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about Iceland, and it’s something I fancy you might have trouble getting hold of. No cities; no towns, no villages. Everybody lives on a farm, whether he’s the farmer himself (and that makes him a big man), or one of his brothers or sons or nephews, or just one of the hired men; we all live in the same house, and sleep in the long hall on the benches - except for the farmer and his wife, they have a room to themselves, but all the rest of us just crowd in together like puppies in the straw Stands to reason, you can’t live that way unless you learn pretty quick how to fit in. If you don’t, it’s best for all concerned if you clear out as soon as you can. Fact was, Eyvind and me didn’t fit. All the time we were growing up, it’s like there was a little voice in the back of our .heads saying, you boys were never born to be hired hands, doing the same work every day, every year for the rest of your lives, just so you can have food to eat and two yards of a bench to sleep on. That didn’t sit well with living so snug and cosy with sixty-odd other people, and all of them figuring that there wasn’t any other way things could possibly be, and anyone who thought different must be touched in the head. So, when Bjarni asked us if we wanted to go off with him trading in Norway, we didn’t think about it longer than a heartbeat. We grabbed our coats and shoes and axes and we were halfway out to the boatshed before he called us back and said he wasn’t leaving till the spring.
    Now, my old mother always said I was born stupid and went steadily downhill from there, and I’m not saying she was altogether wrong. We wanted to leave Drepstokk because we couldn’t stick being cooped up close with the same people day after day And what did we do? We joined a ship’s crew She knew a thing or two about people, my mother.
    You see, on the farm it was tight, but at least you spent the day outside, in the open. On a ship, twenty men and a full cargo in a fifty-foot boat, you can’t stand up or walk two steps without treading on somebody If you sneeze the whole crew gets wet; and for five days, seven days, ten, there’s absolutely no place to go. You can’t just step outside when it all gets too much; and either it’s a heavy sea and everybody’s working like crazy, elbows in each other’s faces, or it’s flat and calm and there’s absolutely fucking nothing to do, just sit still and quiet, because after a bit on a ship everybody’s said everything they’ve got to say, three or four times over, so if you want to keep from getting your head stove in, you keep your face shut and don’t say a word.
    Well, that’s the seafaring life for you, and I’ve got to say I never took to it much. But short of jumping off in the middle of the Norway Sea and swimming home there wasn’t a lot I could do once we’d started; and once we got there, of course, I forgot all about how shitty the journey was. Once we reached Norway, there were all kinds of amazing things. There were towns, a hundred houses all next to each other, and people making things and selling things I’d never even heard of, and there were strangers. Living on the farm, you knew everybody, you’d see a face you’d never seen before maybe once every five years. I saw more strangers in Norway in an hour than I’d ever set eyes on in my whole life.
    So Eyvind and me, we stuck at the trading, in spite of having to be on ships; and Bjarni was a good merchant, he sold fast and bought slow, pretty soon we’d got into a pattern and that was how our lives were going to be. We left Iceland in spring, soon as it was fit to sail; we’d trade up and down the Norwegian coast till winter closed in, then we’d stay over the dark season with one of Bjarni’s friends, spend next spring and summer buying, go back to Iceland to trade for new stock over winter till spring came round again.
    Like I said, Bjarni was just like his dad except for the differences. Old Herjolf was a man