And as luck would have it, the wife of the lad that I was staying with – sorry, the mother of the lad that I was staying with, the wife of the man – she was the sister of the professor of organic chemistry at Oslo University, Endre Berner. And she rang her brother and said, ‘We’ve got this student – can he stay with you? He’s got nowhere to stay in Oslo’. ‘Certainly’, said Berner. So I went and found my way with their instructions to Professor Berner’s house. And he, again to cut a long story short, introduced me to Odd Hassel, who was a Nobel Prize-winning – well, he got the Nobel Prize later – worker in electron-diffraction, and it was he that worked out the conformations around a benzene [sic, should be cyclohexane] ring with the chlorobenzenes [sic, should be chlorocyclohexanes], and was able to tell which of the conformations there were, and you will recall that the Nobel Prize was shared between Odd Hassel and Derek Barton at Imperial College, because he was using conformational analysis in structuring his organic syntheses.

So I had this wonderful day in Odd Hassel’s laboratory talking with Bastiansen, his assistant, and seeing how they work, and then getting on to all sorts of other things, so that was a very wonderful day in Bergen [sic]. And then the next day, Hassel was busy, so I went to see the Vigeland exhibition, a sculpture exhibition in Oslo, and then on to Sweden, where I went to Stockholm.