The Conqueror

Radio Theatre Presents

On one of the threads that forms a spiral in Jonas Wergeland’s life he killed a dragon. And if we enter one of the coils in this spiral we find the following story:

They were going to put on a radio play. Not the way they had done as little boys, when they caught bumblebees and held them, buzzing and buzzing, inside shoeboxes. No, proper radio theatre. Jonas and Little Eagle were about to undertake a project that would represent the culmination of their career; they were going to record a play of their own writing, based on the story of St George and the Dragon. This undertaking did, however, present lots of challenges, and the greatest of these, aside from the different voices, was of course posed by the background noises, referred to in the trade simply as ‘background’: the sound effects which enable listeners to picture rafts heading towards dangerous rapids, or skiers in a snowstorm, if that is what is required. That was Ørn’s job, the sound effects; he was what you might call the floor manager. ‘There’s no sound I can’t make,’ was Ørn’s motto. I don’t know whether I have to spell it out for you, Professor, but when it comes to the question of which person has exerted the greatest influence on Jonas Wergeland’s life, the answer has to be Little Eagle — alias Ørn-Henrik Larsen.

It was actually Daniel who had told them about St George, because Daniel was in the Cubs and they had recently celebrated St George’s Day with much pomp and ceremony. Jonas and Ørn instantly fell for the story of the knight who sets out to rescue the princess from the dragon. They had originally been thinking of recording a simplified version of Jack London’s Call of the Wild — with Colonel Eriksen the elkhound playing the lead — but soon found that this presented certain insurmountable problems as far as the sounds were concerned. It was one thing to get an extremely placid Colonel Eriksen to bark in the right places, or even howl; manufacturing a whole pack of wolves was something else again.

But what sort of sound does a dragon make? Or to put it another way: what is the creepiest sound you can think of?

The tape recorder they were using, or ‘magnetophone’ as Mr Larsen grandly referred to it, had only one track, which meant they had to record the voices and the background noises at the same time. Incidentally, this machine, acquired for Mr Larsen to brush up his ‘Can you tell me the way to the nearest restaurant?’ in eight languages, was itself a little marvel. I take it, Professor, that you recall the Tandberg tape recorders of the mid-fifties? TB2s they were called: like little temples to sound with their mahogany casings and loudspeakers installed behind latticed glass panels.

Actually it would not be entirely out of place to dwell for a moment, here, on the name Tandberg: on the company’s founder, Vebjørn Tandberg, a prime Norwegian example of the pioneer spirit and industrial farsightedness, and perhaps even more on the blissful feelings of nostalgia which Tandberg’s products arouse within a large proportion of the Norwegian population. Say ‘Silver Super’ and you trigger a collective landslide of memories, mental pictures of casings in highly polished, lacquered wood, possibly shot with the memory of the feel of a fingertip turning a tuning dial or even the give of the buttons when pressed. Newer models produced around this time were a delight to the eye as well as the ear, not least the real battleship of the Tandberg fleet, the ‘Huldra’, the ultimate expression of tasteful design, a Norwegian equivalent of Denmark’s Lego, an object which, when set in its place in the living room, raised the whole house several rungs up the ladder of modernity and sophisticated elegance. With its knobs and lights, its teak casing and its wood-nymph name, it imbued an apartment with an air of space age, tropical island and mysterious forest combined.

We find ourselves, therefore, in an era which already seems remote, a time when the living room was still arranged around the radiogram, the wireless being the household altar, occupying the place soon to be accorded to the television set, when people switched religion as you might say, swapped old gods for new. And when Jonas Wergeland was a boy the most eagerly awaited radio programme was the Saturday Children’s Hour, and best of all, like the trinket in the centre of a lucky potato: the weekly serial. Jonas could never get enough of these, especially the noises in the background which one could barely hear but which acted like drum rolls on his nerves, made him bite his knuckles — creaking doors, footsteps on stairs, matches being struck inside dark caves — his brain fairly seethed, he saw those scenes, clearer than he ever would later when he saw, with his own eyes I mean, those notorious pieces on television’s Armchair Theatre: the Finnish plays, for example, with their hilariously exaggerated sounds of feet scrunching through cold snow. All those afternoons spent in a chair pulled up close to the radio — breathtaking hours of listening to The Road to Agra, The Jungle Book, Around the World in Eighty Days — taught Jonas that sounds have an unconscious effect on us, just as a song can tip an incident over into a whole other dimension — like the time, one May 17, when Wolfgang Michaelsen, under duress, of course, and blushing furiously, played an infernally strident clarinet during the singing of the national anthem on the flag green in the morning, thus inserting an ironic, not to say anarchic, element into the pompously patriotic tenor of the day: the chairman of the residents’ association, standing there in his new suit, May 17 ribbons fluttering, all the children in their Sunday best with money burning a hole in their pockets. All things considered, it was the radio, and more specifically the radio plays, which truly taught Jonas Wergeland about the power of illusion, how little it took to fire people’s imaginations. ‘It’s really quite amazing,’ he said to Ørn, ‘how the mere sound of somebody crumpling a bit of paper can make you so scared you pee your pants.’

So what sort of sound does a dragon make? Like a hundred lions? Or like a peach stone scraped across a blackboard?

The voices for the play about St George presented no problems, because Jonas did them all. Jonas was a master when it came to mimicry, to putting on different voices. And after the visit to the Pentecostalists’ tent he was even more conscious of containing a whole gallery of role models within himself; it was almost as if he had been ‘possessed’ by the spirit to perform radio plays involving a host of voices.

The challenge therefore lay in the sound effects. And Jonas and Little Eagle were perfectionists. For months they had been completely taken up with this new hobby, every day after school. They could spend a week finding the right sound for their own dramatization of the ascent of Tirich Mir, based on the book by Arne Næss. At last they hit upon it: to give the listener the picture of a mountaineer digging his crampon into ice, they stuck the tip of a pocket-knife into a lump of resin. In their eyes this was an achievement on a par with the ascent itself, and they were quite sure that philosopher Arne Næss would also have applauded it, perhaps even embarked on fruitful speculations as to the link between resin and Tirich Mir — looked upon it as an incitement to climb still further in his thoughts. ‘I probably get as much pleasure from a good sound effect,’ Ørn once said, ‘as a counterfeiter gets from looking at a perfect forgery of a hundred-kroner note.’

So far nothing had had them stumped, not thunder, not lightning, not fire — they used rustling cellophane for that — not even steamy love scenes: Ørn’s simulated kiss was in the Casanova class. Ørn was also a wizard at imitating cars — right down to the different marques. They walked about with their ears on stalks; every noise was a potential sound effect for a radio play. It reached the point where they begged Ørn’s mother to let them cover the living-room walls in egg boxes to get rid of an annoying echo. And although she refused, she had to turn a blind eye to the mysterious disappearance of a whole host of things from the kitchen: a hand whisk, greaseproof paper, brushes and pans — even the vacuum cleaner. You needed more than a few measly props for a masterpiece such as In the Sultan’s Harem or Napoleon and the Battle of Austerlitz.

In the play about St George, they endeavoured to get to the forest scene as quickly as possible. This was the part where they could give their imaginations free rein. They pretended that they were inventors, freely experimenting with every conceivable, and inconceivable, device from bicycle pumps to balloons. They did not, however, use coconut shells to emulate the sound of a horse walking or galloping, Ørn reproduced this perfectly by drumming his fingertips on the coffee table. One small stroke of genius, though, was the chirping of the birds at the beginning, before things began to get creepy, which Ørn produced by rubbing a damp cork against a bottle — for a whole afternoon they amused themselves with producing the distinctive calls of various different birds, taping them and chortling delightedly at all the lifelike results. As the drama grew darker they added more wind — the radio tuned to a station that was off the air — and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. Peas in a cardboard box sounded like a shower of rain, a couple of tin cans gave the chink of armour. Ørn was a sight to be seen, bouncing back and forth like a yoyo between his various ‘instruments’. ‘When you’re finished with this you’ll be able to get a job as the ball in a pinball machine,’ Jonas said.

The real — the nigh-on insoluble problem — was still the dragon itself. For what does a dragon say? They both tried roaring in different ways, but it sounded as silly as having a lion bark like a poodle. They tried using Ørn’s mother’s Mixmaster, they tried spray cans, they considered — talking of hissing sounds — dripping water onto the cooker hotplate, but were not allowed into the kitchen. Their best solution involved Ørn sitting with his head inside a tin pail, it sounded bloodcurdling enough and would do at a push. By shaking Ørn’s dad’s leather jacket in the air — didn’t it even reek a little of dragon? — they managed to replicate the sound of leathery wingbeats. Finally, Jonas added the crowning touch to their inventiveness by bringing along Daniel’s kerosene lamp which, when they lit it, gave the most glorious sense of fire being breathed.

After numerous dry runs, mainly to get the coordination right, they were ready for the final take. If it turned out well, they were to let the little kids hear it; with any luck they’d scare the socks off them. The introduction went like clockwork, Ørn struck the largest pot lid with a ladle, and Jonas announced in a deep, dramatic voice: ‘Grorud Radio Theatre presents’ — then left a nice pause for effect before intoning in an, if possible, even deeper voice: ‘St George and the Fearful Dragon.’ Another clang of the pot lid. The first part also passed without a hitch, went better than ever before; Little Eagle flew back and forth between the various articles scattered around the room and on the table, screwed and scraped, wafted and rattled, he was the soul of confidence, drumming with his fingers on the tabletop and shaking boxes, ripping clothes — it all sounded quite professional.

St George draws near to the dragon’s lair, in the middle of a dark and forbidding forest; the wind howls, the leaves tremble, the air is rent by a scream: Jonas makes his voice as high-pitched as possible, a princess’s cry for help, a maiden in distress, Jonas switches to the narrator’s neutral, but no less compelling tone, tells how St George leaps off his horse, walks through dry leaves — Little Eagle rakes through strips of paper — sees the dragon come flying towards him — Ørn waves the leather jacket frantically in the air, it sounds good, it sounds really great, this is going to be such a success — the dragon lands with a thud — Ørn jumps off the sofa onto the floor, the dragon comes charging through the undergrowth — Ørn stamps orange boxes to smithereens — they had practically had to go down on their bended knees to get these particular, orange boxes, with slats of just the right thinness, from the grocer — it sounded diabolical, like an elephant, a dinosaur, or yes, a dragon approaching. ‘Now you shall die!’ Jonas cries in St George’s heroic, fearless voice, a challenge which is supposed to be followed by the dragon’s spine-chilling, stupefying fiery breath; Ørn is right on schedule with a lighter held in front of a blowlamp which has so far been used for nothing more exciting than melting Swix ski-wax, but which will now make small children turn weak at the knees; in his mind Ørn is already over by the pail that will lend resonance to the dragon’s hideous roar, but first a terrible blast of flame, the only problem is that suddenly the lighter won’t work, it only goes click, click, Ørn tries frantically, but it’s no good, click click it says, Jonas gazes at him in desperation, it had all been going so beautifully up until now, and there is something about this situation which makes Ørn laugh, to roar with laughter, to laugh in a most particular way, almost gloatingly, spitefully is perhaps the word or carelessly, because he doesn’t take this quite so seriously as Jonas; Little Eagle laughs and laughs, as if he can’t believe this is happening, laughs resignedly, in disbelief, howls with laughter, pops the tin pail over his head in an attempt to smother his mirth, but carries on laughing inside it. ‘You don’t scare me, vile dragon, foul abductor of innocent women,’ Jonas continues in St George’s voice, doing the sword-out-of-scabbard sound, wanting to see the play through to the end for the practice, if nothing else, runs a bread knife over the vacuum’s metal tube, while Little Eagle just laughs and laughs, so hard that he topples off the sofa and knocks over the table, and all his props, including the microphone, making a deafening racket, and they have to stop, switch off the tape recorder. ‘Drat it, that’s just like you, Ørn,’ Jonas fumed, ‘ruining the very end.’

Jonas runs the tape back, though, wanting to hear the recording anyway, to be on the safe side. And it is then, when they come to the fatal point, that it dawns on him: It’s perfect! The clicks sound sinister, you would never guess it was a lighter, it sounds as if the dragon is doing something venomous, working up to something, with its forked tongue. And Ørn’s laughter heightens the tension, not least because it is unintentional, and preceded by a hair-raising pffffft — Ørn’s involuntary reaction actually gave the impression of an honest-to-goodness dragon, a rather menacing, utterly surprising sound, from inside the pail in particular it bordered on something beyond their understanding, a kind of smiling malice, something even more dangerous than a roaring, fire-breathing dragon. Brilliant. And the din produced when Little Eagle knocked everything over provided the cataclysmic soundtrack to a swift but fierce battle in which — no one could be in any doubt — the dragon was killed.

What sort of sound does a dragon make?

An apologetic little laugh?

This was the day on which Jonas learned that creativity can lie in the unexpected, in things one hadn’t thought of, and above all else: in simplicity. Not only that but it might even be that a dragon was killed — for real. He felt proud when he stood with that tape in his hands. To some extent he understood that this spool of tape, this discus of invisible tracks, was more important, that in the long run it also stood for something more valuable than the actual machinery, the tape recorder. At the back of his mind he was also haunted by the thought that these background noises, when isolated, would form the basis for a very different story.

They ran the play for some of the little kids as planned — against their mothers’ will, no doubt — and scared the living daylights out of them. No one could understand why a number of younger children at Solhaug suddenly started waking up in the night, crying and muttering about dragons and not letting them get them. ‘There, there,’ their mothers said. ‘There’s no such thing as dragons.’ And having thought about it for a moment they might have added: ‘Not in Norway anyway.’