Hamn
My longing for horses was enormous when I was a child, and I explored every nook where there might be a horse when I was at the summer cottage in Blekinge. Our cottage was 3 km from the paved road, and when driving on the public gravel road, you had to turn onto an even smaller gravel road and drive about 300 meters to get to the cottage. So when I went on one of my exploration trips, I could either go left or right when I reached the mailbox by the “larger gravel road.”
If I went left, after a few kilometers, I would reach a sawmill that was completely dilapidated. You wouldn’t believe that anyone used it, but the owner, Henry, actually did. Henry seemed odd to me, even though he always greeted kindly when you walked by. Today, I think he was probably shy. He always looked down at the ground, and he had one tooth in his lower jaw that was the only thing you saw when he talked. Henry also had a horse, but I didn’t dare talk to him, and the horse always stood a long way from the road, so I never got to know it well. However, it looked well cared for and fine. After the sawmill, you would reach Henry’s house where he lived with his sister. It was neglected too, but not as badly as the sawmill. You could see that it had once been a nice place and had even been a general store at one time. People said that the entire store was intact when it was sold many years later after the two had passed away, with all the jars and glasses, the counter, and everything.
After that, you would come to a giant hill down into a valley and then an enormous uphill, called Slätten. I never thought it was “flat” there, a bit strange with the name. After you had climbed the long hill, there was a small house with a very nice garden, well-kept and orderly. Further up on a hill was the stable that belonged to it.
I had walked by there several times, but there had never been anyone on the farm when I went by, but one day I got lucky! A little old man who was almost a head shorter than me, even though I wasn’t that old, lively and cheerful with sparkling eyes and a cap. He greeted me, and I told him who I was, and he had already heard about me that I had been with Sven and Signe and loved horses. I pointed to the stable and shyly asked if he had a horse in there, because I had heard a neigh once when I passed by. He did and said, “Come, I’ll show you!”
What awaited me in the stable was something I could never have dreamed of. It was like a fairy tale! In the stall stood a large coal-black North Swedish stallion with a wavy mane almost all the way down to his knees. I had never seen anything so beautiful, it was Hamn. His forelock was so big that you could barely see his head, but you could glimpse bright and curious eyes underneath it.
This stallion turned out to be not only beautiful but also fantastically nice both to drive and ride, and you can probably understand that it wasn’t the last time I visited Bertil. It also became a lifelong friendship with the horses in focus.
In the picture, it’s Bertil Hansson with Hamn in 1970.
