Chapter One

In the years around the time of our last war with Germany, there was a
Christian minister by the name of Johannes Sidenius who lived in a small
provincial town in east Jutland. The town lay at the bottom of an over-
grown fjord and was hidden from view by the surrounding green hills.
This priest was a pious and austere man. His outward appearance and,
indeed, his whole way of life placed him sharply at odds with the rest
of the town’s inhabitants who therefore regarded him for many years as
an intruder whose peculiar ways prompted various reactions, ranging
from a simple shrug of the shoulders to downright indignation. When-
ever he walked – tall and severe in demeanour – through the town’s
winding streets, dressed in his long, grey and rough-spun coat, big dark
blue spectacles perched on his forehead and his hand firmly gripping a
large umbrella with which he struck the pavement in tack and tandem
with each step he took, people on the street would instinctively turn and
stare; whilst those who looked on from behind window panes and lace
curtains would smile at the scene, or scowl, as their mood took them.
The town’s elders, the old estate and cattle merchants, never deigned to
offer him a greeting, even when he was clad in his vestments. For, despite
the fact that they themselves were wont to appear in public wearing
clogs and canvas smock coats, sucking continually at their pipes, they
held it at as a shame and disgrace upon the town that they had got such
a wretched cleric who appeared amongst them dressed as some lowly
bell ringer, and who, to boot, obviously could barely provide for himself
and his brood of whelps. One had been accustomed to a quite different
sort of clergy here – to men attired in fine black cloth and a collar of the
best white cambric with its attendant brilliant chest piece; men who also

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 A Fortunate Man

by their very name had spread a lustre over the town and its church;
men who would go on to be archdeacons and bishops within the dio-
cese, but who were never arrogant in their piety, or felt themselves to be
above the town’s worldly affairs and took a full part in the citizenry’s
functions and festivities.
Indeed, the large red vicarage had previously been a byword for hos-
pitality, where, once any religious business had been concluded with
the minister, there was a standing invitation to retire to the drawing
room. Here, the lady of the house and her young daughters would be in
attendance and over coffee, or (when a better class of folk was present)
a small glas of wine and homemade cake, one could gossip about the
latest news and events in the town. But now, people avoided the rectory,
unless some pressing reason drove them there, and these days one got
no further than Pastor Sidenius’s funereal study, where the curtains were
usually half drawn because his eyes could not tolerate the reflected glare
from the walls on the other side of the narrow street.
Moreover, this pastor then usually left visitors standing in this place,
never offering them a seat, dealing with them in a curt manner and
showing no apparent interest in them. He was, in fact, least hospita-
ble to those who believed themselves to be most deserving of special
attention. Even the families of the town’s civic officials no longer paid
a call to the rectory, given that Pastor Sidenius – instead of offering
them refreshments – had taken it upon himself to question them on their
spiritual inclinations and generally addressed them more like candidates
for the rite of confirmation standing before a bishop.
He had aroused particular animosity when officiating at burial cer-
emonies for the town’s more illustrious citizens – where the populace
would form a procession in pomp and ceremony, holding garlanded
guild banners aloft to the accompaniment of a brass band and with
civic officials in gold braided uniforms and plumed hats also in attend-
ance – all this, it was averred, being a fitting way to offer thanksgiving
and spiritual inspiration following a light wine reception in the home of
the deceased. However, in place of a glorious send off, with the obligato-
ry eulogy in memory of the deceased, this Pastor Sidenius restricted him-
self unbendingly to the recital of a prayer more befitting of unchristened
children and the lower classes. Not a word on the decency of the dearly
departed and the fruitful furrow he had diligently ploughed throughout
his life; no mention of the fact that the town’s rising prosperity had

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 Chapter One

made his name, or of his selfless devotion to its Pavements Department,

or communal water provision. In fact, the deceased party was barely
mentioned at the graveside, and then only with additional comments
such as ‘this poor heap of dust’ or ‘this worm fodder’, and the greater
and more refined the gathering which he addressed, the more flags and
banners that snapped in the wind swirling around the graveside, the
shorter the prayers became and the more miserable was his description
of the remains which people had come to honour, so that mourners left
the scene with an anger which was more than once audibly expressed,
even in the hallowed grounds of the cemetery.
The only townspeople who were regular attendants at the rectory
were a pair of small, shrivelled old ladies from the spinster fraternity
and a pale, long-bearded Christ-like figure who was an itinerant tailor.
There were also a number of ‘saved’ people of no means, who in Pastor
Sidenius’s home had found a long sought-for refuge in a town whose
thoughts otherwise rarely strayed from temporal considerations. How-
ever, the fact alone that Fru Sidenius, the pastor’s wife, was of a very
weak disposition and had been confined to bed in recent years meant
that there was no suggestion of any kind of social circle having been
established. Indeed, it should be said that Pastor Sidenius himself was
in no way disposed to social engagements and his acolytes sought his
counsel on matters of faith alone. On the other hand, they would meet up
every single Sunday in the church, where they would occupy their chosen
place immediately below the pulpit and then provoke the ire of the rest of
the congregation by, in a most ostentatious manner, singing even the most
interminable of psalms without once consulting their church hymnals.
Pastor Sidenius belonged to an ancient dynasty of clerics, which traced
its lineage right back to the Reformation. For more than three centuries,
the call to spiritual works had gone from father to son – yes even to
daughters as well, in as much that these had in many cases married their
fathers’ curates, or their brothers’ student friends. It was from this deep
well that the conscious authority in the pronouncement of the Lord’s
word, for which the Sideniuses were renowned, had sprung from olden
times. There was hardly a parish in any part of the country where at least
one family member had not been present, at some point in the passage of
the centuries, to remind people of the need for obedience to Church Law.
Of course, among such a large number of servants in the Church,
not all would prove to be equally zealous in the commission of their

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 A Fortunate Man

vocation. There had even been the odd family member whose passions
lay more in the direction of decidedly secular affairs – people in whom a
lust for life, which ran as a suppressed but powerful undercurrent within
the dynasty, had suddenly broken out in rather uncontrolled ways. Thus,
in the previous century, there had been a priest in Vendsyssel, ‘Mad Sid-
enius’ by name, who was said to have led the life of a wandering hunter
in the great forests around the Jutland Ridge. Here, he would often be
seen carousing in the taverns and imbibing schnapps in the company of
the local peasantry, until finally one day, in a drunken rage during the
Easter celebrations, he struck down his sacristan so violently that a spurt
of blood desecrated the very altar cloth.
Despite events such as this, the vast majority of the family had been
upstanding champions of the Church and several of them were also very
well read. Indeed, they were theological scholars, who in their rural iso-
lation had sought respite from the grey blandness of each passing year
via the interior workings of the mind, a deep investigation of their own
inner world, in which they would eventually discover the greatest hap-
piness in life, its greatest rewards, and the ultimate goal underpinning
everything.
It was this inherited disdain for the value of all things secular which
had been Johannes Sidenius’s buckler and shield in the cut and thrust of
daily life, and the thing that had kept both his back straight and his men-
tal resolve undaunted, despite the strain of dire poverty and the many
reverses he had suffered. But in this regard, he had also received great
support from his wife, with whom he enjoyed a deep and contented un-
ion; for all that they were so unlike each other. She too was of a deeply
religious disposition, but – in contrast to her husband – she possessed
a doleful, fervent nature, for which life engendered constant agitation
and dark anxieties. Due to her family background, she had once lacked
conviction in her faith. However, because of her husband’s influence,
she became first a true believer and then a zealot, for whom the daily
struggle to make ends meet, combined with so many childbirths in quick
succession, served to confirm her by now passionately jaundiced view of
life’s travails and the need for Christians to strictly observe their daily
duties. And then there were those many years, since her last child had
arrived, where she had remained bedridden in her dark room hoping
to regain her strength; and, to cap it all, the recently concluded and
disastrous war and the hostile confiscations of property and money, the

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bloody humiliations – all this had hardly helped to make her view of life
any more hopeful.
Though her husband would reproach her severely for it, she could
never really banish these anxieties from her mind. For, even as she ad-
mitted that this displayed a sinful lack of trust in God’s providence,
she just could not refrain from ceaselessly reminding her children that
strict moderation in all things was their duty both before God and man.
She would react as if having witnessed a shocking crime whenever she
learned of the lifestyle of her fellow townsmen; of their parties which
boasted extravagant menu selections and several kinds of wine; of the
silk dresses the ladies wore and the golden jewellery displayed by young
girls – yes, she even found it difficult to forgive her own husband when,
every so often, he would return home from a walk with some modest
gift, which he, not without a certain quiet gallantry, would present at the
foot of her bed – a pair of roses arranged in a posy, some nice fruit, or a
jar of ginger preserves to help her night cough. Of course, she was both
happy and touched by his small gestures. Yet, she could not refrain from
saying, as she kissed his hands tenderly: ‘Heavens dear, you really should
not have done that.’
A brood of pretty but rather sickly children grew up in this house;
eleven in all, five boys with clear blue eyes and six equally bright-eyed
girls, all of whom were easily recognisable amongst the town’s other
youths, partly because of an unusual neck collar they wore, which made
the boys look rather girlish and made the half grown girls rather manly
in appearance. The boys, moreover, wore their brown hair long and had
curls flowing almost to their shoulders, whilst the girls wore their hair
plastered to their skulls and had just a plait at each temple that ran in a
hard little curve in front of their ears.
The relationship between parents and children, as with the overall
tone presiding in the home, was thoroughly patriarchal in nature. Dur-
ing the frugal, indeed meagre, mealtimes, which always began with a
prayer, the head of the household would sit at the end of the long, nar-
row table with his five sons arranged according to age on one side and
the five daughters in a corresponding sequence along the other; whilst,
in the absence of her mother, the eldest daughter, the scrupulous Signe,
took pride of place at the other end of the table. It would never have
occurred to any of the children to speak without first being invited to do
so. On the other hand, their father spoke to them frequently – about their

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 A Fortunate Man

educational progress, about their friends and their classes at school, and
thereby came to tell his own story. In his own didactic way, he would ex-
plain conditions and events from his own youth, describe how school life
was at the time and recall life in his father’s and grandfather’s mud- and
wattle-built rectory, and much more besides. And sometimes, when he
was in just the right mood, he would even tell amusing anecdotes from
his student days in Copenhagen, from his time in the renowned residen-
tial hall, and the madcap capers the students would get up to with the
town’s watchmen and the constabulary. But, having in this way raised
the humour of his children, he never failed at the end to give a caution-
ary twist to his tales and a warning to them to turn their thoughts away
from frivolity and attend instead to the Lord’s bidding.
This large flock of children, and especially the fact that it had done
so well – firstly at school, then in the wider adult world – had gradu-
ally become a source of great pride to Pastor Sidenius, and at the same
time caused him to give thanks in humble gratitude that the Lord had
clearly blessed his home. For there was no doubt that these youths,
genuine Sideniuses all, were eager, and inquisitive, and, more than an-
ything, had developed a strict sense of duty as they had grown up one
after the other to become a mirror image of their father. They had
even inherited all the little quirks in his appearance and deportment –
right down to his proud bearing and the measured almost military gait.
There was only one of the children who caused his parents sorrow and
distress. This was one of the boys in the middle ranks whose name was
Peter Andreas. It was not just the fact that he was disruptive at school,
and thus provoked a stream of complaints from that side, but also the
fact that he had already, at a very young age, begun to defy the customs
and practice which prevailed in the home. He had not even reached the
age of ten when he first disobeyed his parents outright, and the older
the boy became, the more he showed a reckless defiance, which neither
chastisement, coercion, nor even the strictures of the Lord himself,
were able to quell.
Pastor Sidenius would often sit at his wife’s bedside discussing what
they should do with this wayward son in whom both of them saw the spec-
tre of the degenerate Vendsyssel priest, whose ill repute was forever etched
into the family’s bloodline. And, instinctively affected as they were by their
parents’ jaundiced view, his brothers and sisters began to look upon the
boy as a stranger in their midst and exclude him from their games.

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 Chapter One

Now it is true that the boy had come into this world at an unfortu-
nate moment, namely at a time when his father had been moved from
an isolated and sparsely populated parish up on the heath to the region’s
market town – a move which involved a substantial commitment and
expansion of his ministry. In this way, and purely by chance, Peter An-
dreas had become the first of all the children whose earliest rearing had
been left to his mother. However, in the years when Peter Andreas was
small, she had always had her hands full looking after those even small-
er than he was. This meant that when she was finally consigned to her
sickbed and sought to gather all her children around her, Peter Andreas
had grown too big for her to keep a proper eye on his behaviour and
whereabouts.
Thus it was that Peter Andreas became almost from birth, so to speak,
a stranger in his own home. The first years of his life were mostly spent
in his sisters’ playroom, or, as he grew bigger, he was often to be found in
the outhouse where an old woodcutter plied his trade, and whose rough
and ready observations on life and events around them had an early
influence on the boy’s view of the world. He then graduated to what be-
came, in effect, a second home within the environs of the large merchant
houses in the neighbourhood with their accompanying timber yards.
Here, too, amongst the yard boys and shop apprentices, he absorbed a
profoundly temporal view of the world and its many bounties. At the
same time, all this fresh air and physical tumult encouraged his physical
development and imposed a ruddy glow upon his broad features. In fact,
as young as he was, local youths and the timber yard boys soon came to
fear him because of his physical prowess and he finally set himself up as
the leader of a small gang of rogues, which roamed and harried about
the town. Before anyone in the house realised what had taken place, he
had grown into a half wild street urchin. It was only when he got older,
and especially when at nine years of age he entered the town’s grammar
school, that the boy’s volatile tendencies became obvious to all; and
both parents and teachers alike then frantically sought to remedy the
initial neglect.
But by then it was too late.