All in all our Stenåsen period, the name of the property meaning Stoneridge in English, lasted a total of fourteen years of which as I have already mentioned the most part was as a summer holiday retreat. Our efforts to move there permanently, foundered on a moving to the country back to nature dream crossing paths with reality. Stenåsen had been a smallholding although the man who built the house in 1905 and his family of five children were reliant on his ability to work elsewhere to supplement their income otherwise derived from growing their own food and some livestock. When we bought the place from one of the sons it had been empty for a number of years since the death of the widowed mother. The enormous barn with the integrated stonewalled stables/cowshed and the fading whitewashed walls had obviously not been in use for far longer, representing a once harsh reality of survival and now serving as a backdrop to some sort of back to basics romanticism. Gunilla is from Stockholm, often derogatorily referred to as 08s, the telephone area code for the Stockholm region and although I come from a family of landowners I have little experience or inclination for that matter to grow things. This of course pointed us in other directions than farming for a living. No problem for my wife who had just graduated from teacher´s training college and in the short term not for me either although travelling the world including to an evermore restless Middle East would be something to address in the long run. Winters have been known to subjugate great armies and in this respect we were not much of an opponent. My mother used to say she didn´t trust history books because the people who wrote them hadn´t themselves been there and experienced what they were writing about. Not a good reason for deriding history books of course although in truth hardship and suffering can only be communicated to a certain degree, yet if we are to avoid making the same mistakes in the future an understanding is a pre-requisite. History repeatedly tells us that we listen but often do not understand.
We spent our first summer blissfully taking in all that our new home had to offer. Our six acre smallholding was perched on a ridge between Västanberg and a lake known as Grängen. The house with its seven outhouses and an earth cellar or jordkällare was situated in a clearing surrounded by woodland on three sides and a small field to the South. A jordkällare I would like to think is the 100% climate sustainable forerunner of the refridgerator. Often dug into a small embankment with in our case two consecutive doors and standing height for anyone shorter than 1,70 metres which I am certain would have been ample for the times. The fascinating thing about a jordkällare is that it keeps roughly the same temperature all the year round, cool in the summer and never freezing in the Winter. Halfway between the jordkällare and the house was a well with a bucket and chain hidden by a heavy lid. Thus a 20 metre walk for some water and another 10 metres to the fridge. As there was no running water in the house it will come as no surprise that the only toilet was what the Australians refer to as a dunnee. Ours was situated just beside the stables which makes sense for more reasons than one but it also had a rather quirky feature to it. This wooden dunnee perched above the manure pit had two holes to it, side by side, each with a lid. I´m not sure if this was some sort of one-upmanship on the neighbours or a necessity for a family of seven.
Talking of neighbours the nearest one had to be the beaver in the stream about a hundred yards to the West and the only neighbour in that direction. As you have already gathered Stenåsen in the community of Ekshärad in the county of Värmland is a quiet place but notwithstanding, Albin one of our two neighbours to the South would quite happily have shot our neighbour to the West. No sentimentality toward beavers that build dams and flood fields, that´s for sure. Pointing out that nobody tilled the land here anymore, other than Arvid about a kilometre further to the South thus not affected by Billy Beaver, was met with a look of disdain. Let me add that Albin was really quite a gentle fellow and didn´t own a gun, in fact I am inclined to believe he never had. The second neighbour to the South was Hannah a charming old lady in her 80s who took pride in growing roses. To the East we had Signe who clung on to the last vestiges of farming life by supplying milk to the local dairy. Although her farmhouse could not be seen from the road the large , shining, aluminium cannister on her milkstand opposite ours put our empty one to shame, indeed we were in the middle of a farming community about to enter history. We became the first summer guests and would over the years come to see the locals replaced by other summer occupants from Norway, Holland and Germany. The changing of the times was never so apparent as when we invited our neighbours to the North for some refreshment during our very first Stenåsen Midsummer festivities. Ruth and her sister Evelina lived on their pensions in a little farmhouse approximately a kilometre further upstream. On arrival and shaking hands with Gunilla both women curtsied, showing the respect earlier generations bestowed on education at the same time paying homage to a class system that everyone else there was convinced had long time been banished. It was a touching as well as an embarassing moment to witness.