One of Us Read online

  Tone, now seventeen and in her last year of secondary school, moved in with him. They rented a tiny place of their own. Finally they could be together all the time.

  ‘Like winning the pools,’ was how Gunnar described meeting Tone. ‘Sheer luck.’

  There was nothing better than her.

  The happiness almost hurt.

  In the dark season they hid under the duvet. They only glanced up to look when the northern lights were dancing.

  As teenagers they were already dreaming of the children they would have.

  Changes in the Country

  The old Prime Minister was worn down by recurring migraines. The doctor had ordered him to take sick leave, to rest and get his strength back, but the modest man did not feel he could. The son of a working-class family with a strong work ethic, he was not comfortable taking time off. But he did drop hints to those closest to him about the illness that sometimes paralysed him.

  Beginning in the mid-1970s, Norway’s oil income had grown vigorously, and the ailing man born in the woods by the railway lines was the first Prime Minister to make serious use of the new money. Over a long career in politics, Odvar Nordli had helped expand Norway’s generous welfare provisions and public health system. During his time as Prime Minister, from 1976 to 1981, the trade union movement consolidated its power, and people gained more time off and more money to spend during it. Under Nordli, all workers were given the right to full pay from the first day they went off sick.

  The global economy, meanwhile, experienced a sharp downturn. Norway tackled the recession of the mid-1970s with a policy of its own, freezing wages and prices to keep unemployment down. Nordli was to be the last Norwegian Prime Minister with an unshakeable faith in strong state control of the economy and in the political regulation of interest rates, the property market and the financial sector. But the wind from the right in the USA and Britain was now reaching Norway. The railway worker’s son was to be one of its first victims.

  Norway’s Labour Party – Arbeiderpartiet – had been running the country virtually without a break since 1935. The political mood swing in the country coincided with escalating intrigues in the party leadership. The whispering in corners became a buzz, and dissatisfaction within the party refused to be quelled.

  At the end of January 1981, the party press office issued a statement declaring that Odvar Nordli wished to resign. The old Prime Minister had not taken part in the decision and tried to deny it. But things were moving too fast, it was an ambush, a coup, and Nordli, known as a kind man, was too loyal to the party to denounce it in the media. He gritted his teeth and silently conceded defeat.

  The country waited. The Prime Minister had announced his departure, but who would take over?

  * * *

  The tension finally broke after a meeting at the home of Nordli’s predecessor, Trygve Bratteli. The party’s co-ordinating committee, five powerful men and one woman, had gathered.

  Odvar Nordli insisted at least on a say in who was to take over. His nominee was the party veteran Rolf Hansen. But the sixty-year-old Hansen was adamant that he did not want to be Prime Minister; his answer was to point to the only woman in the room, Gro Harlem Brundtland, a young doctor and campaigner for free abortion. The choice aligned with the mood in the party: a grass-roots campaign to make her leader had just begun.

  Three days later, on 4 February 1981, Gro Harlem Brundtland was standing outside the Royal Palace, smiling for the press after presenting her new administration to the King. The government was predominantly male, the woman in the red and blue silk outfit having inherited most of its ministers from her predecessor.

  That February day nonetheless marked the start of a new age. Gro, as she was soon called, was Norway’s first female Prime Minister, and the first Prime Minister from the Labour Party to have a university degree. She’d been born into the political elite, the daughter of a prominent Cabinet minister, Gudmund Harlem.

  Throughout the post-war period, the Labour Party’s Prime Ministers were drawn from the working class. Einar Gerhardsen, a former communist and the main architect behind Norway’s welfare state, had worked as an errand boy from the age of ten. Oscar Torp, who replaced Gerhardsen as Prime Minister for a brief period in the 1950s, was in paid employment when he was eight. Trygve Bratteli, who became Prime Minister in 1971, was the son of a cobbler and worked as an errand boy and builder before becoming a whale hunter.

  With its roots in the working classes, the Labour Party fought to remove the barriers to advancement in a class society and make sure employees and their bosses had the same opportunities.

  But in one area the idea of equality was less pervasive. It was men who wielded the power. They were the ones who became party leaders, trade union bosses, Prime Ministers, and – above all – they were the ones who were listened to in the inner circles of power.

  The women’s movement of the 1970s paved the way for Gro Harlem Brundtland. Having grown up in a family where it was natural for men and women to share the domestic tasks, she slipped into Norwegian politics with exceptional self-confidence.

  The campaign against her was equally potent, and a variety of techniques were used to suppress her in the run-up to the general election in the autumn of 1981. Her opponents in debates often countered her statements by referring to what ‘others in the party’ had said. Epithets like ‘shrew’ and ‘virago’ were bandied about and stickers started appearing in windows and cars bearing the simple slogan ‘Kick Her Out’.

  She received hate mail and insults were hurled at her in the street; a woman could not lead a country. When told to get back to the kitchen sink, Brundtland’s style was to brush such comments aside. An authoritative figure, she rarely let herself be knocked off course.

  The ‘Kick Her Out’ stickers were in particular evidence on the BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes in the areas of detached houses and elegant apartment blocks in Oslo West, where people were tired of Labour being almost continually in power.

  It was the area where Wenche and her children lived.

  Labour and Gro failed to win the voters’ confidence in the September 1981 election. When the right won its first general election in post-war Norway, glasses were raised in the homes of Frogner.

  Finally taxes would come down, and the focus would be on individual freedoms.

  But the Breivik family needed the help of the welfare state. By then, Anders’s mother had already been in touch with social services several times, asking for help. As a single mother she was defined as vulnerable and the state would therefore step in to provide financial support.

  The new conservative regime removed interest-rate caps, gave banks more room for manoeuvre, deregulated property prices and made plans to privatise a variety of services.

  As Gro began her determined struggle to get back into power, Wenche and the children were struggling to find a foothold in a day-to-day existence that seemed like quicksand. ‘Hell’ was Wenche’s word for life at that time. The divorce papers were taking an age to come through and she felt caught in limbo, left alone with sole responsibility for the children and no home of her own. The wrangling over how their shared assets were to be divided intensified. Anders just wanted somewhere he could feel safe.

  Later, it was Gro, the powerful woman of his childhood, who would be the target of his hate. The woman who symbolised the new, self-confident Norway. The new Norway in which young women would soon be storming the bastions of male power and boldly taking top positions as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Silkestrå

  All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Five rooms for the family of three. Plenty of space, bright, modern and brand-new. A room each, with doors they could close, a living room where they could have guests, a kitchen and a balcony looking out over the play area in the ‘blue garden’ between the flats. The new housing cooperative behind the Frogner Park had been d
esigned with families in mind. The three-storey apartment blocks extended across the green parkland in a maze-like layout, with sheltered spaces, footpaths and little garden areas, where the benches, slides and swings were painted bright colours.

  The cooperative went by the appealing name of Silkestrå – Silken Straw – and Wenche was one of the first buyers.

  It was thanks to Jens’s membership of the Oslo Housing and Savings Society that they got the opportunity to buy a stake there. He also paid the deposit on the flat.

  Moving out of Fritzners gate seemed to take for ever. Wenche did all the packing herself. First in newspaper, then in boxes. She threw out her old life, the letters and papers she had accumulated in drawers and cupboards.

  Once they were finally installed in the light flat on the top floor in Silkestrå, Wenche was able to breathe a sigh of relief. She could go out for a smoke on the balcony and she could see trees and sky, a real middle-class idyll. Just behind the block of flats there was a patch of woodland with rare oak trees, streams and little paths.

  She could relax here and they could be happy.

  But her energy drained away. The move from Frogner to neighbouring Skøyen had exhausted her, as had the division of assets that had finally taken place. From now on she was on her own. Many of the flats around hers were still standing empty. Her children were always arguing and fighting. Anders was an angry boy and his punches were hard.

  At the start of the new year in 1983, Wenche contacted the family counselling service at the Oslo Health Board and asked for a new respite care placement for her son. Daily demands of a purely practical kind, like dropping him off at the Vigeland Park nursery that was within walking distance from their flat, or fetching him in the afternoons, seemed insurmountable. He might disappear from her on the way: he was often simply running off. The nursery had also expressed concern about the boy. He found it hard to make friends, he never invented games of his own and he didn’t cry if he hurt himself.

  ‘Clingy and difficult, demands a lot of attention,’ Wenche told the officer dealing with her case at the Oslo Health Board. ‘Aggressive, and nasty with it,’ said the case notes.

  She was very keen to have a diagnosis for Anders. Perhaps there was some kind of medicine he could take? She told the counsellor she wondered whether Anders might have diabetes, referring to the baby’s bottle of cordial he clung to at home. But he coped without the bottle at nursery, and he had shown no interest in it when he was with his weekend family. It was at home that he needed it. And there was nothing wrong with his blood-sugar levels.

  * * *

  Wenche had two faces to show to the world. Mostly she showed the smiling, chattering, carefree one. But sometimes she was distant, and would walk straight past without saying hello, or looked away. If she did say anything it was in a drawling voice, her words almost slurred.

  Neighbours talked about it. She wasn’t drunk, it wasn’t that; could it be drugs?

  The neighbours on Wenche’s staircase soon started to get the feeling things were not as they should be behind the family’s front door. Anders was rarely at the play area; both children were sort of invisible, silent, scared. The neighbours called him ‘Meccano Boy’ because he was like something made out of a construction set, stiff and angular. But it was his big sister the neighbours were most worried about. She acted like a mother to both Wenche and her little brother. She was the one who kept things in order at home, and looked after Anders.

  ‘Wenche doesn’t pick up signals,’ said one neighbour to another. The woman in the flat opposite would wait inside her own front door whenever she heard Wenche on the stairs. ‘You could never get away. She went on and on, talking a load of rubbish and jumping from one subject to another, especially sex – she always had lots to say about sex. She twisted words and phrases and laughed a lot at her own stories,’ she said later. It surprised the neighbours that Wenche had no inhibitions, even when the children were there and listening to her innuendo. It was usually Elisabeth who finally managed to get her mother through the front door by saying something like, ‘We’ll have to go now Mum, or our frozen stuff will start to melt. We’d better put it in the freezer or it might get spoilt.’

  The rumours were going round. There were lots of male visitors, the neighbours gossiped. It was embarrassing to encounter them on the stairs and avoid their glance or pass them when they rang the doorbell of Wenche’s flat. And Wenche was always out and about, they muttered to each other. Even at night. No one ever saw ‘a babysitter or grandma’ going in. When Wenche once asked a neighbour to come and take a look at something that was not working in the flat, the neighbour was struck by the fact that there was no sign of any children living there; it was as if they did not exist.

  One day Jens Breivik received a call from one of the neighbours, complaining that there was a lot of noise in the flat, and that Wenche was often out, day and night. The neighbour hinted at the numerous male visitors and said the children were left to their own devices.

  Jens did nothing. He had a new life in Paris, a new wife and new worries.

  One morning, a young, female neighbour heard loud noise coming from the flat again and decided the time had come to investigate. She rang the doorbell. Elisabeth opened the door just a crack. ‘Oh no, there’s nothing wrong here. Mum’s asleep at the moment,’ she said, holding the door in place. Beneath her thin arm a boy stood staring straight ahead, his face impassive.

  The neighbours’ respect for the right to privacy outweighed their concerns for the children. And anyway, the family was already on the radar of the child welfare authorities, Wenche having asked for help herself. The adviser at the Vika social services office had been seriously troubled by Wenche’s last visit and judged the family to be in need of psychiatric help rather than child welfare support. She referred them to the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Two weeks before Anders’s fourth birthday, at the end of January 1983, the family was called in for evaluation.

  The staff found the woman who came along to the meeting confused and on edge. She had great difficulty even locating the place, despite the careful instructions she had been given. It proved beyond her to find her way there with the children, and she was granted free transport by taxi.

  The family was registered with the day section for families, where the children were to be evaluated by a child psychiatrist and their mother by a psychologist. There were therapists, nurses and child welfare officers on hand at the centre. These specialists would observe the family’s interaction in the course of everyday activities like mealtimes and play and carry out psychological tests on all three of them. Behavioural problems in children could be the result of relations within the family, and if ‘things were sorted out in the family’ the symptoms could subside.

  Anders was placed in the nursery at the centre. He was also free to go to the playroom where there were cars, dolls, teddy bears, a puppet theatre, cowboys and Indians, paints and crayons, scissors and paper and games.

  The specialists observed a boy who took no joy in life. Completely unlike the demanding boy his mother had described.

  ‘Marked inability to enter into the spirit of games. Takes no pleasure in the toys. When the other children are playing, he operates alongside them. He is wholly unfamiliar with “Let’s pretend” games. He is always wary during play. Anders lacks spontaneity, appetite for activity, imagination or ability to empathise. Nor does he have the mood swings seen in most children of his age. He has no language for expressing emotions,’ wrote Per Olav Næss, the child psychiatrist responsible for evaluating him. When playing shops, he was interested in how the cash register worked rather than in the game as a whole.

  ‘Anders demands surprisingly little attention. He is cautious, controlled, rarely pesters anyone, is extremely clean and tidy and becomes very insecure if this is not possible. He does not take the initiative in making contact with other children. He participates mechanically in activities without showing any pleasure or enthusiasm.
Often looks sad. He finds it difficult to express himself emotionally but when a reaction eventually comes, it is a remarkably powerful one,’ the report continued.

  Restless activity took over whenever he became aware that someone, an adult or another child, was trying to make contact. It was as if he instantly activated a defence mechanism that sent out the message ‘don’t bother me, I’m busy’ when anyone wanted anything of him. The child psychiatrist also noted a feigned, defensive smile.

  Anders, however, quickly proved capable of adapting to his new surroundings. After just a few days he decided he liked coming to the nursery at the centre and thought it was ‘stupid to go’ at the end of his session. He showed pleasure in mastering new skills and was able to accept praise. The staff at the centre concluded that it was not a question of individual psychological damage in Anders; that is, damage that could not be undone by putting him in a new and positive care setting. He had considerable resources to draw on. It was the situation at home that was undermining him. The general conclusion was that Anders had been made a scapegoat for his mother’s frustrations.

  The psychologist at the centre talked to his mother and carried out some tests, and found a woman who lived in her own private, internal world and had an underdeveloped sense of how to relate to people around her. Her relationships with those close to her were characterised by anxiety and she was emotionally marked by depression and by being in denial of it, said the case summary at the end of her time at the centre.

  ‘She is threatened by chaotic conflicts and shows signs of illogical thought when under pressure. Mentally she has a borderline personality disorder and functions very unevenly. Given a structured situation for living she can function well, but she is vulnerable in a crisis.’