At well over six foot and close to twenty stone, Ragnar Borchmann was quite literally one of the most imposing characters I had met. But it was his personality and intellectual capacity that were most imposing. Ragnar Borchmann was the only son of a consul and director from one of Oslo’s most well-known families. He had inherited his father’s business empire, but ran it more or less as a hobby. His working hours were spent as a professor of economics, and he had a long list of books on his CV and an exemplary reputation. At the age of sixty-four, Professor Director Ragnar Borchmann was now, I dare say, one of the richest men in Oslo and one of the most admired intellectuals in Norway.
But Ragnar Borchmann had carried a great sorrow for many years. I first heard about this when I was ten. One Saturday evening, in sheer delight at the end of the war, he and his wife sat up late with myself and my parents. Both guests showed a touching interest in me, my schooling and future opportunities in life. Before I went to bed that night, my father said to me: ‘There are many things that I may envy about Ragnar Borchmann, but still I am the richer man. Because I have you.’ In his early twenties, Ragnar Borchmann had married a girl from a very good family who was also at the start of a promising academic career. The couple always appeared to be happy and harmonious, but they remained childless. A sorrow settled on them, which seemed to weigh more heavily on him. By 1948, Ragnar Borchmann was forty-four years old and had amassed an impressive legacy of books, property and money, but he did not have an heir, and it seemed had no prospect of getting one.
My childhood was spent in a decidedly upper-class home where strong emotions were seldom displayed in public. I can only remember seeing Mother and Father cry on one occasion – and then it was with tears of joy. One day in July 1949 I came home from school to the news that the forty-three-year-old Mrs Caroline Borchmann was expecting a baby. It was only then that I understood how heavily their childlessness had weighed on the Borchmanns and their immediate circle. I have never seen joy and anticipation emanate more than it did from the middle-aged couple that summer. I went to their daughter’s christening together with my parents in January 1950, as did around 250 other ‘close friends’ from the capital’s cultural, financial and intellectual elite. It was jokingly said that Oslo had never seen the like since the crown prince’s christening in 1937, but then that also seemed fitting, as we were, after all, talking about an emperor’s daughter. Choosing a name for their only child was obviously no easy task for two parents with such illustrious names on both sides. In the end, they settled on Patricia Louise Isabelle Elizabeth Borchmann.