my generation

The following passage is quickly translated from Bodil Malmsten's memoir, Mitt första liv (2004). [She was born in 1944 and died in 2016. Her parents separated and she was brought up by her grandparents on a rural farm in Jämtland.]

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At one time in my childhood I lived by the slalom slope on Frösön. It was after the village school at Bjärmelund and before Ångermannagatan in Vällingby, I went for the second term in high school to the college in Östersund, Ö H A L.

Every day after school I changed into anorak and ski trousers, put my skis on my shoulders and took the ski lift up to the summit of Frösön hill.

There were two ways of getting down. The slalom slope or the ravine. 

I'd never been to a ski school, never had a slalom course either as part of a group or as an individual. I didn't know that I was able to slalom until I did it. 

Maybe all who are born in the inland areas and mountain tracts of central Norrland are born with this ability, even if not all of them know it and far from all of them make use of it.

My gran on my mother's side, her sister Regina, my grandpa and others of their generation never did.  When they put on a pair of skis it was to go somewhere that hadn't been cleared, because something was to be fetched or left, because someone in distress needed your help. To put on your skis without such an object, to ride up on the ski lift with no other aim than to ski back down again; this wasn't something you did in those days.

In Gran and Grandpa's world there were neither holidays nor hobbies, it was use that governed their activity. Compulsion and duty, necessity. Need. 

You just had to make the best of your circumstances. 

Grandpa did it cheerfully and Gran did it complainingly, but neither would put their skis on without some end in view. 

It was different in the world of my dad's parents.

In that world they played tennis and sailed boats, skated long-distance and went skiing, both downhill and cross-country.

But my generation was the first where everyone did stuff that didn't have a practical object. 

With my generation needlessness and wastefulness came into the world. We had never experienced need ourselves and when the old folk warned us of the consequences of our carelessness and our extravagance we despised their old-fashioned kind of reasoning.

That the world should come to a sticky end because of our carelessness and extravagance; that was all of a piece with Gran's blow-ups and with "The Russians are coming". 

That within a few generations the earth will be threatened with destruction as a consequence of our recklessness: that, by and large, we still pay no heed to.

We didn't believe in God and we weren't dependent on the village community for our survival. With us came washing machines and fridges and, gradually, television.

That Gran became so besotted back then with Arne Weise [TV presenter], that was our fault. If we'd never existed she would still have been sitting by the wood stove and spinning thread. 

To get into discussing how much good got lost and how much bad took its place, that's a big risk. You end up in the nostalgia trap and in the worst sort of company. 

Once you start talking about how great it was in the old days you're right there with the folklorists, the preservationists, and the family history people.

To paint romanticized pictures of how the women in the village washed their mats in the beck every spring, how the mats were beaten with clothes-beaters against the rocks in the water of the purling beck, how the steam from the washtubs rose up to the heavens, how fragrant the soap smelled; this is irresponsible and indefensible. Such pretty pictures are made only by those who have lost contact with reality. 

Someone who doesn't know how it is. Someone who has gone backwards. Someone from my generation or someone from Stockholm. 

Someone who has never known the merciless weight of those wet rag rugs, how the cold water attacked the hands, how much was still in them and how they all had to be hung up in the attic and ironed, how the irons were indeed made of iron and were as heavy as lead.

While the cows were being pastured at the summer crofts, we scoured the cow-shed on our knees. The calf partitions were brought out onto the hill slope, the shit scraped out of the corners, every smallest nook was swept clean and soaped. 

That the young ones were in it too, of that you can be sure, everyone had their own scrubbing brush. 

It was the same at hay-making time, so much hay to be gathered in, barley to be harvested, potatoes set in the earth and afterwards pulled up. 

Everything was necessary and the work was never finished.

Pink plastic gloves to protect your hands, that was something neither gran's nor mum's generation had, and if anyone had rocked up to wash their mats in the beck wearing pink plastic gloves they would have been driven forth from the village community, gloves first.

With my generation came pink plastic gloves, the individual's enjoyment and the shortsighted gratification of desires. And when the individual's enjoyment and the shortsighted gratification of desires take over, no-one can answer for the consequences. 

Even if individualism wasn't discovered by my generation, it was certainly we who cultivated it. 

Without being either upper class or wealthy. 

That it's my generation who today govern the world's future is alarming. Representative democracy is fair enough so long as the representatives of the people represent the people and not merely themselves. 

The social democracy that my grandfather was involved in founding is as far from today's as a surströmming from a truffle, and yet there are no more than two generations between him and the government of today. 

That my skiing down the slalom hill at Frösön in 1955 should be the beginning of the end for Swedish social democracy is drawing overblown conclusions from a single case, but why not?

If my generation had shown a greater sense of responsibility, Swedish society would perhaps have developed a bit more along the lines of my grandfather's model.  

(pp. 156-159)

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Notes

Frösön is a lake island reached by bridge from Östersund, Jämtland's principal town. The nearer parts of Frösön are effectively part of the town. The rest is more countrified, for instance the much visited idyllic summer residence of the composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942). Östersund Airport lies at the far end of the island. 

The Swedish school year has only two terms. The "second term" runs from January to June. 

Gran's blow-ups: mommas huvvaligen. I think this is right, but it's a bit of a guess. Huvva is a slang term meaning both awful and awe-inspiring. (Probably this is explained earlier in the book, but I've forgotten.)

calf partitions:  kättarna. A kätte in a cowshed (ladugård, or lagård) is a wooden partition allowing a separate but shared area for e.g. calves (or sheep, or pigs).

at the summer crofts: i buan. Jämtland dialectal form of bodarna, referring to the local transhumance culture. In summer the cows were taken from the village to an often distant location in the woods or mountains, the fäbod. Here they fed off the lush summer pasture, tended by the younger village girls, who had a kind of working holiday. Apart from watching the cows, they also made and sent back preserved milk products such as cheeses and messmör. Meanwhile, at the home farm, the fields were freed up to grow winter feed as well as vegetables for the family. 

you can be sure: using the idiomatic phrase fattas bara annat ("you bet", "I should jolly well think so"). 

surströmming: fermented herring, a local delicacy with a notoriously strong scent and flavour. Here implying something rough and unrefined, but also genuine and honest.