Audrey and Gottnar Hedberg
Nostalgia – Oct 5, 1977
A regular feature of the Golden Star by Lila Spencer
Audrey and Gottnar Hedberg live today not far from their childhood homes in the Blaeberry area. Hedberg Creek, which was named Gottnar’s father, is just down the road apiece. Audrey’s parents held land on the other side of the river, and in fact the old farmhouse burned down just last winter.
These two did not really know each other as children, Gottnar was just leaving school about the time (1923) when Audrey, as a year old toddler arrived here with her parents from Victoria. We have included here, photos of her parents, the Torrance’s, taken circa World War one. The fashions of the day.
However, the Moberly and Blaeberry schoolhouses were the setting for the education of both of them. Audrey’s father built a special footbridge for her though, to save her several extra miles getting to school. While having your very own bridge might seem quite an honor Audrey recalls she did not spend much time dawdling there, mulling over her good fortune, the water 30 feet below was swift and menacing and she hurried across the bridge with all speed!
Both Audrey and Gottnar can recall the special problems of growing up in a rural setting years ago. Gottnar as a lad, walked to town and back many times fetching the mail and doing odd errands the family borrowed a team twice a year to go for supplies. He was working like a man around the farm by age 10. Audrey remembers wagon rides to town with warmed bricks at one’s feet on the trip in, and cold so bitter on the trip home that she had to run behind the wagon at times to keep from freezing.
Since Audrey’s father Mr. Torrance had been disabled by gas during his stint in the war, he was not able to work out as many did, and the family’s only sustenance was the farm itself. It was a pretty scant living much of the time, and Audrey for years had no dresses other than the ones her mother made by bleaching and dying and improvising with flower sacks. This handicap caused Audrey a lot of bitter teasing, though many people who were young in the depression can remember the same sort of clothing and how it affected the young ego.
Social life did exist, though. Gottnar remembers, with a self-conscious chuckle, Saturday night dance is at the schoolhouse. Everybody went. When, for quite awhile, the spring in the winder of the school gramophone was broken, an elderly fellow named Lindbergh kept the music going by turning the record with a finger! Now, if that isn’t an unusual way to spend Saturday evenings, we don’t know what is! There were box socials too, those affairs were the district ladies and girls make up box lunches for two, all decorated to look like anything but, and these are auctioned off to the gentleman. Gottnar bought such a lunch once for two whole dollars though one fellow paid 10 to get a lunch of a particular young lady. The lunch was good, the lady was nice, but Gottner not much of a dancer, took a severe shy spell when the dancing started and the lunch partners had to dance with each other, he disappeared! He was very young though, so we’ll hope the unknown lady has forgiven him by now.
Audrey remembers that the school dances were less frequent when she reached her late teens. Instead, there were house parties and sleigh rides. Mom Torrance, it seems, was responsible for part of the success of those sleighing parties, for cocoa afterward with the prospect of her famous macaroons was an allure that brought out more and more young folks to these occasions. The horses, we presume, settled for hay and a warm barn, but co-operated nonetheless.
Audrey who studied secretarial courses by correspondence after school was finished, obtained a job in Ottawa through the department when World War Two started. She spent four years there as a government stenographer, and it was on one of her holidays at home that she and Gottner came to know one another better but even after Audrey was home to stay again, the romance proceeded slowly for both were busy with their own lives helping out their respective parents. Marriage came in 1951 for Audrey and Gottnar. Mrs.Hedberg worked for a time with the public works office in Golden now the forestry Office, riding a motorbike back and forth in good weather. On one of her daily trips, she recalls, she, passed a bus accident near Moberly Corner, and though she did not stop so much blood, I didn’t know what to do she remembers yet the driver scrambling up the slope with injured passenger after injured passenger, lining them up on the roadside like Sardine’s. Traffic was using the Big Bend Highway then which both Gottnar and his father had worked on but this bus apparently was not on a regular route.
Gottnar worked at many things for a living six years on a railway section gang, the Big Bend Highway construction, 12 winters trapping along the Blaeberry River. In 1956 he bought a small Caterpillar and went working in the bush. The years in the logging industry or 6 of them anyway saw the Hedbergs moving about to job sites with a homemade 8 foot by 24 foot trailer. This lifestyle made it pretty difficult to manage things like a garden, and school for daughter Susie now Susie Susie Shap but it did keep the family together and save hundreds of hours of traveling for Gottnar. The family is still together now, with Susie and husband and two grandchildren living only a mile away. Mr. and Mrs. Hedberg find that babysitting leaves little time for boredom!
Mr. and Mrs. Hedberg your memories are indeed worth holding on to. Have the very best in future!