The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

13 My Own Herra 2009

As a woman I was terribly lonely in my generation. While my peers sat in secondary school, I had a whole world war to contend with. I graduated from that war at fifteen, but with the life experience of a thirty-year-old woman. I was twenty by 1949 and, according to the spirit of the times, was expected to apply to finishing school in Denmark and pursue marriage plans back in Iceland, a well-bred girl from the president’s family grooming her hair for balls in the Independence Party headquarters. An up-and-coming politician would have invited me, and together we would have ended up in the presidential residence at Bessastadir (he would have won with me at his side) surrounded by children and reporters. Instead I threw myself into yet more adventures, dancing on ship decks south of the Equator, never waiting for men to ask me out but going after them myself.

To compound it all, back in those days Iceland lagged a good sixteen years behind the trends of the day, so I always found it hard to cope with the small-town life of Reykjavík. I was a war child, but not in the sense that I’d been reared in the war: the war had reared me. I was a woman of the world before I ever became a woman. I was a party girl and drank all the men under the table. I had become a practising feminist before the word had been so much as printed in an Icelandic newspaper. I had been practising ‘free love’ years before the term was invented. And, of course, I had kissed John Lennon long before ‘Beatlemania’ struck our frosty shores.

And then I was expected to behave like a ‘normal person.’

I was independent, had few scruples, and didn’t let anything hold me back – dogma, men or gossip. I travelled around and took casual jobs, looked after my own interests, had children and lost one, but didn’t let the other ones tie me down, took them with me or left them behind, just kept moving and refused to allow myself to be drawn into marriage and to be bored to death, although that was the toughest part, of course. Long before the hippie girls appeared on the scene and began to hand their children over to their mothers so they could continue their debauched lives, I had devised the concept of the long-distance mother. ‘You can’t let the fruit of your previous sex life spoil the next,’ one of the heroines of the sixties once said, or was that me? Of course, you could say I led a kind of hippie existence, but I made it up all by myself, without following the latest trends from Paris.

I suspect the uninhibited lifestyle I enjoyed has become more commonplace among Icelandic women only in recent years. I recently came across an article about Iceland in a Spanish magazine in which young Ice Ladies praised the flexibility of life in a small country where anyone can have children with anyone, since everyone already has multiple spouses, children and foster children. If the article is to be believed, Iceland is one big orgy of divorces and relationships in which children are able to choose their homes and families for themselves.

I’m still waiting for a call from these modern women and for the bouquet of flowers they’ll present me with for being their pioneer, at a short ceremony here in the garage. Just so long as they don’t bring our first woman president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, star of my generation, with them. She’s always made me feel like shit.