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

And they were in my grandparents’ house, because there were no children there and my grandfather had been dead a long time, and there was a lounge and an office, the two biggest, smartest rooms in the house, and they had their own special door for coming and going, and of course they paid rent. They were nice. But the officers got the houses while the men lived in barracks. The Icelanders got much work from them, making their buildings and so on, selling them fish. There had been a crisis and lack of work, but then came the British rule.’

‘So people were pleased?’

Vilborg looks at the photos in her lap, pictures of young British soldiers smiling wartime smiles in front of turf and rocks. The journals I read recounted lots of bird-watching in between moving equipment around and keeping an eye on the sky for other traffic.

‘When I used to go fetch the cows for milking, late in the afternoon when it was falling dark, they would turn their light on for me. They had a station where they could light up the whole firth, floodlights, and also these small lights – spotlights – and when I was coming in the darkness all along the road I would have a light spot all the way. Because they knew I was a little girl and it was a long way for me.’

I want to see something very English in this story, in the blatant use of official resources for purposes of private chivalry.

‘Everyone talked about how girls would go and make love with the British soldiers but it wasn’t so. The youngest in the army were only sixteen years. There was one who was just a boy, and we used to play a ball game. I don’t know if you have it in England, but we children thought it a very pleasant game. He wanted to play with us, and we didn’t want to have him play, so he sat down on a stone and wept. He was not a big soldier! But they were nice men.’

‘Did people like having the British here?’

It’s a disingenuous question. I know that, by and large, with notable exceptions, Icelanders reckoned it better to be occupied by the Allies than the Nazis, but I also know that the wartime occupation figures in the Icelandic cultural imagination as the catalyst for changes which are now working themselves out in the shape of the kreppa. Europe’s wars were Iceland’s boom-times, when the price commanded by lamb, wool and fish on European markets rose and went on rising.

‘Well, of course in 1941 the Americans came, so the British were not in Seyðisfjörður very long. The day the Americans came it was very nice weather, and we were all standing looking out at the huge ship, like those tourist ships that come.’ Vilborg gestures down the hill, towards the harbour where one of the first big cruise ships of the season is blocking down-town’s view of Esja. ‘It came to deliver two thousand Americans and take away two thousand British, and there was a lot of moving around. And I was standing on the concrete steps of our house and I could see because it was on the hillside, our house. Many things were happening. The British were going, and there was a row of cars going down the road, and the soldiers took off their guns and put them away when they went in the cars. They had been saying goodbye, giving small gifts and toys they had made for the children. And then I saw a plane coming. The sky was blue. And the plane came. Of course when they were arriving they would have planes with them, so I thought it was just an American plane. And then it came low and first there came a huge bomb in the sea and then a second and then the third, and that one came down in the middle of the road, just opposite where I was on the fjord, and I could see it as it came down and there was brown where it hit the road. There was nobody at the big gun, nobody. It was just the moment between the British and Americans, just these three minutes. And then the soldiers ran out and they started to shoot and they shot and shot and the plane got away. They never got that plane, never. There were three little boys who were playing there at the coast, where the bombs came, and all of them were hurt and one of them lost his leg. This was awful. And then the Americans came and took over from the British, and this was very different. There were Canadians as well, and also a group of Norwegians, and everyone sent their girls away if they could.’

I still don’t understand why exactly Icelandic parents needed to keep their daughters away from the soldiers, nor why North Americans were more of a risk than the British. Did they fear seduction or rape, their girls’ betrayal of national identity or the savagery of foreign men? But before I can frame a question Vilborg has swept on.

‘I was sent to school in the village my mother came from, and there were only five soldiers there. The house where I lived was above the bank and the bank manager’s son got stuck in Germany at the beginning of the war, he was an engineer and he had to stay on in Germany all through the war. And of course the Icelanders used to sail to Bremerhaven and Rostock and they liked these places, and just after the war, when I was fifteen and there came this nice weather at the end of the war, then there came a German trawler and they called out to us, they didn’t come in, they called, “Are we allowed to come in?” Something needed to be mended, and they were not allowed to go to Norway, and