Viva Brighton September 2015 Issue #31

column
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John Helmer
Ibsen and me
Illustration by Joda, jonydaga.weebly.com
‘Is this your first visit to Grimstad?’ Tall and
twenty-something, Cedrik is our guide for the
Ibsen tour that my family has allowed me to
inflict on them. The playwright lived in this little
harbour town when he was young, and wrote his
first play here.
‘I’ve never been to Norway before,’ I tell him,
‘but my great-grandfather was born in Grimstad.’
‘Oh yes, I know about the Helmers.’
I do a double take.
‘There were only 800 people in Grimstad at the
time,’ explains Cedrik who, it turns out, is a bit
of a local historian. He is keen to share what he
knows, and since we modern Helmers are the
only people who have signed up for the tour, the
rest of it takes on a bit of a theme.
‘… So this is where Ibsen lived – in a
house owned by one of your relatives.
He was an apothecary, but always away
at sea ...’ These were useful absences.
The role of apothecary in those
days involved dispensing wine and
spirits, and my relative’s long sea
trips allowed Ibsen, his assistant,
to turn the place into party central
for bohemian youth. Everyone
back to Henrik’s. I picture a crowd
of whacked-out hipsters (one of
whom, it transpires, was a further
relative) in velvet jackets, slooshing
back the pharmaceutical hooch.
Ibsen also liked to go at it during the
day, getting high on his own supply
as he neglected the business and
cracked on with what was to
be the first in a long line of world-class gloomy
dramas.
Cedrik lets us into the house, which is being restored.
There’s not much to see. I look across the
street to the doll’s house of a place we’re staying
at, called Café Ibsen. ‘Do you think he actually
went there?’ I ask.
‘Certainly not: it didn’t serve alcohol.’
I’ve always known there was some sort of Ibsen
connection, but the stories were vague. Besides
which, all family history projects are to some
extent self-aggrandising, and about as interesting
to listen to as other people’s dreams. ‘Even people
in the same family aren’t interested in them,’
quips son Freddy when I try to tell him later
about ours. ‘—There: comedy gold; put that in
your column.’
So he never hears the last bit of the story.
I’ve brought a book to Grimstad, a town ledger
from 1897 that has come down through the family.
Cedrik’s eyes grow round when I pull it out
of my IKEA backpack. There is a chapter headed
‘Helmer’, and though the text is in Norwegian,
you can clearly see the name Henrik Ibsen in one
of the footnotes. ‘What’s that all about?’
Cedrik translates. The footnote concerns a third
relative, whose story might or might not have inspired
a famous poem of Ibsen’s called Terje Vigen.
He was arrested by the British Navy for breaking
the blockade of Grimstad during the Napoleonic
wars – rowing to Denmark and back for supplies.
They banged him up in Reading Gaol.
Drug landlord … Pisshead … Jailbird: what a
heritage.
I feel suitably aggrandised.
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