So, Darrell Williams lived in Flat 3B. He was a large, dark-haired American with a firm handshake and an unexpectedly pleasant voice. He showed me his diplomat’s passport, which gave his age as forty-five, though he looked younger. He was at least six foot tall and no doubt weighed well over fifteen stone, but still had little surplus fat. He spoke remarkably good Norwegian, with only the faintest American twang.
When telling me about himself, Darrell Williams explained that his slightly unusual Christian name was due to his Irish ancestry. His grandparents had emigrated to the United States in the 1870s, following the Great Famine. He himself was born and raised in New York, and was the son of a well-known lawyer. Darrell Williams had given up his own law degree in order to sign up for military service after America joined the war, and took part in the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944. The following year, he had come to Norway just after its liberation as a young lieutenant in the US delegation. He soon found himself a Norwegian girlfriend and a post in the American military mission and stayed on in Norway until the spring of 1948. He had learned Norwegian back then and had so many fond memories from that time that he had, nearly twenty years later, applied for a vacant position as attaché at the embassy in Oslo when the opportunity arose. In the intervening years, he had pursued a career in the military and risen to the rank of major, before making the switch to diplomacy in the early 1960s.
In answer to my question regarding his civil status, Darrell Williams’s smile was relaxed and full of self-irony.
‘I got married in the USA in 1951, but the high point of the marriage was when we split up three years later. It resulted in too many arguments and no children. My wife claimed that she left me for a certain man, which would appear to be untrue as she then went on to marry someone else, and to have a child with yet another man!’
The diplomat spoke openly of his disastrous marriage. As a single man with no children, the diplomatic service had allowed him to fulfil his childhood dream of seeing more of Asia and Europe. Over the past decade he had been posted to a number of embassies, but could, ‘with his hand on his heart’, honestly say that he had never seen a capital as beautiful as Oslo.