This from an article and interview published in Arbeider-Avisa January 26, 1952. I've translated it as it gives a little insight into the life of cotters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Olaf Kringhaug
Note: Olaf Svingen is Olaf's Maternal Grandfather

ONCE THERE WAS A COTTER'S HOME

There are not many left of the older Hommelvikings - aside from Johan Nygaardsvold, who is in a class for himself - that know the people and social conditions in the old days better than Olaf Svingen. His parents were cotters on Svingen under one of the Stav farms between Hommelvik and Malvik and Olaf was the 7th in a large family of 12 children - it would have been 14 had not two died shortly after birth. He has had more than sufficient personal experience of what it meant to belong to a large family in very limited conditions and poverty in the 'good old days' as many still call them. He has also been attentive to the social development and knows well what he speaks of.
It is delightful and interesting to speak with Olaf Svingen whether he recounts his recollections of his childhood and youth on the cotter's plot, his time as a shepherd on farms in Malvik or later from the work place with the many difficulties one had to struggle with before the workers united in labour or political organisations. From this one senses that Svingen is a excellent racaonteur. His presentation is distinctive and therefore refreshing and one listens to him with great pleasure and benefit.
Olaf Svingen is now 74 years old. He quit working at the saw mill when he turned 70. So now he has the time to take a trip to Trondheim now and then, and as rule he pops into the newspaper to have a chat. Recently we had just finished our report on the National Budget a few days ago when Olaf Svingen dropped in. And we had a long, pleasant conversation about many things and especially about living conditions for humble people before and now. We looked at the social allocations and national endeavours and grants to further agriculture, education and much more. We looked at a summary of what had been done since the war to provide a good water supply to small communities in the country and the coastal districts.
In my years as a child and youth all social initiatives were unknown and we had no one in the Parliament or municipalities who would take the time to speak of anything like that. Yes, we had one social relief remedy, the poor box, but with that came curses and degradation instead of mercy. "For example, what can one say about child benefits today?" asks Svingen. It has become a good support but for the large families of the cotters of my childhood, it would have meant much more than than it does nowadays. And just think what the old age homes and old age pensions have meant. If the old age pensions could keep better pace with the rise in the cost of living and be exempted from taxes, it would then be possible to live comfortably as a pensioner.
We spoke about the conditions in Svingen's childhood. We who are a bit up in the years, can remember Olaus and Jørgine Svingen, the parents of the large family on the cotter's plot at Kindsettjønna. Despite the incoceivable toil to provide for their large family, they both reached quite an age. Olaus was well over eighty before he gave up his work stacking lumber at the saw mill.
The Svingen cotter's place could only maintain one cow and a couple of sheep. It occurred that Olaus sometimes had to buy fodder to carry the livestock through the winter. It was incumbent upon him to work 24 days of obligatory work on the main farm - six days in the spring, twelve days at harvest and an extra two days picking potatoes. This work just covered the fees for the cotter's place. Then he had to work at his little patch at home and he could be ordered to work on the farm for 30-40 øre per day. But it was only after the Scot, Lewis Miller, at the end of the 90s, began to use Hommelvik as a lumber transit site, that the father could get hold of a bit of properly paid work.
The Svingen cotter's place was not very big. The residence had only two rooms, a kitchen and a little side room. Here fourteen people had to eat and sleep. And here mother Jørgine had to work and do her household duties.
"We twelve children managed to get through safe and sound," says Olaf Svingen, "but how my father and mother managed to make ends meet, is for me, to this day, an unsolved riddle. I remember that all summer we lived on, more or less, milk and potatoes. After we reached seven years of age, we boys were sent out to farms as shepherds. It was the only course so that the smaller ones could get something to live off. In the winter there was a bit better mode of living. We slaughtered a sheep and my father, who had come from Frosta where in his youth he had fished, could be lucky and get on to the herring fishery on the fjord. Therefore we had as a rule a barrel of salt herring in the winter. And where would a large family get clothes from? I remember the first pair of shoes I got. Shoes with toe caps! What I had on my feet before that isn't worth asking about. Another solution was to go barefoot in the summer and stay inside in the winter.
"Under such conditions, there must have been health problems?" we asked. "In my home we did not have a doctor visit before I was twenty when one of my brothers was in bed with pneumonia. To call a doctor to a cotter's place in those days usually meant that someone was dying. But we twelve children survived and the youngest of the children was 46 when the first of us died."
"This sending children to strangers as herders was probably seen as an inevitable thing for poor people's children in that time?" "For poor people there was no choice, it was the only way out for both parents and children. Myself, I was sent out when I turned seven. First to a small holding in Malvik and shortly after to the Engan farm. I remained there from spring until late fall right until I was to be confirmed. Then, they could not take me, because I would be too expensive. Yes, Engan was a peculiar situation. Two odd unmarried brothers owned and ran the farm. They had a milkmaid and otherwise the only female help was their feebleminded  sister. These people were totally devoid of the ability to look after children. Actually they were, as was said by others in the parish, witless in every respect. They kept their livestock out until dark. My workday began a 7 in the morning and a half hour before, I was awakened to get a little food. My next meal was at twelve, after I had herded the animals into a corral. The two men went to bed after the noon meal but, as they said, you don't need to rest so I had to take on small jobs until the next meal at 2:30. It occurred often in the light summer evenings, I didn't dare to bring the livestock home before 11 o'clock in the evening. Then the cows were milked and I received my third meal. On rainy days I often went to bed soaking wet and when at 6:30 I got up, my clothes were just as wet as when I hanged them up when I went to bed. I was so happy when Christmas came and I go home to my mother, father and siblings at Svingen. In my herding time at Engan, school was held at the Forbord farm for periods of two weeks at a time but I had to be satisfied with only one day evry fourteenth day. Nobody cared whether I went to school at all. It wasn't until my confirmation year in 1892 that I was able to go to school when I came home to prepare myself. In that year I obtained all the education that I would have.
But my purification was not completed with the seven years I served and suffered at the hands of the two eccentrics at Engan. In the following 5 years until I turned nineteen, I had to take work at Tiller as a farm hand and lumber driver. This became a new long period of toil, hardship and misery. The annual pay was 40 kroner to begin with which rose to 80 in the last year. Also I received homespun clothes, a pait of long boots, a pair of shoes and underclothes as well as stockings and mitts."
It was a nineteen year old, rich in experience but poor in money who, in 1897 returned to his home. Olaf Svingen went into the lumber trade and this would be his occupation for the rest of his long working life. In the late 90s, Olav Strøm from the Labourer's Union founded the first union in Hommelvik. It did not last long. Only a few of the younger workers joined and when the leader was persecuted and driven out and since the others were denied work for shoreter or longer periods, the union broke up.
But in 1906 Martin Tranmæl came and managed to form a union which gained support from all the workplaces and survived. It became the root for the subsequent worker's organizations, both trade and political. And Olaf Svingen? He joined in right from the beginning in both the union and in the social democratic society - the forerunner of the local Labour Party. He became one of the Hommelvik workers' foremost and competent representatives. Later he was a member of the municipal council for years and for two periods, the chairman. He also spent years as chairman of the committee for the Co-operative. "Yes," admits Olaf Svingen, I have gone through it all from he ground up and if there was a lack of book learning in my childhood, I learned from my work. Thereby I gained a solid basis upon which to build - and perhaps that was just as good.