THE LESS THEY KNEW THE BETTER
In 1896, when Anna was seven years old, she started school. Paulina was her teacher in the early years. A sparrow of a woman, Paulina had a thin, wrinkled neck, set off by a starched, oversized collar pinched together with a large silver brooch.
Paulina lived in the schoolhouse attic. On dark winter mornings she scraped the snow off the children’s clogs, put the clogs and the wet socks around the iron stove in the corner, and ordered the children to take their seats. Slates hung from hooks at the side of each desk. The desk lids had carved-out hollows for inkwells and pens. On a stand behind the teacher’s desk was a large map of Sweden.
Children brought their own food. Anna, like some of the other farmers’ children, brought hard-boiled eggs, often pancakes. The crofters’ children ate bread without butter, perhaps with flower sprinkled on top. “There are two persons to whom you must curtsy and take off your caps,” said Paulina. “Carl Börjesson and the vicar.”
Once a week the children filed out into the schoolyard for gymnastics. Paulina, on the porch, shouted commands: “Arms upward stre-e-tch!” and “Left knee up!” and “Head turn right!” Anna, in her loose cotton dress and button boots, must not have shown much enthusiasm; her grades show that she barely passed.
She spent more energy practicing her penmanship. I have some of her writing books. In them, she has written over and over again short sentences such as “Still waters run deep” and “Bad company ruins the young.” I can see how she struggles to stay within the boundaries, not to extend too far above or below the line. Her letters are upright, with only a slight forward tilt. Apparently Paulina was teaching writing the modern way. Some teachers still insisted on the old “leaning” script, even though German doctors had identified it as a possible cause of both myopia and crooked spines.
Anna received top grades in geography and arithmetic. She also scored high in Christian history, which covered, rather summarily, the early persecutions, the Nicene creed, the Spanish inquisition, and Martin Luther’s posting of the theses at Wittenberg. Her knowledge of Christianity in Sweden was more detailed. She was familiar with Ansgar, a French Benedictine monk, who arrived in Sweden to preach the Christian gospel in 829. She could recite the events leading up to the reformation and the establishment of a national Lutheran church in the early 1500s, when the bishops lost their castles, church land was appropriated by the state, and church bells were melted down to defray the debts of the country, most of them brought on by wars.
Anna spent summer vacations at the farm. Her brown hair took on the highlights of the sun and mosquito bites made patterns on her legs which grew so long she wondered if the rest of her could ever keep up.
On lazy afternoons, in the lull between the haying and the grain harvest, her brother Adolf took her fishing. Drifting in a rowboat on Lake Fevren, Adolf would lie on his back, with a fishing line tied around his big toe, twitching it now and then. Anna kept watch at the stern. Alder grew along the water’s edge, below steep banks shaded by oak. Cattle grazed on three small islands with barns as shelter from the wind which could be strong. An osprey might have circled above, sharply outlined against a deep blue sky, dark edges on broad wings, a short, spread-out tail.
Other days she roamed the fields and the woods with Hjalmar. His taste for killing not yet awakened, Hjalmar was more interested in tracking and studying. He could tell where the hare had fed among the still green rye. Fresh bite marks meant that the animal was hiding close by, defenseless, save for its fear and its speed. One early morning, when the cobweb still glimmered wet in the rising sun, they caught a glimpse of a badger on his way back to his sett — peaceful if let alone, ferocious if attacked. Hjalmar also knew where the wood grouse hen lay motionless among tufts of heather and sun-flecked moss. Mottled gray and brown, she was one with her surroundings, so modest compared to the cock, who had seduced her with his shimmering blue and green, his sharp red comb, and his heavy wings drumming the air.
As she grew older, Anna was expected to spend more and more time in Fina’s kitchen, learning to do “women’s work.” Fina herself would stand by the low iron stove, stirring the oatmeal porridge with a large horn spoon, adding salt and sugar, tasting. She made the best oatmeal porridge in the parish, using skim milk rather than water. Other farmers’ wives served margarine instead of butter, or heated syrup on the stove to make it thinner and longer lasting. Fina never stooped to such practices.
Anna, likely, did the washing up. She fetched water from a large tub in the covered porch. Anders filled the tub with water from the well. The pails of water suspended from his yoke were irresistible targets for Hjalmar’s new airgun. The kitchen scraps went to the cats, to Fina’s hens, and to Hjalmar’s dogs. But most, along with the potato peelings and the dishwater, soap and all, were poured down a sluice into a barrel at the bottom of the kitchen steps. Later Anders thickened it with oatmeal and fed it to the pigs.
Anna also helped with the laundry which was done outdoors by the well. Even with the help of the crofters’ wives, it took several days. A sack of wood ashes was placed in the bottom of a large oak tub, on top of ox bones so as not to cover the drainage hole. Men’s shirts and long underwear, supposedly the dirtiest, were placed closest to the ashes. Next followed more clothes, towels, sheets, and tablecloths. The tub was filled with water and the laundry left to soak overnight.
The following day the water, alkaline from the ashes, was drained from the tub and heated in an iron pot. Throughout the day, Anna and the other women would scoop the hot water over the laundry, drain it, reheat it, and scoop again. After yet another night of soaking, the laundry was taken out of the tub and transferred to baskets. Anders harnessed the horse and drove the women and the baskets down to the river. Here the women scrubbed and pounded and twisted and rinsed, while Anders spent the day pacing back and forth, annoyed because he missed his midday nap. “The river was difficult,” says Gulli, once a maid at Torp. “The current was strong, and if you dropped something, you had to run all the way down to the bend to catch it.”
Anna would also be present on those early mornings when the pigs were killed. It was a violent business. Slaughtering masks were not yet in use, and frequent swigs of brännvin accompanied the butcher’s work. After the butcher thrust his knife into the pig’s chest, the animal slowly bled to death, screaming and kicking while the men held it down on the wooden block.
As soon as she could stomach it, Anna’s task was probably to catch the blood in a bucket and stir it to prevent it from clotting. Later it was mixed with oatmeal, salt, and syrup, poured into the intestines, and cooked for four hours, the result of which was a black pudding, whose flavor Gulli still swears by. Liver, kidneys, lungs, and heart were used for sausage. Feet, head, ears were scraped clean and pickled — painstaking work which Gulli says was never quite worth it. The meat was packed in salt. Some was carried out to the old and the sick who lived on Carl Börjesson’s land. The rest was kept in Torp’s cellar, along with sacks of potatoes, barrels of herring, and large glazed pots with eggs and lingonberries.
In Anna’s thirteenth year, Brodin prepared her for her first communion. The ceremony itself marked her official transition from child to adolescent. Dressed in black, she stood in front of the congregation, answering Brodin’s questions.
“What sin does God forbid in the sixth commandment?”
“Whoring.”
“What else is a sin against the sixth commandment, other than the coarse deed itself?”
“Everything that leads up to it.”
“And what leads up to it?”
“Reckless play, indecent speech, indecent gestures.”
“What is reckless play?”
“Dancing.”
“What is indecent speech?”
“Speech that offends one’s modesty.”
“What are indecent gestures?”
“Gestures that cause foul thoughts in oneself or in others.”
The exact nature of the “coarse deed” itself appears to have been left to Anna’s imagination. School had been no help. Her textbook on the human body has chapters on bones and joints, muscles and movement, eating and digestion, the brain and the nervous system. The sense organs are explained in great detail: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Feeling, incidentally, was said to be more developed in women than in men; to compensate, women’s ability to tolerate pain was also said to be greater. But the book makes no mention of genitals, male or female. It is as if they simply do not exist.
Fina was probably not very helpful either. “It would have been sinful to talk to her about it,” says Gulli. “The less the young girls knew the better.”
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Image credit: Oscar Björck (1860-1929), Skagens Museum, Wikimedia Commons