Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

the coastal supply ships stopped coming, remembering the international guests of the Icelandic writers’ union, of which she was the chair for many years.

‘You are, of course, a member,’ she says. ‘But then surely I would have met you earlier?’

I know I should have tried to join. I know of other Anglophone writers who have done so and found the camaraderie, advice on tax breaks and access to residential writers’ retreats greatly beneficial. I have envied these writers. ‘No,’ I admit, ‘I didn’t think they’d want me.’

I don’t think Vilborg recognises this, the sore conviction of my own inadequacy, bruised again by the experience of being foreign. She’s looking back on opportunities taken, adventures welcomed, a life, I think, enviably lived. She begins with her childhood in the late 1930s.

‘When I was seven it was my duty to drive the cows to the field. There was a boy of my age in the village and we were the only two who were seven, so when the spring came and it was time for the cows to go out we took turns, me one week and him the next, all through the summer. It wasn’t really very far, perhaps half an hour, but it seems long to a child. It was pleasant in fine weather, but I had to pass many stones and rocks where there were hidden people, and I was afraid of the Devil. It was a village where everyone who could afford a cow kept one, because they needed the milk. When there was no milk in the cow, there was no milk in the house. There were sheep, too. My father had thirty sheep, but we had no horse. There were very few horses because the ground was too steep for them, but we all had boats, we learnt to row just as we learnt to walk because that was how we always travelled. When I first went to Reykjavík I went on the boat and it took a whole week, because the boat stopped everywhere, for post and supplies, three or four hours in each village and this was splendid. But then they stopped that and put all the transport on cars and trucks, and in the villages with no roads, where they needed the boats, or where they needed at least two or three ships in the winter when the roads were blocked, the people just couldn’t live there when the boats stopped. There are just empty houses now, big, beautiful houses, because people had money when the boats came and they built good houses. Our house stood in the homefield, and we had to walk a very narrow path to the gate, because the grass was very precious and you had to save it. And at the gate there was water under the grass, you know, so it was muddy and boggy? We used to run over it in a row, and I was afraid that if my foot went in, a hand would grab me and pull me down, because you know there is a nursery rhyme that is not nice at all: “There was a child in a valley, who fell into a hole. And the monster beneath held his feet and pulled him down.”’

Icelandic children’s culture seems full of these charming ditties. When you put these habits beside Pétur’s stories about going to the barn to share the cows’ sewage arrangements, nervous children have a dilemma. Maybe the stories replace the discipline to which everyone swears that Icelandic children are not subject. No-one tells you off, but the dark and the fields are full of waiting, hiding creatures who are out to get you.

‘And when I was driving the cows, I had to pass many stones. The first stone, we children were sure that if you put your ear to it you could hear someone spinning. Everyone had a spinning wheel then, my mother and my grandmother, because we all made our own clothes at home from the wool of our own sheep. So we thought there was a fairy woman sitting there under the stone, spinning and spinning, sitting day and night spinning, and when we were all together we would go and listen to the stone. And of course it wasn’t far from the sea. We were hearing the sea! But we thought it was the hidden woman spinning and spinning, and I was afraid of it. And further along from that stone was a huge rock, called Festusteinn, and I was afraid to pass it even in the mornings, in the sunshine. This big stone was used to fasten the ships that came. We had no quay in those days, so when ships were lying in the inlet they were made fast to this stone. There were hidden people and elves among those rocks, and people said that the Festusteinn was their church, because it was so big, and I never dared even to look in that direction. But next to it was another stone which we liked very much. It was all in steps, shaped in steps, and we called it Trappasteinn. We children used to go there in the spring and each child had a place on the steps to make cakes of mud, and there was a competition to make the nicest mud cakes. And I went on, and when I had nearly come to the place where I could leave the cows and go home, there was a big flat stone beside the road and it was called Gaujusteinn. Gauja was the name of the woman who lived in the house above that stone, which was called Foss, which means waterfall, because there were falls in the river there. And Gauja used to go to shop in the big village at the end of the fjord. It was a very nice place, one of the nicest places in Iceland, the most cultured town in the whole country, and the telephone came there first and