Did I tell you about Stig i
Sågstugan? One time he was trying to learn a hymn. Gunnar Brolin believed in
learning things by heart and part of our school work, every so often, was
learning hymns. Stig had a hard time learning things, remembering them. He
asked me once how many times I read a hymn before I knew it by heart. I don't
remember my answer and I don't remember how many
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| Gunnar Brolin |
times he had to read it but it
was a lot more. One time, Stig got to school first and he walked all around the
playground reciting a hymn over and over to himself, trying to have it
memorized before class started. When the teacher came out to call us into
class, he stepped out and rang a big handheld bell. Well, as we all got into
the classroom, first thing, Gunnar Brolin called Stig up to his desk and began
to bawl him out. He said there was to be no blaspheming on the playground and
Stig had better cut it out. It turned out that the hymn Stig had been trying to
learn was "Jag går mott himlen var jag går" (I go towards heaven
wherever I go). The teacher hadn't heard
him very well and thought he was saying "Gud i himlen" (God in
heaven) and thought he was blaspheming. I stood up and told the teacher that he
was wrong, that Stig was just trying to learn a hymn and it was hard for him to
do. Then Gunnar Brolin said that was enough of that and we should all sit down
and be quiet.
Another time Margaretha and I were
sent on an errand somewhere before school and this meant we got to take the
bikes. We went down the road by Gräsvederna which was more bike-friendly than
the other road and I suppose our errand was over in that direction. Well, when
we came back heading toward
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| Sundsäs, 1938 |
school, we caught up with two kids who were
walking, a boy and a girl who we had never seen before. We stopped and said Hi
and wondered where they were going. They said they were going to Kjettestorp
school and they didn't know where it was and they didn't know when school
started, so they didn't know if they were late. Their names were Arne and Alyce
Strömberg. They had just moved to Sundsnäs and they had quite a ways to walk to
get to school. Margaretha and I got off our bikes and told them that we were
heading to the same school so we walked with them, but this meant that we came
a bit late. When we came in the door, the teacher started to bawl us out for
being late. He didn't pay any attention to the new kids coming in behind us.
When he calmed down a little bit, I told him how it was, that we brought these
new kids here, so then he forgot about us anyway and started to ask them their
names and age and so forth.
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| Ingrid Jakobsson from Boås |
I don't think I ever told you about
Ingrid i Boås. Years ago, these kids who lived out on these little torps and
farms that were far away from any others, they didn't get out much and they
didn't see much of the world. Ingrid was the only child in the family, and she
was very protected. I think she was one year younger than Brita. When she
started school, her father Otto and her mother Cecilia came to our house and
asked if Brita would look after Ingrid in school because Ingrid didn't know how
to go to the bathroom by herself. It turned out that Ingrid had this old
fashioned underwear that we hadn't had for a while -- we already had elastic in
our's -- but Ingrid's underwear were buttoned onto something called a livsticke, like a strap to hold them up.
When she needed to go, there was a flap on the back, but it buttoned up and she
couldn't reach to undo the buttons by herself. After they went home, Mother
gave us a lecture: as much as we knew it, we had better be good to Ingrid. She
did not want to hear that we had ever made fun of her or that we had been
unkind to Ingrid in any way and if we heard other kids making fun of her, we
were to stand up for her. Well, I guess Brita must've done a good job taking
care of Ingrid even though she was only a year older, because when Brita
graduated from Kjettestorp school, they gave her a gift for being kind to
Ingrid. It was a glass tray with a beautiful floral pattern and it had a
little, like a fence around it that was made out of silver. When Ingrid
graduated, Sara and I were each given a small crystal glass dish sitting on a
silver tray. I still have my dish and I'm sure Sara does too.
There’s two girls I don’t think
I’ve said anything about yet. They lived in a big farm in Misterfall. They were
named Olga and Alice. Alice was spelled in the English spelling which was an
unusual thing. In Swedish, the English name Alice is spelled Allis and it's
usually pronounced "All-is" with a very quiet L. We had a teacher
once tell her that her name should be pronounced “AL-is” in the English way because
that's how it was spelled, but the little girl said, “No, my mother has said it
is Al-E-say.” I think this shows the influence that English was starting to
have on Sweden at this point. Many people were already heading off to America.
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