The family of Búðir.
The sea giveth and the sea taketh away.
Before my parents bought Búðir it consisted of two estates, Hnausar and Búðir. In 1920 my parents Cecil Sigurbjarnarson,born at Setberg by Grundarfjörður and Oddfríður Kristín Runólfsdóttir, born at Fjarðarhorn by Hraunsfjörður, moved to Búðir at the base of Kirkjufell. By this time they had their hearts set on buying to the land and with them also settled my uncle Þorkell Runólfsson and his wife Margrét Gísladóttir. They settled in ahouse on a beautiful spot by the sea, it was not a large house by modern standards covering only 48m2 including a basement. At one point up to 16 people lived in the house including my grandparents Sigurbjörn Helgason and Soffía Jónasdóttir and my mother’s adopted teenager son by the name of Hallgrímur Pétursson Jóhannsson (baptised Hallgrímur Pétursson).
The house was constructed of wood and parts of it insulated with hay, the floor arrangement was such that the entrance was V-shaped with a door to each section and a partition wall running through the middle of the house. My family lived in one section and my uncle´s family in the other, a mere 24m2 for each family. Next to the entrance there was a living room with a kitchen and next to that a small bedroom where my family slept. There was a single stove in the kitchen that provided heat to the whole house but there was no additional heating in the bedroom. One bed was on the long side of the bedroom and another by the short side, my parents slept in a 2m bed with one child and the rest of the children slept in the other 1,5m bed, there was also a crib for the wee one. The cows in the basement gave some additional warmth to the house.
When my relatives Þorkell, Margrét and their children moved to Grundarfjörður in 1928 my father bought a coal oven which he set up in the part of the house where my relatives had lived. It was an enormous oven and almost reached the ceiling, it was lit in the evenings when it was cold outside and any additional fuel that went into it left to burn up during the night. The oven would become red hot from the blasting heat and spread throughout the whole house. My siblings and I were all born at Búðir, Kristín in 1921, Bæring in 1923, Soffanías in 1924, Guðbjartur in 1927 and myself (Páll) in 1932. Þorkell and Margrét raised 5 out of their 6 children at Búðir, they were: Gísli, Fjóla, Runólfur, Lilja and Páll. Some time after 1937 a barn and asheep pen were built, after that my older brothers built a cowshed to keep the cows in the summer and the horses in the winter.
My father had a fishing boat which he shared with another farmer nearby, he went on fishing trips departing either from Búðir or Kvíabryggja. During the spring and summer seasons he rowed the boat in local waters but in the winter time he went fishing elsewhere with better weather conditions. Tragedy struck us on the 20th of February 1933 when my father drowned. The ship he was aboard, the MS Papey, was in collision with the German cargo ship Brigitte Sturm off Engey just outside Reykjavík and so I became fatherless at only one year of age and my mother became a widow with 5 children to support on her own.
After my father died life was very hard and we were very poor. We had around 40-50 sheep, 2 cows and some horses but mount Kirkjufell took it´s toll as a number of sheep fell down the mountain´s steep hills and cliffs each year. Despite this all the meat was eaten although perhaps not as fresh as it could have been after the fallen sheep were found. My older brothers climbed the mountain up to the top fetching eggs, they were eaten fresh at first but after that they were preserved in deep buckets of salt, they then lasted until mid summer when haymaking began. In August when the young seagulls and fulmars came from the mountain my brothers would catch them, again at first the birds were eaten fresh but then salted to preserve them longer. Our mother was not pleased with my brothers catching eider but nevertheless they caught just a few just to provide some food.
I remember one morning when food was scarce that 2 dolphins had drifted to the shore by Gjáin just down from our house, this welcome food delivery lasted us for some considerable time. On my brother Soffanías birthday, the 3rd of May 1935, some 5 dolphins came swimming to the shore and stranded on the rough sea rocks just below our house, they were quite large. Soffanías and Bæring were quick to tie them together by the tails so they wouldn´t escape, when they were tying the dolphins one of them lashed out and hit it's tail on Soffanías’s stomach throwing him backwards a few meters, fortunately he was not badly injured. There was no large knife available at home to cut the whale meat so a scythe was brought from the farm to do the job. Many of our neighbours shared this catch from mother nature, the meat was salted and the fat melted ina large wool boiling pot. Sometime later some 32 pilot whales swam to the shore and became stranded in Búðasandur while some hundreds circled outside. The word immediately spread and people came from farms across the neighbourhood to harvest the whale meat and fat, some farmers sailed on their boats trying to get more whales to strand but without success. My brothers went to the shore and carved our mother´s initials in the pilot whales to indicate my mother´s rightful possession of the catch on her land. Numerous neighbours enjoyed sharing this bounty and some of the meat was also sold.
There was not much time for playing but the work with food supply became our pastime, the main playing area was the shore with all it´s fascinating creatures. Often some peculiar fish were found, we used to catch sole with a homemade harpoon fabricated from a wooden stick with a straightened hook on the end.
In 1936 my two oldest brothers Bæring andSoffanías purchased their first fishing boat weighting 2,5 tons and named it Óðinn (Odin), they were only 12 and 13 years old at the time. Some years later they sold Óðinn and purchased Litli Baldur from Stykkishólmur, it was one ofthe first cargo transport boats in Breiðafjörður and was named Baldur. This fishing boat proved to be very productive, the catch was salted at Búðir and then sold in Stykkishólmur.
A considerable amount of peat was harvested at Búðir although it was rather light and poor quality, sometimes we had to di gdown some 15 feet to extract it. It was very hard work to lift the peat so high up. The peat was cut down and dried and was used for heating the house as well as heating the stove for cooking. It was obvious that in the earlier times there had been a forest because wooden lumps up to 10 inch wide were found beneath the peat.
For lighting we used kerosene oil lamps, a 100 litre barrel of oil was sufficient to last the whole year. As lighting fuel for the lamps in the cowshed we used grout oil.
