Hanna #2
I moved out of my room at Lunna House and into the farmhouse down the hill.
It was a more homely environment, and there was female company in the form of the farmer’s wife.
She was a friendly soul, and seemed pleased to have another woman about the place, which must have been lonely for her at times.
I suppose, too, once I’d recovered from my injury, it was thought more proper for me to be accommodated away from the men.
Each morning after breakfast, though, I’d walk up the track to the big house for my training.
In a room at the back of Lunna House, I learned how to operate a two-way wireless set. I was taught how to set up the receiver and transmitter and how to use Morse code.
“There are many ways to wage a war,” my tutor explained, “and one of them is over the airwaves.”
His words took me back to the evenings in Narvik, when Mamma, Liv, and I had huddled around our wireless set to try to find out what was happening.
Radio Oslo had been taken over by the German invaders, but suddenly patriotic Norwegian songs would burst through, interrupting the stern orders to capitulate.
We’d heard the very different messages contained in the broadcasts from Troms?, too, which had given us hope.
And I was already familiar with the BBC, of course, from those nightly broadcasts I’d listened to alone in the hut.
I understood the power of those words that seemed to come out of thin air.
At Lunna, I sat hunched over my wireless set—known as OLGA by the Norwegian resistance, for whom it had been designed—for hours on end, learning how to transmit and decipher Morse code.
The urgent, insistent stream of dits and dahs, afloat in an ocean of static, seemed to pervade my dreams as well as all my waking hours.
I also learned about the technicalities of shortwave radio transmission—how the beam of soundwaves from the transmitting station could be directed skyward at just the right angle to bounce off the ionosphere and return to Earth to be picked up by a receiver, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, linking countries across great distances.
I learned about arrays and aerials, about modulation and amplification, about medium wave and long wave transmissions.
And I learned about the jamming techniques employed by the Germans to try to block broadcasts from Britain, as well as the Direction Finders they used to try to track down clandestine wireless stations.
I knew only too well what my fate would be if they managed to identify my location.
That it was so remote and isolated was both an advantage and a disadvantage.
They probably wouldn’t know I was there.
But once they did, it would be easy to pinpoint where the transmissions were coming from when there were so few other houses along the coast. My trainer constantly impressed upon me the need to keep my use of the wireless to a minimum, to use it only briefly at the agreed times, and always to code my messages.
I smiled when he gave me my code name. It was Storm Petrel.
The BBC used propaganda just as unashamedly as the Nazis.
The voice of these messages belonged to a certain “Colonel Britton.” No one knew who he really was, but his clipped British tone was measured and assured.
Back in Norway, I’d hung on his every word, taking strength from the way he calmly rallied his audience: “You are the unknown soldiers,” he’d said one night.
“Millions of you. Men and women. A great silent army, watching and waiting.”
Listening to those words in the isolation of my hut, I’d felt an upsurge of hope.
His message had been a reminder that there was support in the darkness, that we weren’t alone.
I thought of the others, hunched over their wireless sets in homes and huts and even sometimes in caves on remote islands, in Norway and Finland, Russia and France, listening to the same words and taking from them the strength to keep going, to defy the invaders.
To resist and fight back, just as Per had done, alongside his brothers-in-arms.
Once I’d been trained and caught the Shetland Bus back to Norway, my job would be to set up and operate one of a network of fifty or so two-way wireless stations that was being established by Milorg.
“The raid on Svolvaer was a lesson to us all,” said my instructor.
“It was one of ours, a British commando raid, and unfortunately, Milorg weren’t fully briefed.
Lives were lost, some unnecessarily.” I wondered whether Per’s was one of the lost lives to which he was referring.
He continued, “So there’s a drive to try to improve communications on both sides, to work together more.
The wireless network you’ll be part of will play an important role in that. ”
While I was just a small cog in the machine, and much of what was going on was top secret, by listening carefully to what went on around me at Lunna, I gleaned that more plans for major sabotage operations were being formulated.
If I could help pass on the messages that might mean fewer lives would be lost, I was keen to do so.
I knew the military personnel at Lunna House were no ordinary soldiers and sailors.
They were special forces, training an unlikely assortment of Norwegians to be commandos.
It came as no surprise now that Dr. Williamson seemed to be involved in some way.
He joined me at the lunch table one day and, after making some casual conversation about the weather, he suddenly asked whether I knew of anywhere in the vicinity of Narvik that might be suitable for use as a rendezvous point.
I thought for a moment. “There are a couple of mountain huts on the plateau above the town,” I said.
He shook his head. “It needs to be somewhere the Germans wouldn’t think to check. Some place that isn’t obvious, yet distinct enough to be clear to those who are looking for it.”
“The Grouse Tree might do.” I described it to him, the way the two trees grew intertwined and how you could hear their rasping creak as the wind made them sway. “You can’t mistake it,” I said. “And if you ask anyone in the town, they can tell you where it is.”
He nodded. “That would be ideal. Do you think you could pinpoint its exact location on a map?”
“Of course,” I said.
I thought no more of it at the time, although that short and seemingly casual exchange would come back to me later.
*
I spent the summer of 1941 in Shetland. Ordinarily, I don’t think I would have been trained at Lunna House.
I learned that most of the wireless operators were taught elsewhere in Scotland.
But Fate, and that stray machine gun bullet, had brought me here.
I was impatient to learn and equally impatient to return to Norway.
On one of our walks, I asked Dr. Williamson how soon I could go home. “You’ll have to wait a bit,” he told me. “It’s too risky to run the boats in the summer months with hardly any cover of darkness. It’ll be a few more weeks.”
It was frustrating, being confined in that remote place.
I wasn’t allowed to go into Lerwick, as some of the sailors were, or to the occasional dances in the local hall at Vidlin.
I’d have stuck out like a sore thumb, because of the haphazard way in which I’d washed up here, and the powers-that-be at Lunna House thought it best if I stayed apart from the others.
I was only too aware that information was a dangerous commodity in a war.
Under torture, Per had managed not to give away the identities of his comrades in the resistance, but it was best for me simply not to know.
And, by the same token, the fewer people who knew of my existence outside the secrecy of the community at Lunna, the better.
Sometimes I felt those of us who had been carried here on the tides of the war were a bit like the fragments that washed up on the beach.
During the twilit nights, when my body would be too filled with the restlessness of summer to sleep, I’d slip out of the farmhouse and walk along the water’s edge, stooping here and there to pick up a shell or a sliver of sea glass, gazing out across the water toward Norway and thinking of Liv.
Little would she imagine, as she watched the midnight sun sink toward the horizon, that her sister gazed back at her from another shore.
It reminded me of the folk tale Pappa used to tell us.
These days, she was east of the sun and I was west of the moon.
We were an ocean apart, and I hated being separated from her like that.
On Sunday mornings, the community would gather at the little white church. We were a motley congregation—soldiers, sailors, fishermen, farmers—speaking a mixture of English, the Shetland dialect, and Norwegian.
It was sobering to see the grave of a Norwegian sailor in the churchyard, marked by a simple wooden cross.
He was one of seventeen men lost when their merchant ship was torpedoed by a German submarine.
I was glad the people of Shetland had found him and given him this burial place.
One morning, before entering the chapel, I lingered by that grave to place upon it a little posy of wild roses and honeysuckle I’d gathered from the hedgerow.
I thought of my father, caught in the cruel net of the sea goddess, and of the others who’d already lost their lives in this war.
And I wondered how many more would be drowned, buried in graveyards like this, far from their homes, before the fighting ended.