Names for the Sea, page 8
By the end of September, the sunsets that have been inching back a few minutes every day have reached Max’s bedtime, and most days it’s not ‘sunset’ but a more familiar darkening of grey skies. It rains as much as at home. We’re all wearing winter coats and I am beginning to be glad that school and nursery insisted that the children have proper Arctic winter clothing from the beginning of term. If you wait, Katrin told us, all the snowsuits will be sold, and don’t expect the shops to import any more. Toddlers’ winter clothing is seasonal and imported from Denmark, and no-one’s going to risk importing anything they can’t sell.
I’m still taking my evening walks along the shore, even on days when the rain on my glasses refracts the low-level lighting along the coast path so that the city lights across the water are jumbled and kaleidoscopic. Almost all the birds are gone now, and I rarely encounter another person. Icelanders, says Matthew, take to the gym in winter. Another colleague tells me that she and her husband bought good waterproof coats only when the kreppa forced them to sell their second car. As far as I can see, most people don’t go outside at all in rain or wind. I understand why people prefer to be inside on a wet night, but I want to follow the year’s cycle out here on the shore, feel the rain and wind as well as turning my face to the sun at midnight and standing shivering under the aurora. Even in the dark, the half-finished buildings stand black against the horizon, like shells of bombed churches.
5
Pétur’s Saga
The first snow comes in early October. It doesn’t exactly fall, because it’s coming horizontally, borne on a wind so strong that I have to hold on to Max as we walk 300 metres down the street to school. Tobias, it seems, can’t go out, since the wind would flatten him and neither of us can hold the pushchair against its force. Dodging down the sides of buildings, Anthony carries him to the bus stop to get to nursery, but we’re beginning to see Icelandic car-dependency with more sympathy. We can’t manage without one.
I wonder how people coped here before cars. The ‘ring road’, Route 1, which makes a circuit of the island, was finished only in 1974, and even when Kathy and I first came in 1994 there were people living in the countryside without cars, dependent on the daily bus (which has now been replaced by a summer-only tourist coach service at four times the price). I’ve been reading, with horror and fascination, an autobiographical novel that I found in the university library about life in the north of Iceland in the 1940s, just before wartime and post-war prosperity made Icelanders drift from the farms into sedentary, urban lives defined by earning and spending. Valgarður Egilsson’s Waiting for the South Wind was published in 2001, although its nostalgia for the wartime years seems to speak from the last century. The book’s relentless romanticism makes me want to move to Tokyo or New York and buy shares in oil companies, but it also suggests how much Iceland has changed:
For generations these people had lived at the Stonechurch farm, strong men, peaceful Vikings, who instinctively knew how to carry out any kind of work, whether it was building a house or a boat, shoeing a horse, building a bridge or a church or a ship – or even dealing with polar bears.
While the ‘strong men’ are indulging their instincts in matters of bridge-building and polar bears, Mother cooks, cleans and washes for her husband and seven sons while singing opera over the mops and pans. The family live on blood porridge and skyr and thrive because ‘in cold weather, all food tastes good out in the open air. It is only at twenty-seven degrees Celsius that people become connoisseurs or gourmets with regard to food. Here the temperature was seven to eight degrees Celsius.’ Iceland, it should be noticed, does not reach twenty-seven degrees Celsius. Gourmets are foreign. The Stonechurch boys soon learn to ignore the cold as they go about the spring work of breaking ice with their bare hands so that sheep don’t fall through it and yomping along the cliffs in a blizzard. The Fjorders are real men and real Icelanders:
No authorities had ever visited the Fjords, the landscape protected the Fjorders from them, it was too steep, considering outsiders were not surefooted. The Fjorders, on the other hand, obeyed only God and the song of the golden plover, as well as fate and earthly forces.
On their way across the Fjord Heath – treading paths between rocks and tussocks that were only two horse hooves wide – the Fjorders had to keep their ankle movements and reflexes in order, their muscles were striated and not atrophic, their blood was still red and streaming, their minds – and their brains – were unspoiled by money or any other pollution, their fertility was not spoiled by pollution either . . .
I think again, with gratitude, about our underfloor heating and almost-free gushing hot water, which seemed distastefully extravagant in August, about steaming Jacuzzis at the pool and the way I need to turn the radiator down and keep the window open at work even when there’s a blizzard outside. I am glad that my brain is spoilt by money which means I have bought a down snowsuit for Tobias and thermal underwear all round. Most of all, I think, atrophying my muscles as I curl up on my IKEA garden chair with my laptop, I am glad not to have to eat slátur, blood pudding.
Our friend Guy plans to come to Reykjavík for a long weekend. He’s a car-lover who, he assures us, would relish nothing more than a day spent negotiating the second-hand-car showrooms of Reykjavík. I am not entirely sure I believe him – my disinclination to engage with the tedious world of car-buying is one of the reasons we are still walking to Hafnarfjörður to buy tinned tomatoes – but I am so grateful for the suggestion that I react by planning a menu to compensate him for his day rather than questioning his willingness. Guy comes to meet me at my office when I finish teaching, and we set off. Two buses, and the final kilometre on foot, along a dual carriageway through the industrial quarter. A blizzard has blown in from the sea, and we clutch each other as we bend into the wind that’s pulling my coat away from my body and hurling chips of ice into our faces. I suggest to Guy that we might take something for a test drive in the first showroom we reach and then use it to get to the others. He eyes up a Porsche, I suggest borrowing one of a row of Volvo police-cars left with the keys in the ignitions along the edge of the forecourt. By the time we reach the showroom’s office and discover that all you have to do to test-drive a car in Iceland is ask for the keys, we can’t make eye contact without giggling. We spend the afternoon driving around in a sequence of borrowed cars and nobody once asks for any proof of identity or signature, much less a driving licence. The combination of unfamiliar cars, the blizzard, the need to drive on the wrong side of the road and fear of Icelandic drivers makes me lose my nerve entirely and Guy does all the driving, with the aplomb of someone who learnt to drive in Texas and now insists on driving across central London every day. You will, he warns me, need to come to terms with this. I’m back at work on Tuesday, I can’t stay and be your chauffeur. I know, I say, I know. But not yet.
Late in the afternoon, when it’s been dark for a while and I’ve given up trying to keep my feet and trousers dry, we find a Volvo. I’ve never driven an automatic before and am alarmed by the prospect, but the car is of recent manufacture, cheap, in good condition, with a full service history and winter and summer tyres. It will drink fuel, Guy says, but it’s the only one within your budget in which I’d happily take children on the road round here. We take it to an empty car park and I get behind the wheel. Yes, I say, it’s fine, I can reach the pedals and see out of the windscreen; it’s comfortable. Start the engine, says Guy. Go on. I drive it about twenty metres, stop, and make Guy take it back. Yes, we say, we’ll take this one, please. And less than an hour later, having signed two forms, we drive – Guy drives – back to the Big Flat. Insurance is sorted in one phone call, tax arranged as part of the purchase. Still no-one has asked to see that I have a driving licence. By the time Guy leaves, three days later, I have driven across Reykjavík and back, white-knuckled and swearing. The following weekend, we drive to Pétur’s house. Pétur comes out to see our new purchase and I set off stylishly, waving, on the wrong side of the road. I’ve been driving for fifteen years in England, I am fine on the M25 and around the mountain lanes of the Peak District, can cope with ice and, as long as my mother isn’t watching, reverse-park with pride. But I’m infantilised again by my foreign-ness here. It will take me weeks to brave driving in the dark, even though dark is now most of the time, and for the first half of the winter we will use the car to stock up on food when the roads are clear and then walk and cycle as long as there’s snow and ice underfoot.
The greenhouse-grown Icelandic salads are over for the year now. There is still fresh cabbage, but apart from that all the vegetables are imported, expensive, and long past their best. Fruit is waxy apples or squashy bananas, although a king’s ransom will buy you tasteless, mushy plums in Hagkaup. I rub legs of lamb with smoked paprika and cumin from my hoard, and roast potatoes with butter and shards of rosemary picked in our garden at home. We have found good food in Reykjavík. There’s a French bakery on Laugavegur and a Vietnamese noodle bar just down the hill from Hallgrímskirkja and a sushi counter on the top floor of the bookshop that has American magazines. There are more formal restaurants that boast of tapas and pierogi and mole poblano, though the chilli tends to be dumbed down to toddler levels. There’s a Thai grocer by the bus station and an English cheese shop near the zoo, and the rumour of a Polish bakery out in Hafnarfjörður. Mads has directed us to the treasured farm shop near Laugardalur, which has bacon from pigs reared outdoors and smoked trout and muddy potatoes, and in summer a cornucopia of greenhouse-grown Icelandic tomatoes. Mads and I exchange leads on lime leaves, poppy seeds and miso paste, like addicts following the rumour of a fresh supply. I’ve learnt how to cook here. That’s not the problem. But it seems the coward’s way out, expatriate arrogance, to strain every nerve to realise a simulacrum of what we’d eat at home, like Brits who move to France and then drive miles to buy cheddar. I will try to be more adventurous. As long as it doesn’t involve blood pudding.
At the supermarket, I pick up a cellophane package of what I believe to be reindeer meat. Tobias is pulling on my arm, begging for vanilla skyr and sweet barley cakes. I cook venison often at home, but this is an unfamiliar cut, a slab of dense, dark muscle. It’s only as I put it away at home that I read the label properly. Hvalur, not hreindyr. Whale meat. No wonder it was cheap. What shall we do? I ask Anthony. Imagine what our friends at home would say if they knew we’d eaten whale. Whaling is one of the subjects that Brits in Iceland should be cautious about mentioning. (The others are the Cod War and Gordon Brown’s use of anti-terrorist legislation to freeze Icelandic assets as the banks went down in 2008.) When I discuss whaling with my students, most see it as a problem only inasmuch as the practice might compromise Iceland’s application to join the EU. They don’t understand why anyone who eats meat and fish should have ideological anxieties about catching whales, and point out that Iceland has a much better track record on managing marine stocks than the EU does. I argue that whales are intelligent mammals subject to a particularly brutal and long-drawn-out butchery. I wouldn’t buy or eat whale meat by choice, but since we have now paid for it, I suggest to Anthony, it would be worse to throw it away than to eat it. Let’s eat it, then, he says. Max is always keen to try something new, and hovers in the kitchen trying to decipher the back of the packet. I think you’re supposed to serve it with potatoes and brown sauce, he says. I blench, put it in the freezer and revert to cooking with tinned American chickpeas, cod and smuggled chorizo. I still don’t understand how Icelanders survived Icelandic food before the great post-war shift into the modern world.
I ask Mads, who says that of course many of them didn’t and many of those who did emigrated at the first opportunity, but adds that no-one really knows how much Icelandic moss and seaweed people were eating. I recall the almost complete absence of vegetables from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English cookbooks; some food historians used to think that this absence showed that people rich enough to buy books didn’t eat vegetables, but it now seems much more likely that eating vegetables was so obvious that no-one bothered to write about it. Maybe people were somehow meeting all their vitamin requirements from cabbage. I suggest this to Matthew, who replies that when he first came, an elderly couple asked him what he missed most from England. Salad, said Matthew, and fruit, and especially spinach. And broccoli. The old man looked him up and down. Sheep food, he said. In Iceland we leave the grass for animals. I ask Pétur, who first came to Iceland in the 1960s and lived on a remote farm, working as a cow-hand, what there was to eat.
‘I had to get over my pickiness,’ he says. When he came to the farm for the first time, he was twenty, he’d been travelling for days and he was hungry. But he arrived on a July afternoon when the farmer was expecting rain, and everyone was working hard to get the hay in before it got wet. He went straight into the fields, and stayed there, working, until late in the bright night, until the work was done and everyone could go up to the house for food and rest. And then, he says, ‘the worst imaginable kind of food I could ever think of was put on the table, steaming salted fish with a terrifying smell to it, and hot sheep fat, and potatoes. That’s all there was. And I knew I was going to be there for six weeks, and I would have to eat it or starve. I told myself, you wanted to come to Iceland, you wanted to find out what it’s like here, you bloody well eat their food, and I forced myself to eat it. And it was delicious, absolutely glorious. It’s one of my favourite dishes today.’
‘Not with the sheep fat?’ I ask.
Messíana is vegetarian. It’s a wheat-free, sugar-free household, with soya milk and olive-oil spread in the fridge (though they will always buy in Coke and ice cream for the grandchildren, and Pétur makes fine buckwheat waffles on Sunday afternoons, served with lots of whipped cream and low-sugar French jam).
‘Oh yes, it’s glorious. I could have had butter, the younger kids were having butter, but I thought I’d try the sheep fat. In the old days people used cod liver oil on the salt fish. I tried that and it was quite palatable, not half as bad as you’d expect. The sheep fat would be hotter than boiling point, so hot you’d pour it over and it would crackle, and there’d be little bits of suet in it, brown and crunchy.’
Rick Stein, I remind myself, cooks chips in beef dripping. I still don’t want to think about suet.
‘Presumably there was no fruit and very few vegetables?’
‘That was exactly the situation.’
‘Then why didn’t people get ill?’
‘Because we ate a lot of fish,’ he says firmly. ‘And Iceland moss, swede, and white cabbage. A lot of white cabbage. It was the fish, though, I think. And of course a lot of milk, and skyr, there are a lot of nutrients in skyr.’
‘Skyr contains protein,’ I point out. ‘But it doesn’t solve the vitamin C problem.’
‘Well, it is a bit of a conundrum, why they didn’t all get scurvy. People drank a lot of Iceland moss tea, and they were probably using many more grasses and herbs than is recorded. That knowledge has gone.’
‘The people on the farm were widely read,’ Pétur says. It mattered to his hosts to keep up with new developments in science and literature, and this matches both what I’ve learnt about Icelandic rural life and what I know about the Scottish islands and the Faroes. Mid-century farmers were not ignorant about nutrition and Pétur remembers discussion of vitamins; the old people bought and ate whale-fat (‘it tastes good,’ he adds, teasing me, ‘nice and sour’), but the children didn’t eat it. There were three girls, twelve, eight and six when he arrived, still his friends fifty years later. ‘They were absolute goddesses and they’d walk around the farm like goddesses and milk cows like goddesses, and they would come in and sit down at the table for tea like very hungry children. It would be glasses of milk and those round biscuits, kex, and that was what they ate. No fruit at all, and they all grew up fine.’
