The Very Beginning

I remember my childhood from the age of four, when Mother had to go to hospital. I heard her say that it felt as if a grasshopper had got behind her ear and kept chirping there. It turned out to be no grasshopper at all, but an infection of the middle ear. Mother was taken to hospital and I had to stay in the care of Mamma, my mother's mother.

To me it seemed that I stayed there for a very long time, but it was around Christmas when Mother finally came home from hospital. Father had brought her by horse close to our home and asked whether she could manage the rest of the way herself. He said that he would go and fetch the child home as well.

I remember picking at the buttons of Father's coat with my finger and being full of excitement. All the greater was the joy of seeing Mother, my sister and Grandmother again, and the beautiful Christmas tree Father had brought, decorated with coloured candles and little apples.

A fur blanket was spread on the kitchen floor and we sat on it. Grandmother had baked a large raisin loaf, and a big pan of sausages and oven-baked potatoes was taken from the oven. What more could a small child have wanted? The rooms were warm and cosy, and the whole family was together again.

We had an extraordinarily good grandmother. I still remember her with great warmth in my heart. May a ray of sunshine gently caress her grave mound. But sometimes our dear grandmother fell ill too. Then my sister and I would cry together.

Large ash trees grew beside our home. Every spring cuckoos came there to call. Grandmother would say, 'They have come to call me away.' We children went to chase the cuckoos off, hoping to keep every bad thing away.

Because there was little grazing land for our animals at home, we had to obtain permission from the forestry office to graze them in the state forest. My sister was the real herder of the horned animals. I was more of a little helper tagging along. Once my sister played a trick on me: she drove the cows home and left me alone in the forest with the sheep. I came out onto the road but did not know which direction led home. I shouted as loudly as I could. When she was sent back to fetch me, I lied that I had not been shouting because I was lost, but because I had seen a snake.

Once a neighbour boy, who also grazed his animals there, asked us to watch them for a while because he was hungry, and he ran home. He returned with terrible news: our grandmother was dying and blood was already running from her legs. A large blood vessel in her leg really had burst, and Father stopped the bleeding by tying a strap around it. She was terribly pale, but she recovered all the same.

So the years passed and we too grew older. When I was six, 'the stork brought' a little boy into our family — Evald-Rein.

I had wanted a brother very much and had asked every flock of storks flying overhead to grant my wish. But he certainly gave me plenty to do. My sister Selma was older and was given other chores, while the little boy was left for me to mind.

I remember one early morning when Mother began doing the laundry and, still sleepy, I was told to look after him. As I had not finished sleeping, I dozed off and dropped the baby from my lap. I was terribly frightened and the two of us cried together, both the minder and the child. Mother comforted me, saying there was nothing wrong, he was wrapped in clothes and had not broken.

Our father and mother were very hardworking people. They rose before dawn. Father went to the field to cut the edges of the hay with a scythe so that later the machine could get close. Even now I can almost smell the honey-sweet clover and see in my mind's eye those large, strong haystacks. When Father came in for the mid-morning meal, he had something wonderful for us children: combs from wild bees, full of sweet fresh honey. It was lovely to hear him sharpening the scythes in the early morning — 'cling-clang, cling-clong'. The sky was high and deep blue, swallows twittered around our barn and fed their young. Everything felt so homely and dear.

Our farm was small — ten hectares. Still, we kept a fair number of animals: four cows, two young heifers and a horse with a little foal. Father bought farm implements. Later we were given two additional hectares of meadow in the valley. Father cleared it all and had it ploughed with a large powerful tractor. I jumped on the great overturned clods of earth, loved the smell coming from the tractor and promised that one day I too would learn to become a tractor driver.

Oats were sown on that newly reclaimed land and they grew as tall and strong as reeds. My sister went into the field and only the top of her head could be seen. The grain was taken to the barn, which was filled right up to the rafters.

Then the threshing machine travelled from farm to farm. It worked and hummed until late at night by the light of a carbide lamp. There was so much grain that, to our annoyance, it was carried into the rooms and poured into heaps on the floor before it could be taken to the bins in the granary. It was a beautiful time, our parents were still healthy people in the prime of life.

In general, people seemed cheerful in those days, as though they had no worries at all.

On Saturday evenings people came to visit us too — perhaps twenty from a neighbouring village. The accordion player came first, and soon the dancing began. One of our neighbours was a fairly young widower. One evening his wife had gone to fetch a weaving knife from a visit, a storm raged that night, and when he went looking for her in the morning, he found her dead in a roadside ditch, the weaving knife beside her.

Because the man was lonely at home, he often came to us. In the middle of winter he would arrive barefoot. He took bread and a knife from the table, saying that he wanted to see how well the knife cut, climbed onto the chopping block by the stove, drew up his legs and began eating the bread.

It seemed a little strange to me, but that was how it was. We missed his wife very much. She had been almost like one of our own, someone who came in the evenings to sit and talk through the twilight hours.