The Long Summer

By Kirsten Thorup

I had got a job at the fruit processing factory which lay halfway between two small towns - the one where I lived and the one where I had gone to school. We had had our exams in April, and it was much too long to go right until August with nothing to do. First and foremost I needed money for clothes. My mother Betty couldn´t understand what I wanted all those clothes for. "You can´t wear more than one dress at a time anyway", she said. But she was very pleased that I was going to learn what it was like to work. Otherwise, she had always impressed on me that I should avoid working at a factory at all costs. As a farmgirl (her family had been farmers right back to before the abolition of serfdom) she saw life within factory walls as a veritable hell - camouflaged slavery - where you never saw the light of day and became afflicted with all kinds of physical and mental ailments.

Opening her eyes wide like a silent film movie-star, she vividly described how a girl moving from the country to the town and becoming a factory worker was almost predestined to end in the gutter. Should she lose her job, she would be quite alone in the big dangerous city, with no other alternative than "woman´s oldest profession". So in her view it was far safer to go into service like she herself had done. Even though this colourful picture of the depravity of the city that threatened innocent young girls from the country was confirmed when I read in Picture Weekly that "seventy per cent of the capital´s prostitutes had grown up in the country", to me her long explanations seemed merely irritating - even malplaced, since I was most probably going to move out of factory circles. Turning a deaf ear, I let her go on talking, feeling as if she were not only my mother, but my great-grandmother. That we were simply not living in the same age. She was over forty when she had had me, and her roots went back to the time before the First World War.

We had become so estranged that our contact chiefly consisted of practical messages about meal-times and what I was to buy at the grocer´s. She didn´t even insist on my helping her with the washing-up; nor did she expect me to do it of my own accord. I came and went like a lodger.

The factory, which was so small that it could scarcely be called a factory, was run by Junior. He had taken it over after his father had joined the board of the local savings-bank and advanced to the position of director after a surprisingly short time. So he left this trifle of a factory to his son in order to be able to devote himself to far more important activities; his newly acquired position of power gave him great influence on local development, which he administered in brotherly harmony with big farmers, wealthy businessmen and parish councillors.

Junior was a spineless individual resembling the German film idol Horst Buchholz and, with his dark curly hair and his brown velvet eyes, he was the hero of every girl´s dreams. Not to mention his long slender fingers with their clean nails. Especially the latter were irresistible. He was very stupid and had left school at fourteen, but with a father in that position it was of little importance. He was twenty-five and managed the factory and us ten women and girls who had been fortunate enough to work. It was typical women´s work, and seasonal. The fruit processing factory delivered fruit and vegetables to the cannery in Odense.

It was asparagus time. And we scraped asparagus as if it were a matter of life and death. We received seven kroner per box. And I could make thirty-five to forty kroner a day. It was at any rate better than picking strawberries at two kroner an hour, which I had done the year before.


Extract from Kirsten Thorup: "The Factory" ( The Long Summer)
From "No Man´s Land", An Anthology of Modern Danish Woman´s Literature, Norvik Press 1987
http://www.uea.ac.uk/eur/norivk_press Translated by Paula Hostrup-Jessen