Nordre Aker, Grefsen | Harald lived here at the city’s most secret address. No one found him for 25 years

Now that the weather again invites hiking in the fields, I like to leave the training session past Harald’s secret home. While the city seethes and boils, there is hardly a quieter place. And it’s not far for a dip to cool off either.

However, the main purpose of the tour is as a time capsule from one of the city’s dark chapters. Proof of how insanely the municipality has treated its weakest.

Housing shortage, alcoholism and poverty

After the war and the following years, many came home to Oslo with trauma. There were war sailors from the war years and young men who had served in the German brigade in the years after the war.

They had seen and experienced unimaginable things. The way they were treated is a disgrace in Norwegian history.

Many struggled with anxiety and alcoholism. They failed to establish relationships and families. In addition, it was very difficult to get a roof over the head.

The housing shortage was great before the blocks started to shoot up in the drabant towns. According to FriFagbevegelse, in 1948 there were 14,161 families, or 36,448 adults and 7,148 children, on the Oslo rental office’s lists of housing applicants. Single men came last in the housing queue.

Harald Grande was such a man. He came home from the German brigade struggling with anxiety and alcohol. Couldn’t take public transport. Didn’t get a regular apartment.

Outlaw colony

For Harald, as for many others, the solution was a simple, self-built cabin in the field. Without water, electricity or heat sources. Almost without insulation. But there was a roof over his head.

A squatter colony was established in Årvollåsen and Grefsenåsen.

It was Oslo’s answer to the most undignified living conditions you otherwise see on TV images from the favela in Rio or other areas built up by sheds with tin roofs.

The only thing more undignified than the living conditions themselves is the way they ended. In 1964, Oslo municipality took action against the vagrants. They burned down almost every single one of the outlaws’ cabins. The trigger for the colony being burnt down was a drunken brawl that ended in murder in one of the cabins.

A bit like when they went in to demolish and clean up the city’s old wooden house areas, such as Enerhaugen, the municipality erased the traces of need and poverty in the land.

A few tens of meters from the ski resort

But they did not find Harald. He literally lived at a secret address in Lillomarka from 1956 to 1983. For almost three decades, he went there daily to work at Aker’s mechanical workshop. He was unable to take buses and trams. There were too many people.

Instead, he lay alone and slept under a crag, well hidden, a few tens of meters from the ski resort in Grefsenkleiva. Harald could certainly hear the sound from the hill and the alpinists driving past, but they did not hear him.

He managed in his own way in a society that did nothing to help him. Harald told Dagsavisen that he had nevertheless had a good life.

The last years of his life he lived in Namdalen, and he died there aged 90 in 2017. Until the 2000s, he made occasional visits to the cabin.

Peaceful both Harald and the cabin

It still stands there, the house Harald built for himself. Here he was safe. A king in his own kingdom, with a view of the whole city.

But the cabin also bears witness to a hard life and it is proof of a dark chapter in Norwegian history. The cabin is et time witness to how the nation treated many men who had done a lot for the country.

A few years ago, Harald’s home was restored and made suitable for visits by walkers with the help of funds from the Sparebank Foundation and various historical groups.

The initiator was former forest supervisor Håvard Pedersen, who told Dagsavisen that he became aware of the cabin and Harald Grande by chance: – When I met him for the first time in 1980, I immediately realized that this was a cultural monument, and the “peace” both him and the cabin, said Pedersen.

I am glad that Pedersen took the trouble to save the cabin.

The view over the city is strikingly beautiful from Grefsenkleiva. The exercise by walking straight up the alpine slope is good, and afterwards you can cool off with a dip in Trollvann. An additional reward is the opportunity to visit a cabin that makes you both angry and humble.

When you come home to Harald tired, you can think that he took the steep slopes on foot every day, in all kinds of weather, for almost 30 years. And that he was the one who had to sleep in there.

Harald himself claimed that he only froze once, when he accidentally got his toes outside the duvet in minus 23 degrees!

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