Read Neither Here Nor There Online
Authors: Bill Bryson
Neither Here Nor There
NEITHER HERE NOR THERETravels in Europe
Bill Bryson
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NEITHER HERE NOR THERE
A BLACK SWAN BOOK: 9780552998062
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd
Minerva edition published 1992
Black Swan edition published 1998
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1991
Part of this book was previously published in
Granta.
The lines on page 8 are reproduced by kind permission of Unwin Hyman, part of HarperCollins Publishers.
Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction.
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Bill Bryson is one of the funniest writers alive. For the past two decades he has been entertaining readers with bravura displays of wit and wisdom. His first book,
The Lost Continent,
in which he put small town America under the microscope, was an instant classic of modern travel literature. Although he has returned to America many times since, never has he been more funny, more memorable, more acute than in his most recent book,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,
in which he revisits that most fecund of topics, his childhood. The trials and tribulations of growing up in 1950s America are all here. Des Moines, Iowa, is recreated as a backdrop to a golden age where everything was good for you, including DDT, cigarettes and nuclear fallout. This is as much a story about an almost forgotten, innocent America as it is about Bryson’s childhood. The past is a foreign country. They did things differently then ...
Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include
The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods
and
Down Under. A Short History of Nearly Everything
was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. His latest book is his bestselling childhood memoir,
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
To Cynthia
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was ‘A smell of petroleum prevails throughout’.
Bertrand Russell
A History of Western Philosophy
In winter Hammerfest is a thirty-hour ride by bus from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there in winter is a question worth considering. It is on the edge of the world, the northernmost town in Europe, as far from London as London is from Tunis, a place of dark and brutal winters, where the sun sinks into the Arctic Ocean in November and does not rise again for ten weeks.
I wanted to see the Northern Lights. Also, I had long harboured a half-formed urge to experience what life was like in such a remote and forbidding place. Sitting at home in England with a glass of whisky and a book of maps, this had seemed a capital idea. But now as I picked my way through the grey, late-December slush of Oslo I was beginning to have my doubts.
Things had not started well. I had overslept at the hotel, missing breakfast, and had to leap into my clothes. I couldn’t find a cab and had to drag my ludicrously overweighted bag eight blocks through slush to the central bus station. I had had huge difficulty persuading the staff at the Kreditkassen Bank on Karl Johans Gate to cash sufficient traveller’s cheques to pay the extortionate 1,200-kroner bus fare – they simply could not be made to grasp that the William McGuire Bryson on my passport and the Bill Bryson on my traveller’s cheques were both me – and now here I was arriving at the station two minutes before departure, breathless and steaming from the endless uphill exertion that is my life, and the girl at the ticket counter was telling me that she had no record of my reservation.
‘This isn’t happening,’ I said. ‘I’m still at home in England enjoying Christmas. Pass me a drop more port, will you, darling?’ Actually, I said, ‘There must be some mistake. Please look again.’
The girl studied the passenger manifest. ‘No, Mr Bryson, your name is not here.’
But
I
could see it, even upside-down. ‘There it is, second from the bottom.’
‘No,’ the girl decided, ‘that says Bernt Bjornson. That’s a Norwegian name.’
‘It doesn’t say Bernt Bjornson. It says Bill Bryson. Look at the loop of the
y
, the two
ls.
Miss, please.’ But she wouldn’t have it. ‘If I miss this bus when does the next one go?’
‘Next week at the same time.’
Oh, splendid.
‘Miss, believe me, it says Bill Bryson.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Miss, look, I’ve come from England. I’m carrying some medicine that could save a child’s life.’ She didn’t buy this. ‘I want to see the manager.’
‘He’s in Stavanger.’
‘Listen, I made a reservation by telephone. If I don’t get on this bus I’m going to write a letter to your manager that will cast a shadow over your career prospects for the rest of this century.’ This clearly did not alarm her. Then it occurred to me. ‘If this Bernt Bjornson doesn’t show up, can I have his seat?’
‘Sure.’
Why don’t I think of these things in the first place and save myself the anguish? ‘Thank you’, I said, and lugged my bag outside.
The bus was a large double-decker, like an American Greyhound, but only the front half of the upstairs had seats and windows. The rest was solid aluminium, covered with a worryingly psychedelic painting of an intergalactic landscape, like the cover of a pulp science-fiction novel, with the words
EXPRESS
2000 emblazoned across the tail of a comet. For one giddy moment I thought the windowless back end might contain a kind of dormitory and that at bedtime we would be escorted back there by a stewardess who would invite us to choose a couchette. I was prepared to pay any amount of money for this option. But I was mistaken. The back end, and all the space below us, was for freight. Express 2000 was really just a long-distance lorry with passengers.
We left at exactly noon. I quickly realized that everything about the bus was designed for discomfort. I was sitting beside the heater, so that while chill draughts teased my upper extremities, my left leg grew so hot that I could hear the hairs on it crackle. The seats were designed by a dwarf seeking revenge on full-sized people; there was no other explanation. The young man in front of me put his seat so far back that his head was all but in my lap. He was reading a comic book called
Tommy og Tigern
and he had the sort of face that makes you realize God does have a sense of humour. My own seat was raked at a peculiar angle that induced immediate and lasting neckache. It had a lever on its side, which I supposed might bring it back to a more comfortable position, but I knew from long experience that if I touched it even tentatively the seat would fly back and crush the kneecaps of the sweet little old lady sitting behind me, so I left it alone. The woman beside me, who was obviously a veteran of these polar campaigns, unloaded quantities of magazines, tissues, throat lozenges, ointments, unguents and fruit pastilles into the seat pocket in front of her, then settled beneath a blanket and slept more or less continuously through the whole trip.
We bounced through a snowy half-light, out through the sprawling suburbs of Oslo and into the countryside. The scattered villages and farmhouses looked trim and prosperous in the endless dusk. Every house had Christmas lights burning cheerily in the windows. I quickly settled into that not unpleasant state of mindlessness that tends to overcome me on long journeys, my head lolling loosely on my shoulders in the manner of someone who has lost all control of his neck muscles and doesn’t really mind.
My trip had begun. I was about to see Europe again.
The first time I came to Europe was in 1972, skinny, shy, alone. In those days the only cheap flights were from New York to Luxembourg, with a refuelling stop en route at Keflavik Airport at Reykjavik. The aeroplanes were old and engagingly past their prime – oxygen masks would sometimes drop unbidden from their overheated storage compartments and dangle there until a stewardess with a hammer and a mouthful of nails came along to put things right, and the door of the lavatory tended to swing open on you if you didn’t hold it shut with a foot, which brought a certain dimension of challenge to anything else you planned to do in there – and they were achingly slow. It took a week and a half to reach Keflavik, a small grey airport in the middle of a flat grey nowhere, and another week and a half to bounce on through the skies to Luxembourg.
