Edda Stentiford, Freya’s sister, left Germany at 17 and now lives with her husband and two children in Caversham, a town 35 miles west of London. I spoke to her prior to Freya’s Carpentaria crossing.
How many years are there between you and Freya?
Two and a bit. Two and three quarters, so call it three. We grew up in Kiel, and that’s on the Baltic coast in northern Germany.
How did you and Freya get along as kids?
Oh, it was always as all sisters do. Sometimes we got on very well and other times we’d bash the living daylights out of each other. Quite frankly I was the one who got the shorter end of the stick. She might have been three years younger but she was always three years stronger. She could easily flatten me without trying too hard.
How old was Freya when she started getting that physical strength?
When she was six she was strong enough to knock me over, but I threw jellyfish at her on the beach, which set her running away. Mind you, they were just jelly, no stings attached.
She has always been very physical right from the start when my mother, Anne-Marie, took us to mother-and-toddler gymnastics, then into sports clubs. At one time Freya was the North Germany champion in gymnastics. I think she was only about ten. Our parents always tried to facilitate whatever it was we were trying to do unless it was total mischief.
She was born a big baby. I think she was over ten pounds when she was born and she stayed a big baby ever since. Yes, she certainly brought tears to my mother’s face. Joking aside, she was always strong, you know, not big as in fat. She was very quickly the same height as me. From all the gymnastics she did from an early age, she was physically very strong very early. I was never a weakling, but she always gave me the bigger thrashing than I gave her. On the other hand there were times when we were best of friends, like when I’d eat her egg yolk and she’d eat my egg white. As long as we did it quietly and our parents’ eyes were turned.
Was she also strong-willed?
I think “stubborn” is the word she’d been invented for or the other way around, I’m not quite sure which way you want to turn it. Once she’d set her mind on something she was going to go for it and she would go for it, all out, with no holds barred. It was just the whole attitude, you know. If hard work needed to get done, she would just knuckle down and get it done. She always got the rubbish out of the way and then had fun afterwards. I tried to do it the other way round most of the time.
Did that attitude make her a good student in school?
Oh, yes. She actually jumped a grade. She was always very curious. Our mother was a primary school teacher. She was prepping me a bit to get ready for school and Freya was already listening in and then watching me do my homework, to such an extent that when she got into school she could already read and write. When they saw that they said she might as well go straight up a year. It’s not that she was deliberately setting out to achieve things, it was more or less a byproduct of being naturally curious. She absorbed the reading, writing and arithmetic in passing, just by watching.
What role did your parents play in shaping her character?
Our father was a keen hunter and outdoorsman. A true forestman who made sure the animals had feed in the winter and actually watched the animals to make sure they were healthy. Green ecology as we now would call it, but then it was just straightforward common sense. It was very important to him for us to like the forest. We could run wild, nobody knew where we were for hours on end and it was perfectly safe. He would have liked to have a boy he could pass all these things on to. Things didn’t work out that way and Freya was the one who was more interested in this sort of thing. And she really wanted to please our father, so things really came together there.
Were you parents involved when Freya was doing bodybuilding and beauty pageants?
Not really. That pretty much came off her own bat. I think my parents looked at that with tolerance rather than anything else: “If that’s what you want to do, my dear, then go ahead. We’re not stopping you.” It was something she wanted to do, basically for a lark. She thought it might be a hoot. Then bless her cotton socks she goes and wins it.
She does like to be the best, and who doesn’t. But it’s not for the sake of image, if you can see what I mean. It’s to satisfy her own self. She always climbed the highest mountain or the highest tree depending what age we were. She’s got the focus and the determination to do as well as she can do.