cracked ice

overcome by otherness

I found the coat in a charity shop. I was in my duffel coat phase at the time — I had a black one, a navy one and a pale blue one with a hood and a nipped in waist. This coat was — I thought — more grown up. Pure, grey wool, expensive-looking and tweedy, it was heavy on my shoulders and reached down to my ankles, swamping my small form. I was a teenage girl, and this coat was made to fit a man. Now, we might describe it as ‘oversized’, but in the nineties, it was just ‘too big’. I didn’t care, I liked it that way. It made me feel powerful.

Standing on the wind whipped deck of the Harwich to Esbjerg ferry, I was glad of it. When I had signed up to travel to Denmark in February with three other sixth formers to help with English teaching in a school in the north, I had not considered the cold. Now, as we approached the Danish coast, we were astonished to see from the ferry window that the sea was frozen, its surface covered by segments of ice floe, cracked like crazy paving. We took the stairs in leaps, and burst out on deck to find ourselves surrounded by fragmented, glittering grey ice. I was overcome by otherness — a thrill I am still chasing.

We travelled up the country by train, a winter-bound landscape flying past outside the window. Changing trains at a remote station, as we stood waiting on a platform between banks of snow, I pulled my coat closer around me, burying my hands in its deep pockets. When we arrived, I didn’t need the coat in the cosy apartment of my exchange partner Hanna — who had stayed with me for a week in the months prior, bringing with her my first bottle of perfume, a gift from duty free. In the mornings, I wore both coat and a cloud of perfume as we set off to queue outside the bakery before school for sweet pastries that I stuffed into my capacious pockets to nibble later in the day.

Many years have passed since the Danish exchange and I don’t recall now the name of the town where we stayed. I remember the home-like ‘English House’ where we helped younger children with their English conversation, the bakery window with its astonishing array of treats, and a party one night in the house of a fellow student where giggled as we we drank shots of something sweet I had never tasted before or since. I remember Hanna’s blonde bob and her smiling face. I remember wriggling cold toes in my black DMs and thin cotton socks. Fragments of memory float away from me like cracked ice, but I know that something changed in me there — a widening of my horizons, an opening of my heart, the start of a deep enduring obsession with Scandinavia.

I don’t know what happened to the coat. Years later, my father asked to borrow it (it was, after all, a coat for a man) but I hadn’t seen it since I left it on a coat hook in my bedroom when I moved out. I hope it’s still out there somewhere, hanging with mothballs in a heavy wooden wardrobe, traces of Danish pastry crumbs in its deep, wide pockets.