Free In Search of Mary by Bee Rowlatt

standing on earth once more, I feel stunted. Like rushing off the end of an airport travelator, abruptly back on your own disappointing legs.
    We moor up – and there on the jetty is a striking woman. She’s a “local person of interest” that Per thought we should meet. Her name is Grethe Rønning Clausen; she is tanned, elegantly dressed and glamorous. She could be about seventy or eighty, but somehow I couldn’t possibly ask. Grethe offers us black coffee and princess cake, an oversized vanilla sponge in the shape of a flower, drizzled with icing. Will clasps a chunk in his hands, and I carry him in my arms as we all wander about.
    Portør is tiny and bright. The sea is encircled by round soaring rocks, smooth enough to walk up – indeed they invite you. Wollstonecraft ends part of her letter here saying “Adieu! I must trip up the rocks”. The hill-like rocks have pockets of moss, tufted grass and wild flowers. Several perfectly round holes in the surface near the top have become bright puddles reflecting the sky. A lookout post clings to the upper slopes,from which the pilots would keep watch, staring out on the sea all around.
    Next door to Grethe’s house is a small green lawn that was the original site of the place we visited at this morning, the portable house that came from Portør to Kragerø to be lived in centuries later by Yoga Lady. Mick is clearly taken by Grethe, and they fall into maritime reminiscences. When she was young she would sail to Kragerø, bringing the pilot boat back on her own. Grethe has a quiet voice, and when we settle down so I can record her, Mick keeps bursting in and talking about his boat, and Will crawls around exclaiming, and seagulls shriek overhead. I lean in closer as she begins her tale:
    “We were from different regions of Norway. Everyone said it wouldn’t last, for we were so different. But I loved him from the first time I saw him. It was a festival day in Norway. There was a fair, and I saw someone arriving on a boat, a very nice boy, but I didn’t talk to him. That night there was a party with dancing. I went along with my girl friend from school, and she had on a red suit with pearls. And that special young man, he always got to dance with her.”
    Grethe’s blue eyes twinkle: this story has the feel of a favourite. She enjoys her audience, and we’re all captivated.
    “I said to my mum: I don’t think it’s nice here and I want to go home. I stood beside this girl, and we saw him coming back, and I said to her, now he’s coming to dance with you again. But then he saw me. And I saw him. And yes, that was it: done. The first thing he said to me was, had I changed my shoes? I said yes, it was too warm. We’d never talked before, buthe had noticed me. We started dancing. I was only seventeen years old. It was a beautiful spring.”
    The special young man who arrived on a boat was a seventh-generation pilot from Portør, and Grethe married him and came here to live with him.
    “The life of pilots was so hard and dangerous. Seven pilots lived here in Portør, and they had to compete for work. As you know, the first person on board the ship got the job. One time my husband’s uncle, also a pilot, knew that a ship was coming that night. He had placed his clothes by the bed when he slept, so that he could be the first one up. When he got up he leapt into his wife’s clothes by accident. But he still got the job!”
    Grethe has not only heard of Wollstonecraft, she brings out her own copy – an old hardback edition of
Letters from Norway
in Norwegian.
    “It’s very nice,” she says, flicking through the pages. “She had to be strong at the time, hundreds of years ago. I can’t imagine how she could make it, and with a little child too.”
    The bare wildness of the surrounding land is in stark contrast with the inside of Grethe’s home. It’s a special place. Photos of generations of smiling children cover the walls; her house is bustling with lace