Memories of a pupil who attended school in Bergen from 1914

“What we played and what we did was mostly determined by the season. There were no playgrounds at that time, and they weren’t necessary, because we practically owned the entire city and its surroundings. We could romp around to our hearts’ content without worrying about traffic. In the spring, we mostly played with spinning tops. There were paved sidewalks everywhere in Bergen, and since people weren’t as busy as they are today, we didn’t really bother anyone. Playing marbles was very popular during the summer. We usually played this game near the corner of the old, levelled cemetery behind the church, where we liked to hang out anyway. That’s where, year after year, we also tirelessly practised handstands on the lawn...”

“The games played indoors were mostly limited to a few harmless card and board games. At that time, horses and carriages and trains were still popular as movable toys (note: dolls with all their accessories were very popular with girls, while teddy bears were popular with both boys and girls). But if you watched the train going round and round on an oval track for a while, for example, it soon became boring, partly because you had to wind it up again and again. I was never bored in that respect because I liked to read and draw a lot. It was wartime, and as a child you had your own, mostly quite imaginative ideas about what was happening at the front.”

“The electricity required by the city of Bergen was generated by its own power plant, which was located quite a way outside the city, in an environmentally friendly way, on the road to Putbus. The son of the plant manager was in my class, so it was not really surprising that I was occasionally able to take a look behind the scenes of electricity generation. It wasn’t so much the blazing boilers, the large pile of coal in the yard, or the tall chimney that impressed me, but rather the huge flywheel of the steam engine that drove the generator. At that time, there were small steam engines available as children’s toys, in which the boiler, piston and flywheel were arranged in the same way as here in the power station, so I was familiar with how it worked, but back then I had never thought it possible that such a thing could exist in reality and on such a huge scale.”