Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

‘It sounds like Facebook,’ I suggest.

‘It was a little like Facebook. If you had no e-mail or phone and had to put everything on Facebook. The telephones were little box things on the wall with a handle on them, and a button you could press so that people couldn’t hear you, and one farm had a little weight they used to put on the button, but at the next farm their button didn’t work. They didn’t know, so you always knew when she was there because you could hear her breathing heavily, but it was an accepted thing to listen to everyone, and it was a great backward step when the private telephones came in. They felt it.’

There were other ‘backward steps into the future’. Pétur regrets the enormous, cast-iron solid-fuel stove that dominated ‘old Johanna’s’ kitchen. The stove fuelled the boiler and had a tap for hot water as well as being the cooker, and it kept the kitchen warm through the hardest winters when it was too cold to sit anywhere else in the house. Everyone gathered around the stove, and then one of Johanna’s sons sold it, gave her an electric cooker and installed a modern boiler so the family didn’t sit together any more.

Johanna liked to talk. At first, Pétur struggled to follow her, but as the winter passed he understood more, and lingered in the kitchen for stories of her youth in the early twentieth century. She told him about the arrival of rubber boots in rural Iceland, when for the first time it was possible for people who spent their days working outside to keep their feet dry. The old people, she said, didn’t like it, found dry feet uncomfortable and were sure it must be unhealthy. They used to pour water into their wellingtons before they went out. (Along the lines of a wet-suit, I muse; your feet would be wet but not, after a while, cold.) And she remembered the building of a road up the valley, the novelty of being able to walk all the way to the next farm without having to look at her feet. ‘Before the roads were built,’ Pétur says, ‘there were very few places in Iceland where you could look around while you walked, or even run, because before they made big fields to be farmed by big machines you were always going over or around rocks, streams and ditches.’

‘Or lava fields,’ I add.

Lava fields seem impassable until you get used to them, a landscape like a rough sea, arrested in stone. You scramble up a wave of rock, and think you see a way through, and then climb down the other side and are lost again. Sometimes you can pick a path along the troughs of the waves, but rarely for more than a hundred metres and rarely in your intended direction. Something else occurs to me.

‘I thought Icelandic women used to knit while they were walking?’

Pétur lifts his hands, as if any idiot can knit while crossing the lava. ‘Well, you can do that, can’t you? You don’t have to watch your knitting.’

Icelandic knitting usually involves several colours, and therefore several balls of wool at once. I can imagine no way in which even someone who could normally combine knitting and walking could combine Icelandic knitting with crossing a lava field.

‘Was everything still hand-knitted?’ I ask. ‘In the 1960s?’

‘The old woman had her rokkur, her spinning wheel, and this magnificent German steel knitting-machine. But we did a lot of knitting. We’d all sit around and she’d run off the big pieces and we’d knit them together, or sew them together. She’d run off these mittens with two thumbs on them, one on each side, and the idea was that you’d use one side when the other side wore out, but of course you never had any idea which side you were using. But you’d always see people walking around with two thumbs on their hands. And socks, we’d darn socks a lot. The barn was full of old-fashioned things. There was a lot of braided horse-hair rope there, and the old equipment for throwing rope over hay and binding it onto a horse. The horses were still very important, although they weren’t used much for work any more. They were used for herding the sheep. And the old man would sit out there every morning sharpening the saw, and he had a special pair of pliers for angling the teeth. He was brought up in the old days. When he’d finished his porridge, you couldn’t see that the plate needed washing. Every time. And he had flu, we all got flu that winter, and he lay in bed with his bad flu. It was a blizzard outside, but he did all the work, he got up and did the work, and in between he’d lie in bed. And then he’d get up, go out, and go and stand in the snow and throw up, and come in and lie down again. And he’d do this three or four times a day, and he’d always go out to pee and so on.’

‘Were there no toilets?’ I ask, mildly horrified. I remember al fresco peeing from Kathy’s and my camping trip and it was no fun even in summer, without blizzards.

‘They had one. He wouldn’t use it. They built a new house, which was as modern as the one I lived in with my parents in Sussex. But you could find farms all over the place where there was no bathroom, no lavatory, where people went out into the cowshed instead, places where people were living as they had done fifty years earlier, with mud floors and chickens wandering in and out of the kitchen. Even later, in sixty-eight, a friend took me up to the north to visit his parents there, and when we arrived we sat down and had a slap-up Sunday dinner.