Ejna is my host family’s gardener. He has a nice old room in our house and loves sucking on caramel. Due to his delicate frame he can’t actually garden much, but with part of his Danish pension he helps buy the bananas and newspaper once a week.
Most mornings I sit with Ejna at breakfast. With a great toothless effort, I watch fondly as he sucks and swallows a buttered bread roll that has been nicely warmed and cut in half. He slurps his instant coffee and gives me a friendly reassuring nod. Often I reach my hand across to his and ask him if his bread tastes good. He always holds my hand tight and with brightened eyes he laughs and tells me that it does.
My host father’s grandfather first employed Ejna in 1922 at the tender age of 14. This means, if one of my host siblings has a child, our wonderful old gardener will have seen 5 generations (and 4 lots of babies) of the same family. He doesn’t have one of his own - but if that’s not love and relation I don’t know what is.
On his birthday I decided to make him some easy to eat Russian Fudge. I thought this would be perfect considering the Danes don’t have anything quite like it, and he loves the taste of caramel. It was rather difficult to find all the ingredients and I had to use some ominous substitutes. These included a strange syrup that wasn’t golden and an odd smelling powered vanilla essence. It turned out okay, Ejna sucked happily.
Friends and neighbours came around all throughout the day. They all brought baskets of chocolate and bread and alcohol (which they mostly drank themselves at the event). At the end of it all when they finally all left, Ejna was mumbling in an irritated tone and a slight frown swept across his forehead. He told farmor it was all a bit of shit as from his spot at the end of the table he didn’t hear one word the whole bloody time.
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