New Land, New Lives. Janet Elaine Guthrie
Eve, we had just for ourself. We had spareribs. In different parts of the country, they used different kind of food. In cities, seems like it was altogether different than out in the country. When you live in town, you have to buy it in the stores.
My mother had the most children, and my father’s relatives always chose to come to us for Christmas Day. How they took interest in us children! We got handmade gifts, little fur collars and little mittens, and stuff like that. And we sang around the Christmas tree, and they all took part in it. That’s when we had our big dinner. We had reindeer roast. Mother ran strips of pork, they call it spekk, into the meat, because there’s no fat in there, see. There they don’t roast meat in the oven, because it shrinks too much, and they don’t fry meat. They roast it in a big pot. You brown it and then you cook it in milk or cream; and that gravy was, I believe, the best thing. Then we had tyttebær [lingonberries] and multekrem [cloudberry cream].
Then, of course, there was Christmas parties afterwards. I counted ten we went to one year. I remember I went to Glassmaker Petersen where they had a ballroom and we even had [dance] cards that we carried. At Christmas, we got to put fine little patent leather shoes on and we felt like we didn’t touch the ground. We felt so light, because we always had to have heavy shoes on. Oh, it was so good to dress up for Christmas!
When I took care of that little girl, they gave me enough money so I could take dancing lessons. The boys sat in one end of the room and the girls in the other. And the boys came and bowed like in the military and the girls curtsied. You had your card where they wrote who they want to dance with. This was ballroom dancing and I enjoyed that.
My mother went to church, but she didn’t think it was fair that we should sit in church, because it was a little deep to understand. But we children had to go to Sunday School every Sunday. When we left for Sunday School, my mother said, “Now, when you come back, I want you to tell me what you learned today.” I remember I did go to church a couple of times with my sister and we got so tired we started to get hysterical. We couldn’t grasp it, when he stood up there and used all those big words. Now, in Sunday School, they made it more like a story. And we had religion in school—catechism, explanation, Bible history. We said our prayer and sang our hymn when we entered the schoolroom. At home, never had a meal without saying the Lord’s Prayer or table prayer. We took turns. We had really a good foundation that could last us through life.
I think my mother was a very smart woman in many things, because she had six children and we never have a mark on our name. She had so many good ways about her. When she was fun, she was fun; but when she was strict, she was strict. When she called us in at night for dinner, she just called us once. And we were supposed to be in hearing reach. She would not call us again. I remember once, I was going to have herring for dinner. My mother filleted it and put it on the plate with potatoes and soup. I didn’t like it and I tried to get away from it. And when I came in at night and wanted something to eat, there’s the dinner. There was no way, ever, that you can get out of doing what she told you. She never had to spank us or use her loud voice. There was no loud voice in that family, but, boy, when she said something, we went by her word. She never changed “yes,” when she said “yes” and never changed “no.” The children knew what “no” meant. When you get out in the world, you have to accept “no.”
When you live in an apartment, there’s a lot of complaints about children being noisy; but we had the best reputation because we put slippers on when we came in, so there was no noise. Then we had a big dining-room table where we sat around and drew and played games, and there was a nice stove kept us warm. It was a great life. I’m glad I lived in those days.
On Thursdays, we got to choose our dessert and it was always gooseberry pudding. That was my favorite. I don’t know how many varieties they have. They have big huge red ones, green ones, yellow ones, little ones, big ones, and sweet as honey. I’ve never seen any of them like that here. And there was black currants and red currants and blueberries and tyttebær and something we call krekling [crowberry]. The bushes look like heather; they get berries on them, very little, about the size of huckleberries here, but they weren’t much good for anything but for us kids to eat.
In the laundry room there was a big round stove. We used to have a big iron pot in that stove, where they used to boil the clothes. Then you took the pot off and it was a big plate there where they baked potato cakes and lefse.* We hired a woman to come and sit down there and make big piles of it. Otherwise we had to buy most things like that.
Up in Nordland, the north, they believe in trolls. They used to tell us, the horses come trotting down the road and once of a sudden they’ll stop. And there was nothing there. They said, it was a troll there. They [horses] didn’t dare step over it. This is a true story: My uncle’s farm had fifty cows and in one little booth you couldn’t keep a cow. She stood and stamped all day long and all night long. She kicked and she stamped and you had to take her out of there. And they said, those little men, we call them småkaller, that’s their home and nobody gets in there. They couldn’t keep a cow in there. That was the truth.
I remember there was a big party at my uncle’s farm and all the guests was down in the barn looking at the cows. I was just a little girl then. My father had just bought me a beautiful little linen sailor suit from England. So I came out of that big barn. Right in the corner was some geese lying there with little babies and there was a big gosling. I ran and he chased me. He knocked me down in the puddle, and he hit me with his wings, and he pulled my hairs out. I thought I was going to have no more hair left, till they came out and caught me and took me in.
During the war [WWI], we all had to pitch in and help. We children was getting pretty big and my father was out at sea. We really had to scrounge around to get food for six. We used egg flours for eggs, when we made pancakes and stuff. We had to sit for hours and hours to get just a kilo of margarine. And we had whale fat for butter. It kinda stuck to the roof of your mouth when you ate it, but that was the only thing you can get. And cocoa shells for cocoa, for chocolate in the mornings. We ate a lot of whale meat. We had coupons—rationing. We just could get so much, and you had to stretch it as far as you could. I wouldn’t say we suffered too much.†
Mother rented out two rooms, the front room and another little room there that we didn’t need, to a student. He was a handsome man, very well dressed. He was just like one of the family. He played piano. We had a piano in the dining room.
My father was over in New York waiting for a new boat, that was in 1918. And a captain got sick, so he asked my father if, while he was waiting, he couldn’t take his boat down to Australia. My father said he would. And the boat disappeared completely. There wasn’t a sliver or a man to live to tell what happened to that boat.
That year was a very hard year, because my sister died, too. Spanish flu just went all over the country. Families died out.* We were lucky, because my mother used common sense. My sister died, because she was kind of weak anyway. And then this student that lived with us, he died. My mother said she could have saved him, if they wouldn’t have taken him outside and taken him to the hospital and thrown him in the bath. If he could have lain here, she said, in the bed, he would have still lived.
Another thing when we were children was tuberculosis. Whole families around us died. We were not allowed to go in the houses there. My mother was very strict, that we didn’t go in, no matter how clean the houses were. It was sad, but there was nothing you can do. They called it “galloping”; you just went to bed and you never got up. They were so sure there was no hope. That’s why my mother was terribly strict that we were outside. Why, when I was fifteen, I still was out in the street playing with the kids, running around, because she wouldn’t let us stay in the house. My father believed that we should raise our chest so we could have room for our lungs and heart. My, he used to hit us in the back, “Come on, straighten up.” He was so proud to have a big chest cavity.
I was a skier. In the wintertime, after school, I walked [on skis] seven miles up the mountain to Fjellseter. I got up there and then we sat around the fire. Oh, it was beautiful! And the same night, we made it down all by foot, over lakes and all. I did that every winter till the last snow at Easter. I was on top