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| Thor and Elin sit while the kids stand behind them in this photo which I'm guessing is from the mid 1940s. Left to right, standing, are Mom, Brita, Lennart, Sara and Margaretha. |
"In those days, people made up all
kinds of entertainments for themselves. There was no television. We didn’t even
have a regular radio. We didn’t have a radio until after the war. Dad was the
king of telling stories in the evening, but Farfar was the king of ordspråk. Farfar had so many ordspråk; I’m not sure what the best
English translation of that is: sayings? Proverbs? He always had something to
say about every situation. Whenever we had been somewhere, to church or into
Kisa, when we came up the hill and we could first see Kjettestorp, he used to
say, “Bort är bra men hem är bäst.” “Away is good but home is best.” Another
one he used to say when we came home was, “Egen härd är guld värd.” Härd is an old Swedish word for a
fireplace or hearth, and to have a fireplace, you’d have to have a house, and
gold was always a precious metal, so the meaning here would be “Having your own
house is worth gold.” Then there was this saying, “Tala är silver. Tiga är
guld.” “To speak is like silver, but to be quiet is like gold.” He might have
said that one to me quite often because I tended to talk a lot when I was a
kid. He used to say, “Vilken vart du vänder har du endan bak.” “Whichever way
you turn, your backside is behind you.” That’s the one that Bill used to call
“Herman Enders.” He thought the last part of it sounded like a name. When I
would say that around the house, Bill would ask why I was talking about Herman
Enders again. I’m sure I can’t remember all of Farfar’s sayings now but I do
remember the day that I discovered that a lot of Farfar’s sayings came from the
book of Proverbs in the Bible. Some of them he made over a bit or turned
around.
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| Sara Boberg, 1939 |
When we were growing up, there was
no high school in Kisa. Sara and I were the only ones who really wanted to go
to high school, but we would have had to board with a family either in Vimmerby
or in Linköping. That would have cost quite a bit of money and Dad said that he
couldn’t afford to do that for all of us, so then none of us could go. Instead,
we studied through correspondence classes. Sometimes Sara and I took a course.
We registered in one name and we would both study it. Sometimes Margaretha
joined us too. Margaretha and I took
typewriting through a correspondence course. Sara was probably the smartest one
of us all. When we grew up, Lennart used to say, “Just think what would have
happened to the world if Sara had had the chance to go to college!”
During the war years, that was
something else. Women used to form groups, and we knitted for the soldiers in
Finland during the winter war when Russia attacked Finland. There were quite a
few Swedish men who formed a volunteer army and went to fight. We knitted
special gloves that had a hole on the right pointer finger, so they could take
their finger out and feel the trigger on the guns, and then put their finger
back in the glove again. It was wartime but still we had so many funny stories
and funny times. Ingrid i Gräsvederna was real impulsive. Some of the girls put
notes in the gloves they knitted with their name and address. Ingrid didn’t do
just that. She put a note that also said, “If you want to, you can write and
thank me.” Oh she was teased about that forever."
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