Oscar Humlum and I had been travelling companions for a long time before we met, though without knowing it.

There was nothing strange about this. It was perfectly normal. Because, for an orphan in Denmark, everything was very strictly regulated. Across the country ran certain tunnels that were invisible; they ran alongside each other, absolutely parallel. So, when Humlum and I met, we did not talk much about the past. This silence – it was so as not to pry, but also because we knew that, in a way, we had been travelling together, even though we had not seen one another.

First one was put into a Home for Infants. One was so small, there, that one could not remember anything, but the file stated that I had been in two different ones.

After that one was put in a children’s home. Both Humlum and I had been with the Christian Foundation. I was at the Home on Peter Bang’s Vej, between the KB playing fields and Flintholm Church. Humlum was in Esbjerg. One feels as though one ought to have remembered quite a bit about that time, but the only thing one remembered was the storytelling, and the punishment for soiling one’s mouth with swearwords – the matron, Sister Ragna, pushed one’s head down the toilet after she had used it.

One ought to have remembered more. But that was the only thing that had stuck.

They kept you for as long as they could at the children’s home. Only if they came to the conclusion that there was no alternative were you moved. There was only one kind of place to go to from there. That was to a residential assessment centre, for a limited period. I went to Brogårdsvænge in Gentofte, that was in ‘66. I remember nothing about why, in the file, the matron, Sister Ragna, had written “wayward, refuses to wear plus-fours”.

That is what it says, but one remembers nothing.

One time I showed it to Humlum. It was winter, at night. We were sitting on the toilets, up against the radiator. “I remember them,” he said, “baggy pants and long checked socks. The rest of them at the school wore desert boots and Fair Isle sweaters. You didn’t have anything else, it was like your skin, it got to the stage where you wanted to rip it off, rip your skin off, or something.”

He did not say whether he too had refused.

It was all downhill from the assessment centre. Because one was older there were more places they could send one. I was put into a boarding school for children whose development does not measure up to the norm, and from there to Nødeborgård Treatment Home.
That was in ‘67, I must have been ten.

Biehl’s Academy takes “normal” children and others from various institutions, with a mission to integrate them into “normal” society. Some of these “borderliners” are slow or perform well below their mental age. Others are academically sound but are traumatised for various reasons. In Katharine’s case, for example, the death of her mother followed by the suicide of her father has led to her admission to the school.

The narrator of the story is Peter, a strange child, obsessive and intelligent, with a long history of orphanages and care homes. When August is admitted into Biehl’s, he is watched over by the teachers, never allowed to move more than a foot away from the playground wall. He gasses himself on the cooker at night, just enough to be able to sleep. Peter and Katarina believe that he won’t survive school life and will be permanently institutionalised.

The school uses measurement rather than love to ‘treat’ its pupils, all personal relationships are frustrated and replaced by IQ tests and other ’systems’. It is a version of Hell.

Everyone involved in the sadistic and damaging experiments at Biehl’s Academy – the staff, the education minister, the caretaker, their families, everyone – except the children, believe that they are defending eternal values.

The school, always reminiscent of Kafka, brings to mind other establishments from the literary canon, Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall from Nicholas Nickleby, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

This is a difficult and inspiring novel, rich in meditations on the human condition. It was originally published in Denmark in 1993.

Who should I see in the store but Tessa Netterby whom I hadn’t seen for maybe a year. I felt badly I’d never got out to see her, because I used to try to keep up a sort of friendship after she dropped out of school. I think I was the only one that did. She was all wrapped up in a big shawl and she looked like something out of a storybook. Top Heavy, actually, because she has that broad face with its black curly mop and her broad shoulders, though she can’t be much over five feet tall. She just smiled, the same old Tessa. And I asked how she was – you always do that when you see her, seriously, because of her long siege of whatever it was that took her out of school when she was around fourteen. But also you ask that because there isn’t much else to think of to say, she is not in the world that the rest of us are in. She is not in any clubs and can’t take part in any sports and she does not have any normal social life. She does have a sort of life involving people and there is nothing wrong with it, but I wouldn’t know how to talk about it and maybe neither would she.

This collection of short stories has an introduction by Jonathan Franzen, in which he underlines Munro’s claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America.

I can’t argue with him. I read these stories and stand speechless before them. She makes me glad I’m alive. She dominates this world of the short-story, packs into it much more than I was ever aware that it could hold. And I’m a fan of the short-story, have been for years.

I’m always coming across people who tell me, I can’t be bothered with short stories, they’re over before they begin. I much prefer a novel.

And the novel is my own preference as well, but it shouldn’t close-out the possibility of other forms.

For anyone interested in the craft of writing, this book is a must. For anyone interested in poetry, please don’t miss it. You thinkers; you seekers after magic; you unbelievers; are you listening, paying close attention? And for all of you out there who are prepared to stand stupidly in front of this life of ours with a smile on your face and your mouth open, there is a genius at work in Alice Munro, don’t let it pass on the other side of the street.

He writes, with great difficulty and doubt, difficult and doubtful poems. He alternates between self-laceration and cockiness. He is profoundly alienated, not least because he inhabits a world of rejection slips, indefinite longings, extreme aesthetic sensitivity and (in the words of a friend) “passionate nihilism.”

His disorders are physical, too. Although his spleen is clearly in fine working order, he suffers from a series of ailments whose details he entrusts to his stalwart confidant Thomas McGreevy. Most significant are acutely distressing nocturnal “heart attacks,” which lead him to try cure by psychoanalysis. We also learn of pulled teeth, dry pleurisy (“I feel all right except for a reluctance to sneeze & belch”), intestinal pains, boils and — brace yourself — “a sebaceous cyst in my anus, which happily a fart swept away before it became operable.”

I’ll be with Andrew Duggan who will also read from his novel, Scars Beneath the Skin.

We shall also sign books and be available for questions.

A touch of cold in the Autumn night -

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded;

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

TE Hulme (1912)