Århus 1961 to 1973

In the summer of 1961, my mother, sister (born 1950) and I moved from the Danish big city of Copenhagen to Århus in Jutland. It was half a day’s travel away, and after that we simply didn’t visit the capital or the island of Zealand that much. My Dad had split a couple of years before that and moved to Greenland about the same time with his new, Norwegian wife. I was eight at the time and started school in Århus Friskole after the summer break, i.e. in 3rd grade. 

It was a complete transformation for my sister and me; we had never lived in the country-side before. The space and the nature surrounding us on all sides was mind boggling. Instead of taking the bus to school as I was used to, I started riding my bicycle; I never took buses much after that until much later in 1980 when I moved to Singapore. The distance to my new school was 5.3 km according to Google Maps, I remember it as much longer; it seemed so at the time! Even then, that was a long way to bicycle for a small kid; luckily the vehicular traffic was light in those years, and there were designated bicycle tracks much of the way. During the dark winter there was often ice on the road or snow to plow through; we didn’t use batteries at the time, the lights on my bicycle were operated by a dynamo running off the front tire, it often didn’t work very well, and sometimes I would have a flat tire that I also had to fix.

While my mother worked at Dalgården, a home for wayward pre-teens, she had to spend 10 months back in Copenhagen during the school year September 1962 to June 1963 to complete her degree in early childhood education; that was part of her employment terms. During that period, she put my sister in care with a close friend, Bente Storm, and me with another friend Birgit Begtrup. Birgit was an amazing lady, loving but firm, and I liked her a lot. But she was also very busy; she was dean of the college where my mother started teaching later in 1964, and for most of the day I was on my own, together with three of Birgit’s own children, her husband had passed away very young. I found my own way to school and back, and Martin and I (Birgit’s son, a bit older than me) would take care of ourselves till Birgit turned up after work and made dinner for us. I learned to be on my own and independent from an early age, I was only 10 then. That particular winter was very cold, and Martin and I would walk many hundred meters out onto the sea ice that started covering the Bay of Århus. We would stand there while a huge hovercraft ferry thundered past us in a cloud of snow; it could ‘sail’ across the ice as well as the water. Like so many other inventions from the 1960s such as robots and flying cars, hovercrafts never really caught on. Today I find it odd that the grown-ups allowed us kids to walk alone and un-supervised way out onto the unstable and treacherous sea ice. Some weekends during that winter, my sister and I would travel on our own by train and ferry to Copenhagen to see our mother. Although I was happy in Birgit’s household, I was also somewhat relieved when that year was over and we all lived together as a family again.    

In the My mother tab I mention my mother’s work at Dalgården where we stayed, she had that job for three years till 1964 when we moved again, to Tranbjerg; like Dalgården, this was south of Århus, in fact a bit further out of town, I now had 6.9 km to cycle to school each way according the Google, but I was also older and stronger of course, and I started to enjoy the workout and the fresh air this daily exercise gave me. My mother never moved again after that, she stayed in that small rented terraced house for 48 years till she died in 2012. I stayed at Gartnervænget till 1971 when I moved to a university hostel.   

In Denmark, the educational system at the time was such that you did seven years of compulsory education in a primary (elementary) school. After that you could leave school and work, but most kids continued in middle school which was three years for a diploma, two years for express stream directly into high school, which was another three years. You were then ready for college. Today there is no middle school in Denmark, only primary school 1-9 plus another optional year = 10, after which you are free. Or you can do high school 9 + 3 = 12. In Singapore now, the kids cook for six years in primary school, then four years in middle school and two years in Junior College. What do you know: Also 12 years!? Educators and MOEs everywhere seem to think alike.  

When I started in middle school during the late summer of 1966 I was 13 of course; and the school then, which two years later in 1968 also became my high school, was just down the road from my home at Garnervænget, Tranbjerg: Just 2.8 km – or about 10+ minutes - each way on my bicycle – life became a breeze! If you are now worried that I didn’t get enough exercise during my teenage years don’t be – by then I had started getting seriously interested in bird photography and all my weekends and holidays I would spend bicycling and hiking to remote locations to find good habitat and birds for picture taking. I cycled to Grenå and back once to spend a day at this bird migratory hot-spot north-east of Århus, from Tranbjerg that is about 85 km each way. That was a bit far and I didn’t do that again, but I often cycled down to Norsminde Fjord which was only 2 x 15 km from Tranbjerg. When I got older I had a tiny-engine moped for a while, but it was not much faster than a bicycle and kept breaking down; I gave it up and went back to cycling. 

The day of my 18th birthday was a Friday (18 Sep 1970), so school finished early and that afternoon I did two things: I passed my driver's test and got my licence. That was possible because I had passed the theoretical test before and taken some 9-10 practical lessons while I was still 17. Things were just easier back then, is it any wonder that 'us elderly' always pine for those Good Ol' Days? After that, passing my test, I cycled out to Holme Kirke, our district church, with my birth certificate and opted out of the Danish state church. You have to be of age (= 18) to do that. I didn't believe, I never have and I probably never will. The kind old pastor tried to talk me out of this 'serious' step, but he was wasting his time and reluctantly had to accept that he just lost one soul in his flock! Apart from the principal aspects of this, the move also saved me some 0.7% p.a. of my income in church taxes!   

I don’t recall ever studying much doing my teens; our curriculum wasn’t that hard and there was little homework. Looking ahead, there were plenty of jobs to be had out there; we kids never worried about our future. Of course, in those days the labour market was very tight; we didn’t have to worry about competition from Eastern Europe, which was under occupation by the Soviets, or from the Indian Subcontinent, which were going from famine to unrest in those years; China was simply just one big prison camp that we also didn’t have to worry about. For us locals in the West, the World seemed endless with opportunities. If you got higher than C in high school you had been wasting your time, so the saying was at the time, you should have had more fun, you studied too hard, C was plenty good to get any degree you wanted later or become anything you dreamed of in life, who needs straight As? I am not kidding, that was the sentiment in Scandinavia in the 1960s! 

Well, things started to change in the 1970s. I graduated from high school in 1971 with an average result and could have studied biology I suppose, but I chose Economics because I felt that economics, dealing with scarcity and allocation of limited resources in the most optimal manner, would be the essence of understanding anything else that was going on in society. I also felt that economists would always be in demand and make decent money, I could always go back to photographing birds and hiking in the woods once I got wealthy and financially free!? That was my great plan, but the studies at university were a struggle for me. I had terrible study ethics from high school, in fact, I didn’t have any at all, and this was tough stuff. I had courses in macro economics, micro economics, math, statistics and accountancy. The material was dry as a bone, the lectures in huge auditoriums excessively boring. After two years at Århus University – and an exhilarating two-month trip to Iceland (see Iceland 1973) – I decided to take the famous gap year. Of course, I never went back to school full-time after that! 

Much later, in the late 1990s I was back in Århus again. More about that later. Anyway, my wife at the time and I were running a small business, and we had an accountant consultant to help us audit the books, prepare our company tax returns etc. He and his wife operated out of a small unit on the third floor of an old apartment block at the outskirts of town, their office was a tiny reception room right inside the main entrance. I got talking to the guy, he was about my age: mid-40s. He was an economics graduate from Århus University! We were hundreds of students in that programme, and although I didn’t remember him specifically, we started the exact same year, 1971. Except, I dropped out and he went on to graduate some five years later. After that, the economist never moved more than 10 km it seemed; he definitely never got that big two-storey villa down at the beach where the rich people in Århus live. I am sure he had a good life in his own way, who am I to judge. But as I drove away from our meeting that day, it did cross my mind: I am glad that life wasn’t mine. Dropping out of college in 1973 was the best thing I ever did!