The Bug

The Quiet Thread
Issue No.15 – The Bug. 
Stories from our home at 682.5 metres above sea level

Written by Arne

My mother worked as a Husmorvikar, a profession that no longer exists. She worked all over Gausdal, the district in Norway where I grew up, a huge municipality, and if I remember right there were two Husmorvikarer who split the assignments between them. In the early days my mother rode a moped to work — it must have been rough in winter, starting out early in the morning on badly ploughed roads and in all kinds of weather. I remember she started early and got some work done at home first; we often woke up to the smell of freshly baked bread and the sound of cutlery clattering in the sink in the kitchen. She would probably rather have stayed home, but there were many adults on the farm, so she didn’t need to worry about us — we had great-grandparents and grandparents. So my mother could go to work, because we were never alone, with great-grandmother and grandmother in the house.

We called my mother Humlen (the Bumblebee), for she was always in motion — the moment she sat down, she fell asleep.

Most people today probably have no idea what a Husmorvikar was. So here’s an explanation. Husmorvikar (roughly, “housewife substitute”) was a new profession starting in 1955. When housewives ended up in hospital for one reason or another, the Husmorvikar stepped in and took care of house and children while the mother was at the hospital and the father was at work. That’s how my mother became a stand-in mother for many children in the district, both in Vestre and Østre Gausdal. The Husmorvikar was trained by the municipality and the service was subsidised by the council, so families only paid a small fee — and for some, once that added up, it was free.

The Husmorvikar was more a social worker than a housemaid — they had to study things like practical psychology, civics, sickroom care and diet food, home economics, work efficiency, and infant care through theoretical training. And they required a fair amount of practical experience before they could even take the course. Housecleaning wasn’t part of the job, but mending clothes and cooking were common.

My mother started the five-month course for Husmorvikarer on 30 July 1957 and finished on 19 December. During that time she did practical training at the Central Hospital in Kristiansand, in the south of Norway, the Nursing Home in Kristiansand, the Red Cross clinic for mother and child, looked in on children’s homes and day homes, and finally spent one week at Søgne Agricultural School. She worked there for a while, before she and my father got married and she got the job in Gausdal municipality.

My mother in 1956.

Eventually she got her driver’s licence and life got a bit easier — though she still had to bundle herself up and always ended up looking like the Michelin Man, since the Beetle is famously a car with two winter temperatures: cold, and colder. But she was shielded from snow and wind, and the Beetle got through in all kinds of weather. Sometimes she drove with a sack of flour in the back seat so the car would be heavier and handle the slippery uphill stretches better. The driveway at home could get icy in winter, and then my father would walk out to meet her as she came home from work, standing on the back bumper and holding on to the roof rack.

My Bug was my mother’s third VW Beetle, a 1968 model bought secondhand in 1984, and this one had a bit of luxury to it — she had a petrol heater installed, so it gave off some warmth in winter. But you still had to keep one hand on the wheel while the other scraped ice. So today she’s a summer car — you can’t drive around with ice on the windows any more, a little peephole to see through doesn’t cut it now, you’d lose your licence for that.

Proud owner of a “new” VW Beetle 1300.

When my mother later, in the ’80s, bought a modern car, she gave me the Bug. I got my driver’s licence in 1986 and also had a VW van for a while, but it didn’t last — the exhaust came in through the heater and the car was scrapped. After that it was just the Bug. But there was never any trouble with her — all you needed to know was how to top up oil and petrol, and how to change the fan belt. It was wise to keep some spare fuses in the glovebox in case something stopped working — then you just fitted a new fuse.

I worked as a dairymaid at our sæter (outfarm) at Mjødokka in Gausdal Vestfjell, with Langsua National Park all around us. The area was protected in 2011. One summer I drove milk down from our sæter to the dairy. I had a tow bar and a small trailer and made the trip every other day. Quite a sight, lining up between the big milk lorries to get my churns emptied. This was before mobile phones were common, so if I needed the vet I had to jump in the Bug and drive about half an hour to the café to ring for help.

Fjellros, Stule and Fagmann. Fjellros on the left, grew up to be the lead cow with the bell — a very home-loving, gentle cow.

Once the neighbour who had a cabin at our sæter fell ill, I drove to the café again to ring the doctor. They wanted to send an ambulance, and I had to wait by the café until it arrived, since they didn’t know the road. There was only one road, but I didn’t try to explain, so once they got there things got hectic — there was, after all, a sick woman waiting up at the sæter. The road is narrow and winding, but I know it like the back of my hand. What you had to watch for especially was moose — I knew where the cows were. I led the ambulance up to the sæter, and the Bug could go faster than they could keep up with; on the long straight stretches I’d get well ahead of them, so I had to slow down and wait until I saw them behind me again before setting off once more.

We arrived and the woman was taken to hospital; after a few days she was back, good as new.

Coffee break on a mountain hike with grandmother and my mother in 1986.

Then I moved to Oslo to study, and there was no need for a car any more, so to save money I took the plates off and she ended up in a field down in the woods on our farm back home in Gausdal. She stood there for a good four years and was more or less forgotten. Until one day I went to look for her, and there she was — a bit spotty from all the leaves that had landed on her over the years, and the tyres flat. My father said kids had been playing in the car, the windscreen was cracked, and the front seats had been picked at and weren’t in good shape either. So I had the saplings around the car cleared, pumped up the tyres, put in a new battery, and she started on the third try. I drove her up to the farm and gave her a proper wash, and saw there was still something to work with here.

Later we moved her over to our home in Valdres with big plans, but it took time. She got new glass in the front window and eventually a new engine — one from the next year’s model, a bit stronger than the one she came with. Only after thirteen more years under a tarp did we finally afford to fix her up properly. Luckily there’s a lot available for a VW Beetle, and parts were ordered from both Norway and England. Parts weren’t all that expensive either — it turned out cheaper, for instance, to buy new floor panels and screw them in than to weld the holes in the floor, and it looked better too. She was repainted and got new interior trim, new seats from a used shop, and new seat covers from England.

The Bug freshly painted, and us a few thousand kroner poorer.

As I said, the Bug is now a summer car. After the renovation, we couldn’t leave her under a tarp in winter any longer, so we finally built her a garage.

We’ve had many lovely trips around Norway, and one long journey to Skåne in Sweden. The longest of them went to Lofoten in 2020, where we met our YouTube team and filmed some episodes. That summer we were all being encouraged to holiday in Norway because of covid. We drove the E6 to Steinkjer and then took Route 17 further up to Bodø. You have to take a few ferries on that route, and we were lucky — we heard from other travellers that the big rush of traffic came right behind us, and there could have been ferry queues all along the coast. But the Bug is a small car, and most of the time we got waved on when a ferry looked completely full — we didn’t take up much room compared to the modern cars. That summer, other travellers were waiting two to three hours for a ferry, with the whole country holidaying at home because of covid — but thanks to the Bug, we made it all the way to Lofoten without ever having to wait for one.

Many people have memories tied to the Beetle, and when we drive around in the Bug we always end up in conversation with someone, wherever we park. So this really isn’t a car for the shy — you have to be sociable in this one, and sometimes Carlos struggles with that, since he’s actually the shy one. I grew up in the countryside, so I have no problem with small talk. We’ve often been told by people of my generation that it was their first car, and you always get a story about it. It was, for instance, astonishing how many people you could pack into a Beetle, and many remember that as children you’d sit at least two in the hole behind the back seat, where a hat shelf was supposed to be.

We had a few overnight stays on the way up the coast to Lofoten, since you don’t want to rush a journey like that — you have to take your time, enjoy the view, and stay at some of the lovely hotels along the route. We took the ferry out to the island of Vega, and there the Bug turned stubborn as we tried to set off again the next morning. We weren’t allowed to drive over 40 km/h on the island, and she didn’t like that, so she hopped like a rabbit, and we had to give it full throttle in second gear to keep her from stalling. We got back on the ferry to the mainland and rang a garage — can’t remember where — who told us what they thought we needed. But once we were back on the mainland and could drive at 80 km/h in fourth gear, she came right again — just as we’d suspected, she hadn’t liked crawling along at 40. By the time we reached the garage she was perfectly fine, and they told us that the part they’d assumed she needed couldn’t be got hold of on such short notice. They were rather impressed by how far we’d already come, and by how much further we still had to go. The Bug got told how lovely she was, and we were proud!

Afterwards we were tourists again and looked at Saltstraumen and had prawn sandwiches in Bodø before taking the ferry over to Reine in Lofoten.

From Reine in Lofoten.

We’ve travelled quite a bit around Norway with a lovely group of ladies and their fine cars. On those trips we often stay at the old historic hotels, and when the row of old cars parks in front of such grand buildings, it feels a little special — they seem to belong in surroundings like that.

Here we’ve arrived at Dalen Hotel in Telemark.

Many of the other cars in our group are MGs and Triumphs from the ’50s and ’60s, all water-cooled, and on a warm day climbing a mountain pass they sometimes struggle and have to pull over to cool down. The Bug is air-cooled and never has that problem — so we get to trundle steadily past them, sporty convertibles pulled over at the roadside, while she just keeps going.

My mother said, in her later years, that there was one thing she regretted, and that was all the time she didn’t get to spend with us children, and that she had to make up for it now that we were grown and she was retired. She wanted as much time with us as possible, and to make up some of the time she’d lost with grandchildren, and eventually great-grandchildren, too. I was grateful for the time we did get with my mother, though it wasn’t as much as I’d wished, because by then I had become like her — always on the move, just with longer trips. That’s maybe part of why it became especially important to me to get the Bug running and back on the road. I wish my mother could have come along on drives in her — she would have loved that. Now we take the trips, and do the things she never got the chance to, and it’s become a few fine drives in the old Bug, with my mother along in spirit. We’ve also given her the name Humlen — after my mother.