2. Signe Lund

Summer days stretch into light nights while winter days are contrastingly dark in the little Norwegian mining village of Sulitjelma where Signe Lund was born.

Signes father Kjell Lund came from Horten on the Oslofjord. He was born into a family of 9 children. His father was a teacher and he himself trained to become an engineer starting work at 17 as a trainee in the copper mining village of Sulitjelma. The village lay by a lake in a secluded valley, far off the beaten track in the shadow of the Sulitelma mountain. It lay 16^o east and 67^o north of the Arctic Circle. To get there at that time you took Hurtigruten, the coastal ferry, to Bodö and drove by horse and sled or buggy to Sulitjelma or Sulis as it was known to those who lived there.

Aagot Anfindsen moved from Bergen with her parents AO and Olava Gurina when her father got a job at the mine. Aagot was the third of 5 Children but her mother died when she was 13 years old. Her father remarried and life was hard growing up in Sulitjelma. Kjell completed his training there while Aagot worked for some years in Berlin as a secretary. She got engaged there to Hans von Bülow but on a return visit to Sulitjelma she fell deeply in love with Kjell and broke off the engagement. Kjell and Aagot had a large family wedding and quickly became a central family in the mining village of Sulitjelma.

In lieu of her mother Aagot turned to the local women when it came to advice on getting pregnant. They advised her to cook a soup of bread and beer which she drank daily. Whether this actually helped or not their first daughter was born on 25^th September 2015. They were over the moon but their daughter cried and cried and they couldn’t understand why. They suspected that something was wrong with Aagots’ breastmilk so they tried cows’ milk. They tried goats’ milk. They tried a homemade pacifier made of fabric dipped in sugar-water. But nothing stopped the crying and the Lunds eventually asked the ‘local’ minister to baptise their daughter because they feared she wouldn’t make it.

When the minister skied in to Sulitjelma they hadn’t decided on a name and wrote some names on pieces of paper and put them into a hat. They guided their daughters’ little hand into the hat and she grabbed a piece of paper. When her parents unfolded the paper they saw that the name she had grabbed was Signe. They didn’t like the name so they put it back into the hat. They repeated the process two more times but after she grabbed the same name three times she was baptised Signe which means blessing.

Signe refused to drink cow’s milk when she was three years old but it took many more years before she learnt that she was actually allergic to lactose, casein and gluten, the main ingredients in the beer soup that her mother was drinking. No wonder Signe cried. Signes’ first sister Anne-Karine was born a year later in Sulitjelma and the girls were very close. Signe nicknamed her Nussa.

Because Kjell was fluent in English he was given the task of assisting a visiting engineer in developing a flotation system that would reduce the toxic substances from the mine being deposited into the local lake. This led him to advance quickly and become a manager at the mine and later a director.  The mine itself was part of the Swedish mining consortium Sulitjelma Gruber Aktieselskap where Kjell was appointed associate director. In 1920 he transferred to Stockholm taking his growing family with him. Kjell found a house in a little village called Älvsjö, now a suburb of Stockholm and the home of Swedens largest exhibition site. At the time it was connected to Stockholm by a small railway but is now part of Stockholms subway system. The house was on the village’s long dirt road with a boardwalk, called Langgången, which ran along the side of the road to avoid people walking in the dirt, particularly when it rained

There were relatively few modern conveniences in those days but the Lunds lived in what could almost be termed luxury. Their house lay in a big garden with a well where you could draw water with a bucket for washing and cooking. Their kitchen boasted a wood stove, an oven and an indoor sink with a hand pump to crank up drinking water. There was an outhouse in the garden known in Swedish as the ’dass’. There were trees all around the dass and their roots formed the drainage system. They also had an dass in the house which was considered an added luxury at that time in Stockholm where most homes shared an outside dass in a common yard. But the dass-cans still had to be emptied and a man with a horse-drawn wagon would bring fresh empty cans when he collected the full ones. When guests came to stay the man with the wagon didn’t come often enough so the cans had to be emptied by Kjell and one of the girls who helped in the home. They would tie wet towels around their heads to cover their noses and carry a can between them which they tipped over into the outside dass. The family then used the dass in the garden untill the man brought fresh cans.
Signes second sister Inger was born in Älvsjö. When the company head office was moved to Gothenburg the Lunds moved for a few years. They eventually moved back to Stockholm and an apartment on Vallhallavägen in 1926 where Signe’s youngest sister was born in 1928. She was named Aagot after her mother but called Lillan for many years.

Vallhallavägen is part of Stockholms center today but was at that time on the outskirts and close to the fields of Djurgården where the sheep grazed on the other side of the road from where they lived. The little flat on Vallahallavägen was crowded and there was barely space to move between the beds in the girls’ room. Aagot had health problems and needed lots of help at times. Hives and burning skin took her to sanitoriums seeking help and so the Lunds invited young girls from friends families in Norway to help in the home. It was a way for them to get out into the world while meeting the acute needs of the growing family. These girls shared a bedoom with Signe and her sisters.

Aagot felt at her best when she was pregnant. She loved her children, she loved their home, she loved the girls who came to help, their friends and entertaining. She was well educated and could have had a career of her own but she chose to stay at home. She felt equal to her husband and it showed in their home and their rich family life.

The Lunds were creative and Kjell and Aagot had good singing voices and took lessons. When Signe and Nussa reached their teens Kjell taught them to sing ‘Gluntarna’ in parts. The songs were a cyclical duet that described the common experiences of a professor and his pupil at Uppsala University. Signe and Nussa learnt the harmonies and Kjell sang the tenor. Each of them sang different words, harmonizing beautifully to end at the same time with immense pride and joy! This is when the song ”Här är gudagott att vara” was introduced to the girls and later become a song that the whole family sang together in harmony for years to come. When they took walks they often sang cyclical songs as they walked along, sometimes making up songs out of their everyday events like a fall or an event.
Kjell also played the saw! Sitting, he placed the handle between his knees with the jagged edge faced towards him. Bending the blade sideways in an S-shape with his left hand he stroked the outer edge of the blade with a violin bow, shaking his knee to achieve a vibralto sound much like a woman singing. He also played any music on the piano without notes.

In those days you didn’t buy ready-made clothes so Berta, a seamstress, was enlisted to alter clothes once or twice a year. Aagot and Berta would unpick the seams of clothes that no longer fit one sister and refashion them for the next in line. Aagot’s clothes became Signe’s, Signe’s clothes became Nussa’s, Nussa’s clothes became Inger’s and Lillan got whatever was left! Aagot was a good seamstress and had excellent taste. She would go to town during the sales and come home with beautiful fabrics. She dressed her girls smartly and sometimes daringly for instance in the not-yet-trendy overalls that the girls lived in all summer. They even made ballgowns. They were all proud of their clothes and happy with what Berta and Aagot created.

Although they lived frugally the Lunds prioritized family events and summer holidays and the Lunds took the 3-day trip to Sulis as often as possible. This involved a trainride to Trondheim to visit Aagot’s sister Thelma, her brother-in-law Tinka Tangen and their 3 daughters. After a few days in Trondheim they took Hurtigruten, the ferry that still connects the western coastal ports of Norway from Bergen up to Kirkenes. They got off at Bodø where they travelled by horse & cart or later by car to Sulitjelma. The car ride from Bodø to Finneid took 3 hours through the mountains followed by boat to Schønnsta, and then by the little local railway past Furulund and on to Sulitjelma. After the Second World War four long tunnels were built connecting Fauske to Sulitjelma that cover nearly 9 kilometers.

As the summer of 1930 approached, Kjell, Signe and Anne-Karine planned a 3-day hike from Mo-i-Rana to meet up with the rest of the family in Sulitjelma. The plan was for Signe who was 15 and Nussa who was 14 to set out from Mo-i-Rana by bike and meet Kjell and their guide at a given spot. They were so proud when they met up at the right time and place! From there they were guided over Norway’s massive glacier Svartisen and made their way up to Sulitjelma. There were of course no mobile phones or even landlines nor were there any stopping places on the way in case of emergency or delays. There are lots of mosquitoes up north in the summertime and Signe remembered how you sometimes could see small dark clouds with feet approaching as the mosquitoes swarmed around a person – unless you were walking on the ice.

The family spoke Norwegian together but all spoke perfect Swedish outside the home. During the difficult years of the depression the shares in Sulitjelma Gruber Aktieselskap dropped in value and were bought up by French shareholders who then held the majority. Kjell spoke German and English but now had to learn French in order to conduct business. There were no crash courses in those days but ever resourceful, Kjell engaged a French lady to come and have dinner with the family regularly and speak French so he could learn the sounds and common phrases. Signe had just started to learn French in school so Kjell would then get Signe to go for walks and help him practice the lessons that he had been assigned for the next appointment. Signe would ask him questions in Norwegian and he responded in French. The whole family were great linguists and where Kjell had previously conducted business in Germany he was soon able to conduct business in France too.

On his business trips to France Kjell would try to buy something nice for Aagot to wear. He was known to go into a store and look for something pretty and find a salesperson who looked about the same size as Aagot to model the dress. Other times he would take the dress and hold it up at the neck so that he could look down into it. Sweeping his eyes around the inside of the dress he assessed the size to see if it would fit – and it always did! Aagot’s creativity in the home and the way she entertained rubbed off on all her girls. This gift of home-making on a shoestring was passed on to them all and even if money was scarce they learnt to create special things out of what they had.

Signe was to become my mother.