15 years old - I lost my virginity

I was 15

Our two-week spring break was in February, during a real, rather seldom occurring, cold spell. Even Karlshamn, on the coast, recorded – 20 C.

I visited the neighbours of my late father's cottage. This is where I had been a truly happy foster child, living on a real farm around the time of my parent's divorce. I had started grade school there and still had many friends in the area.

One evening we went to a party. A couple of the older boys had cars and we arrived in great style. The party was a great success and all felt good as we were about to leave, long after midnight.

Not so fast, it was – 25 C and no car could be started. There was no taxi to be had in the forest at that hour so we all took off walking in different directions. I warmed my hands inside Solveig's coat, followed her into her parent's kitchen to warm up and, with a little encouragement, proceeded to undress. A large brown dog was watching us. Her parents were sleeping in the room next to the kitchen.

Sparing you the details, all went well on top of the wood storage box next to the warm stove. Continuing home to my foster parents place the world looked all different. I was now a man, the stars were brighter and closer than ever. I was on top of the world. The cold? It was the coldest walk of my young life until then but why care?

Solveig and I never met again. She took ill with Leukemia a few months later and was soon gone. She forever has a place in my heart. I sometimes put a flower on her grave when passing by.

On the good side, my childhood friend and grade school classmate Sonja, also in that party but walking home with a different boy that night, is still very much alive. We talk on the phone now and then and try to meet whenever I am in Sweden.

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My late father's fiancee, Sandra, had a cottage in town so we met quite often. She had talked to a farmer she met on a train and promised my services, 15 year old, as farmhand for the summer.

The farm was located far north of my home. The summer nights never got dark. I worked long hours, building fences, tending to the cows and calves, feeding the chickens, collecting eggs from the hens and just being available. The farm life was invigorating for me, reliving so many experiences from when I was just a little kid at my foster home, also on a farm, many years earlier.

Peugeot standard 1955

The farmer and his wife were very cheap, the farm was not theirs but leased. He drove a special extra inexpensive farm edition French made Peugeot car. It had hammocks for seats, not a smidgen of insulation and in gray matte paint. It was also equipped to run on an extra tank with un-taxed kerosene, very illegal.

The smell of the exhaust was very telling. You just couldn't drive into a city on kerosene, you had to switch over to gasoline first. My farmer boss forgot that one day, we were stopped by the police and he had to go to the local fire station for an inspection.

The mechanic pinched the kerosene supply pipe with a set of pliers. Adjustment completed. - Back to the police station for confirmation. My farmer didn't get a ticket but was muttering all the way home. To put a new pipe to the kerosene tank was a five minute job, then the car smelled as bad as ever.

There was also an old tractor? I got a 15 second instruction session on how to shift gears.

Farmall 1946

"Here is the field, you are to turn the hay with this rake."

It was scary but I got going and didn't break the rake or tip the tractor. It was hot and I suffered from the heat. I took a break to fetch some water from the creek. 

How could I know that the parking brake didn't work? I saw, from the corner of my eye, how the tractor slowly rolled away. Quickly, stop the damned thing. I managed to jump back on in time to stomp on the brake. That ditch was awfully close.

My instructions didn't include how to stop the engine. There was no key but probably a switch somewhere, but where. At lunch time, I left it idling in the field.

Lacking a parking brake, I put logs in front of and behind the large wheels at lunch-time. The idling engine was very noisy so I walked quite far away to enjoy my sun-burned milk and sandwiches in calmer surroundings. Then I saw from a distance how the engine started smoking precipitously. I didn't think much of it. Just burning a bit of oil? Then the smoke, or more correctly, steam, started to subside and I realized what had happened, it had boiled off all the water in the radiator.

I must stop the engine now, but how?

I stepped on the brake, put it in top gear and left out the clutch. This probably broke about all the rules in the book on how to treat an old tractor.

The fan belt was broken and lying on the ground. I was stranded on a field a long way from home. The belt had been held together with a piece of wire. True, there was more wire in the tool box. I mended the fan belt, got water for the radiator from the creek and started again.

I felt rather proud of my mechanical abilities.

It took a couple of days until I added to the story of how I fixed the belt about how I had stopped the engine. The farmer almost hit me on the spot. After that I didn't drive the tractor unsupervised.

In retro-respect, any living farm boy, farm girl, farmer or farmhand can tell about how terribly dangerous a three wheel tractor can be. I was lucky I didn't tip it.

The next time I gathered hay I had a horse. The wasps were everywhere. The horse was thirsty and tired – and on the way home he got stung by several wasps simultaneously. 

The horse panicked and took off. 

He calmed down before anything really bad happened, like meeting a car. I hung on for life and didn't fall off but the rake didn't fare so well, one wheel wasn't round any more. This time the farmer didn't get angry at me. After dinner, he produced a welding torch and a sledge hammer. The wheel was soon made round again.

Sure, I worked far harder than I ever had, but so did everyone else on the farm. The bull was unpredictable but could be led if you held on to his nose ring. This ring had a short piece of wire wound around it. Once, the bull threw his head up, the wire got caught and ripped into my hand. It bled profusely and the farmer's wife put on Iodine, that hurt, and tied my hand and finger tight. I didn't sleep that night. The next day we were spreading fertilizer and I was assigned to off-load the 50 kg sacks. Needless to say, the sore in my hand opened up. The hand had swelled precociously over night and started to bleed again.

Time for another ride in his car, this time to the hospital.

By now I had an infection. The doctor at the hospital gave the farmer hell for not taking me in the day before. I stayed in the ward overnight and returned the next day with a few stitches and a huge bandage on my hand.

I didn't have to lift any heavy bags for the next few days, nor did I have to clean up around the bull. The scars are still visible.

The summer had its real bonuses too. The farmer's daughter, my age, had a multitude of friends. We went to several barn dances together. The life with the girls and their friends had been good and I had very mixed feelings about leaving as the summer drew to an end. 

The meals were carefully metered out to each of us at the table. I did ask for an egg once, but was told that each of us were only allowed one egg per person per day. I had already had mine, she had baked some sponge cake that day. I never saw an egg on the table. I had lost a bit of weight but perhaps gained some muscles too. I weighed 50 kg when I returned home, 110 lbs.

There had been a previous agreement on how much I would be paid. I had very little money when I arrived and that was soon gone. I asked for an advance but was told that they never had any cash in the house.

The day of departure arrived. I had my return ticket for the train fare. We left for the railroad station just after sunrise, before breakfast. When we stepped out of the car, I asked if he was going to pay me now.

“No, I am not going to pay you anything, you have eaten too much and not worked hard enough.”

I stepped on the train for a seven-hour trip with two changes of train without a single penny in my pocket.

I was sooo hungry.

In the middle of the afternoon I sat facing a young lady. She opened her lunch bag and put down three hard bread (Knäckebröd) sandwiches on the little table between us.

She looked at me and said: “You look hungry, would you like to have on of these?”

“Yes, thank you.”

To this day, that is the best sandwich I've had, ever.

I can still feel the movement of the train, the draft from the open window, the taste of the lukewarm water and – feel the crunch as I bit into the hard bread with a slice of cheese on top.

My mother got angry when we met, I was so skinny that my clothes were practically falling off me. Now I know. Hard work and too little food will make you lose weight. No harm had befallen me, but I did get a little suspicious of employers who don't pay.

.................

I faced one more winter of failing school, not doing any home work, and feeling generally rotten in the academic department.

My life was pretty good, otherwise. We had moved to a larger apartment and I had my own room again. I soon built a little laboratory, complete with a low voltage supply for my electronic experiments and a bunsen burner, fed from a gas bottle well hidden under the table.

The gas bottle? It had a broken valve when I “released” it from the school scrap heap. I washed off the bottle, then went to the hardware store for a propane refill. The clerk took pity on my broken valve and replaced it for free.

Crystal radio from kit

I built a radio receiver from a kit, then a tone generator. Those two, and a pair of earphones, allowed me to practice Morse code. I became quite good at transmitting code, but receiving from the radio was much harder.

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Model airplanes? Of course, lots of them, both in balsa and in plastic. The balsa models all flew.

The largest was a soaring plane, over one metre between the wingtips. 

One day the plane got up into an updraft and continued up and up and away. I bicycled after it as a mad man, waiting for it to come down again. It flew away, nowhere to be seen. I got a call late that evening, a farmer had found it on his hay-field, safe and sound with my name and telephone number on the side.

That big plane came to an inglorious ending, It was run over by a train. Yes, one day it landed on the track in front of a train at full speed. I don't know if the engineer saw it or not. I could only pick up the pieces and call it quits. No repair was possible.

My model airplane era was over.

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My sister, soon to be diagnosed with mental illness, could be uncontrollably angry and throw whatever was near at me. She deeply resented me in her life, calling me “the suckling pig”, probably in reference to the fact that I spent time with mother too. I felt more and more like I was in the wrong place.

We lived in an apartment on the property of my grandfather. I helped a lot, shoveling snow in the winter, sweeping the sidewalk, mowing the grass, shoveling the coal and generally doing small chores. The garden was wonderful with berries, apple, plum and pear trees. It was enclosed on all sides and relatively wind free, greatly extending our season.

Lou-Lou, our Cocker-Spaniel, was in heaven. She took to chasing squirrels and birds, and just about everything that moved, usually in futility. She had a bad habit to snap after flies and bees.

One day she got a bee that stung her on the base of the tongue. She almost suffocated as her throat swelled closed. We carried her up to our neighbour, a family doctor.

This all played out within a few short minutes. He took one look at the dog, stuck a tongue extender in her mouth, reached for his medicine cabinet and gave her an antihistamine injection. His quick actions as an impromptu veterinarian saved the life of our dog. Lou-Lou never snapped after flies or bees after that day.

My uncle Sten, my mother's eldest brother, the ex fighter pilot, visited often.

He, by default, became my substitute father, a man to look up at and to emulate. He was a well read and well traveled man. I got many tips from him about life and the rough and tumble world out there.

He introduced me to the civil defense and later to the volunteer army (FBU). It was fun, I got to operate radio sets, telephone exchanges, play with big guns and even shoot some. Also, we regularly had military exercises with the woman's auxiliary, not bad company.

Me in charge of a communications group.

My uncle, living in Karlskrona, usually showed up in a gray painted military vehicle, a Karmann Ghia.

Karmann Ghia 1955 in military gray.

In what? A military sports car? Yes, the Swedish forces had a standing contract with Volkswagen to supply “x” number of vehicles per year. VW had decided to ship some of their sports cars too. I suppose all officers, Captain Rosholm included, quite enjoyed them.

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We were to get a new railroad station in a couple of years. The grounds preparations were in full swing. I made friends with one of the Caterpillar tractor operators. I was soon driving that tractor on my own.

My photograph

That, as so many adventures of mine, ended with a bang, or at least with a squirt.

The operator, a young Finnish man, had a liking for the bottle. One day, under the influence, he took the little Caterpillar D-4 too far. It sunk in the mud and he used the blade to lift it up. It didn't work at first so he jerked the mechanism even harder.

Finally a hydraulic hose split open. He wasn't quick enough in his reactions so the tank emptied and the hydraulic pump seized. The tractor was pulled back to terra firma by an even larger tractor.

He was fired the next day.

I had lost an interesting friend, or at least a friend who had an interesting machine.

................

School was terrible and I was, again, destined for remedial classes at the beginning of next semester.

Spring time ended and summer arrived. I turned 16.

For more about that year, click here:

http://ayoungboysjourney.blogspot.ca/2017/04/growing-up-16-years-old.html

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