Histories from home, part 6 - a quiet reminder

 

The centre of my native village, Hyen, is a hamlet called Straume. The name comes from “straum”, which is one of several words in Norwegian that mean “river” or “flow of water”, and refers to the short but salmon-rich river which flows past the farmstead which for a long time was the only settlement in the hamlet. The river in question is one of two rivers that separate the mainland from a small island, which is called “Straumsholmen”. “Holme” means small island, so the full name can be translated as “the small island by the river. In our time, this small island hosts the sole remaining shop of the village, the church, the school, the care home, the community hall, the gym, a football pitch, and a number of residential houses, including the one built by my paternal grandparents in the late 1940s.

 

At present, the residents of Straumsholmen are primarily middle class. No one on the island keeps animals any longer, and the old farmstead of Straume remains the sole farm in the area. This state of affairs, however, is a relatively recent shift, and the number of modern residential houses can make it difficult to grasp the slightly older history of this hamlet, a history in which wealth was divided among the farmers of Straume and the shopkeepers on the island. At the turn of the nineteenth century, however, a few smaller farmsteads were leased from the wealthy farm, and eventually, over the next few decades, the hamlet of Straume became the home of several families who came to buy the land on which they lived. These families belonged to a type of rural farmers called “husmenn”, literally “housemen”, whose relationship with the landlord could be similar to that of sharecroppers or crofters in the anglophone world. The term is difficult to translate, however, because the social context of the Western Norwegian fjords is rather different in its hierarchies and practices than rural England or Scotland. Moreover, the housemen of the fjords are often referred to as “bygselhusmenn”, with “bygsel” meaning the act of settling through clearing the ground and erecting buildings. These families had some livestock, a small patch of ground, and supplemented their income through work either for the landlord or in other ways. Fodder for the livestock was often collected by helping out at other farms, or a family could be allowed to harvest from part of someone else’s land. 

 

Although my description of this rural class is rather brief and superfluous, the main point is that these new settlements that emerged both on the island and on the mainland from around 1900 onwards were inhabited by people who were often poor, whose social power was often dependent on local village elites, and who lived a much more precarious life than most because they initially did not own the land on which they lived – in short, their livelihood could be taken from them in a heartbeat. 

Straumsholmen, seen from the bottom end of the fjord

Today, the village centre does not contain many traces of this social stratification and the harsh reality of everyday existence that presided over the housemen. However, during daily dogwalks I have come to realise that there is one part of the area which serves as a quiet yet forceful reminder of this aspect of our village’s past. The part in question is the other river which makes Straumsholmen an island. This is a small river which does not always run, of a type which in Norwegian is called “løk” (not to be confused with the word “lauk” which means “onion”, which is commonly also spelled the same way in modern writing). In our dialect, both the river and the surrounding area is called “Løkjen” in our local dialect, meaning simply “the small, trickling river”. This small river is crossed by two bridges, and at the point of the second crossing the river appears mainly like a heap of boulders left from the Ice Age, lying inconveniently at the junction of fresh water and the fjord. A few buildings are located nearby, such as a well-kept boathouse and the local care home.

 

When you stand on the bridge, however, you will see that there are some stones that have been placed there by human effort, and there is a dent in the shore with logs of sallow-wood placed breadthwise across the bottom. Slightly beyond that dent can be seen the foundations of a torn-down house, foundations made from coarsely cut stones, which have probably been collected after one of the many erratic boulders that once littered the island had been blown up. This little corner contains an important clue about the earlier social stratification of the village, and of the plight of the housemen. 

Løkjen

As can be seen in the pictures, the waterway is not very convenient. The pictures are taken on high tide, and it is possible to navigate a rowboat through some of the rocks and into the fjord. When the sea is ebbing, however, it soon becomes difficult to get through, so all passage has to be planned carefully or one is forced to get ashore elsewhere and wait until the tide returns. In this place, however, four families were given the right to keep their boats, one of which was my paternal grandparents.

 

The white boathouse on the left-hand side of the picture is still in use, and it is well-kept, belonging to a family that bought the property from the housemen who first leased it from the main farm. The foundation of rough stone on the other side of the river belongs to my family, and supported the boathouse which my grandfather used, and which my family dismantled in 2023 because it was on the brink of collapsing. One other family kept its boat on that stretch of land – although I do not know exactly where, as the shoreline was altered when the main road was upgraded some decades ago. Another family has the right to store boats on the other side of the boulders behind my grandparents’ boathouse, but no storage facility currently remains.

 

As might be clear from the photographs, this is not a good location for keeping boats, partly because of the lack of general space, and partly because of the difficult passage. Since the river carries so little water, those who are going on the fjord to fish or collect hay from the farms along the fjord are dependent on the movements of tide and ebb. This area was given to the housemen because the owners of the main farm were not interested in using it themselves, as they had access to the fjord elsewhere. Since housemen could not be choosers, they accepted the locations, and over the decades much effort was put into making it a useful and suitable working space. My grandparents’ boathouse was built in the 1950s, and it was still in use – although badly dilapidated – in the early 1990s. The white boathouse remains in use, but that use remains severely hampered by the erratic boulders left in the small river. 

The socioeconomic context in which these places for boat-keeping were established is now part of the ever-receding past. My family, for instance, has long since moved our boat for the fjord to a different place of anchorage, one independent of the tide, and so have most of the other families who once were housemen in the hamlet. This patch of the small river serves nonetheless to remind us – by its retained inaccessibility – of how social hierarchies were once much more severe, and how social class meant something different in the early twentieth century. This is part of my family’s history, and part of the histories of countless families in the western fjords, and we do well in not forgetting it.