Göran Sonnevi: The Ocean

I've just discovered that the celebrated Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi lives in the same town, Järfälla, as my sister. (It's on the edge of Stockholm, at the eastern end of Lake Mälaren.) In honour of that discovery, I'm dipping into Oceanen, Sonnevi's enormous poem of 2005. I thought: let's open the book at random (p. 40 of 419), and begin to translate....



ORMÖGA; SECOND POEM

Here's Ormöga    The grey clouds drift over
the level heathland    the sea horizon grey
with a glowing streak just above the land
The cuckoo calls  The snipe are flying round the fen
The early marsh orchids' dark little torches glow    The grass is
greygreenbrown, changing    All round are precipices
There's one next to the bed I sleep in    Steeply
falling night    We float over the darkness, as over
the universe, in its abstraction    In the morning we're to-
gether    We listen to music    I'm listening to nothingness too

In the distance I can see the fishing huts,  the chapel ruins
Among them stands the Celtic cross, of lime-
stone, which was itself the crucified with
outstretched arms    The hands    The head    The foot
grown over with grey and yellow lichen    Now rain
sweeps across the landscape    The hen harrier flew
from the grove towards the sea    I shall not have any defence
I'm in the streaming darkness also the pale night

I've set up as a sign
the feather I picked up by the eastern sea
My father and my mother are in the western sea, which I
also touched, with my hands    Here are the other dead, the other
living    We touch each other's distorted faces
I feel their geometry    I see the swallows' flight-curves
here too, quick switches in direction, a constant adjustment
The hen harrier has its geometry, in its flight    That's
what we touch, far away, in the distance
The feather is grey within, then brown, then nearly white
Also down at the root there's white, fluffy
The swallows are still building their nest, on the outside the clay is moist
Ay! Ay! That dark face rests behind all this

The landscape here moves in a seemingly
older economy    Same dry-stone walls, same fields
as from another time    The birds    The orchids    Yesterday
we went to the sea; within the pine grove grew
a very large specimen of Military Orchid,
Orchis militaris, pale lilac, a big spike, thick stem
Down by the sea I went to the place with Blood Orchid,
flecked leaves, boldly marked flower-lip, beside
the Early Marsh Orchid, a deeper lilac    The black-tailed godwit flew up
The cows, young heifers, formed themselves into a line in the distance
Farming going on    The smell of liquid manure in the rain, under
the mists    On the sea cargo boats go by    On the thrift's
stem glowed the lackey moth's larvae in the evening sun, with red-brown
hairs, above the light blue and brown stripes along the body
We are in a network of dependencies    Who is it that's murdered?
Who do I murder?    Everything depends on the way we touch each other

In Ormöga the blind man lives, alone, since his mother died
a couple of years back    When I pick up the post from him
he turns his ear's glance towards me while we talk
In his face is a kind of peace    The garden runs ever more wild
We're renting here at one of his sisters', in one of the houses
facing the sea    Most of them are leased out now    I told her
about Gunnar and Verner in Färgaryd, how they kept a calf
This talk touched my childhood    I'm getting ever more childlike now
Today is the last day of the year since my mother's death    We'll be lighting a candle

Everyone's asleep    Everyone is as if they were awake
in the first moment of dawn    The landscape entirely still
My mother has been dead for a year    Now I'm wholly alone
My child is asleep    You're asleep, dear one    Everyone should sleep
In the morning we light the candle in the window in the sun
between us and the sea    Here is Ormöga, where we were meant to be
a year ago    We are here for the second time

What do I see with the snake's glance out towards the sea    In my
self-sufficiency, in my lack of interest for the
life of others    The indifferent's geometry    My tower here is
turned towards the sea, since the proprietress locked the other room

I shan't break open the other's room    Only my own
Yet nothing can be repeated    The swallows' geometry is constantly new
Perhaps we go into each other's room    As into a chamber of Hades?
We will be in each other's intolerance    There love finds us

My mother has gone in to my silence, is now part
of it    There she can no longer disturb me    It's
not required now either    She touches me with every leaf
In the grey afternoon I go alone to the sea
The black-tailed godwits fly up, circle around me, cry
The curlew flies up too    In the pine grove by
the sea a red-brown cow has got over the dry-stone wall    She
follows me with her gaze    I follow her    Down by
the sea I touch the water, follow the beach    Look for
avocets in the bay towards Kapelludden, but there aren't any

My mother's silence breathes    I am in my breath    The deep
voice is heard, within me, in the silence    Whose turn is it now?
Ay! Ay! The swifts' young are flying, already supreme    I breathe
in    Genders, animals, creatures, society, people    They breathe
also within me    I delete nothing    The voice is in its
divisions, infinitely subtle    It isn't subject to anyone

I'm waiting for the dark pain    That will come
and break its way in as my mother    She comes also as
a woman, and I rest in her transparency
She's terribly jealous, doesn't tolerate that I'm
with anyone else    There is no sleep    I'm with my dear one
We are lying within the extended sofa's wooden frame
Over the heath and the wood stands the moon, a bit bigger than a sickle,
waxing    It shines with silver-gold light in the pale night
Still June    Later in the night I hear the shriek of the black-tailed godwit

July    Through the open window comes air from the sea
Listen to the swallows, their small chirping sound    Far off
is heard the curlew    The grief for my mother comes, outside time, it doesn't
bother about time    Saw her smiling hugeness, when she no
longer was sad    The vastness without reserve, just in existence
Here's Ormöga    The pain has no time    The joy neither
The sea glitters in the distance    On the shoreline saw the beck's cleft

I still wait for the pain to break into the future, into its
dark forms    I see the angel of the annunciation on the font at Egby,
Gotland sandstone, 11th century    It flies like the birds of the dead
on the picture-stones some centuries earlier    But with a glory round
the head, above the wild animals who attend Mary
In another scene she rests wrapped up, half sitting
on a bed, Joseph gives her something to drink    We go to
the little alvar behind Bockberget to the west    There we see the cranes stepping

Yellow sedum's blooming, and white, half out    A little
tuft of thyme glows lilac    On a dark limestone slab a light-coloured stone,
some kind of sandstone, mossy, hollowed out    A cranium
You stretch out on the warm slab, rest there    In the distance
I see you as some animal, green- and black-flecked, that doesn't exist
At night the swifts flew before the moon, nearly half full    A
single star appeared, scarcely distinguishable, in the pale night

The noise of rain on the roof    Here too in the tower of nothing
Gösta Skyle    We'll be going straight from here to his burial
He's the last of the people from my childhood    At his home was
the same luminosity, the same kindness as at my dad's    Not his torment
I didn't see that until now, in the contrast, in death
Grasp that my father didn't want to be what he was    At Gösta's I saw
a different society stand out   Where nothing's sold    Nothing bought
See that my father fled from his mum's torment, her hardness, dominance
Helge related how he used to get up in the night with the potty full of blood
She forbad Gunnar from marrying, after he came to grief in America
when the bank that held his savings went under, and he was forced to live
in someone else's house as a farm-hand    Farfar wrote to him, when he was called up
in the summer of 1941, about the harvest, and that he hoped he wouldn't have to
go to war    Seeing before me Gösta's parents, August and Selma, Gösta
took after her, remember the hornet's nest I stirred up when as a child I said:
Farbror Svensson is a Nazi      Who has said that? Where did you hear that?
The adults in a ring round me, disturbed    I understood nothing about it
Don't know, but I have no reason to think it was true
He was a grocer in Vattugatan in Halmstad, a little shop
in the basement of the big apartment block, bowed metal roof over the stairs down
His children, Gösta and Helfrid, wanted to be artists; he became a drawing master,
she became a telephonist    The other son, Sture, became a chemist; when I was
nine or ten, maybe eleven, I visited him at Chemicum in Lund
All that I see    Ay! Ay! Nothing of everything    Everything of nothing

The tower of nothingness is emptied    The hen harrier stops with
fluttering wings above the beach heath    I go out in the sun
look at the rock-roses in the grass, the burnt orchids and the
twayblades    Hear the waves, and far off the black-tailed godwit
In the night I heard the nightjar, while visiting friends
We came home over the Alvar beneath the moon    Then northward, getting
under dark clouds, in the rain    Here all the birds are sleeping
The swifts sleep under the roof tiles, with their long,
slender bodies    We sleep beside each other    I've drunk wine
Not you, who drove    This tower is emptied    Others will come
Slenderer, with their roots far down beneath the earth
The water presses up through the limestone pavement    Meets the rain there
I heard the nightjar sixteen years ago in the same place    We are older

I see a woman's sex, bright, upright, a narrow mandala
I pass in there   Into its darkness    In a violent emptying
I see history's face    Wolves pressed into Paris, through
breaches in the wall    Ay! Ay! We shall be here with each other

The sea sees me, with its horizontal glance    Level with the eyes
Yesterday I went to the mother-sea, also here    There are all creatures now
All those who see each other    The fox, the cat    Cows there in the distance
At dawn the fly runs like a sweat-drop over the face    It
doesn't sleep    The swifts are already flashing past    Everyone sleeps

Here is Ormöga    Here everything is foreign    Here we almost
don't exist    Here is the dark-grey sea horizon    All the flowers
All the birds    Yesterday I saw the swallow's young in the nest nearly above
the dining-room window    In the beach heath the curlew's young, while the parents
circled above; smaller, slenderer bill, same call, though smaller
I went the last time to the sea, alone    Everywhere water, after
the rain    The sea was completely still; I heard its voice, still
This is now my mother's sea too    Although she never managed to come here
I touched it    It is a returning    Here everything is foreign
Here is the hen harrier    Here is the snipe, keeping watch
In the night I see the moon go down, orange among the clouds    Perfect
solitude; perfect silence    While everyone sleeps    At dawn the fly wakes us
Ay! Ay! The everywhere vacant torment, in its furthermost presence
The cuckoo is heard, distantly    The swifts are in their geometry, dynamic
We take our leave of friends, chat in the dusk, after visiting
the headland    the first migrating birds are gathering, dunlins, says the newly arrived
                                                             ornithologist in the house next door
Tomorrow Gösta Skyle will be buried in Söndrum outside Halmstad    We shall be there


(pp. 40-47)


*


[Ormöga is on Öland,  which contains Europe's largest alvar (extended limestone pavement) -- Stora Alvaret -- , and also many orchids.

Blood Orchid = "Blodnycklar", a name given to Dactylorhiza incarnata ssp. cruenta,  a dark-coloured subspecies of Early Marsh Orchid.


]

inner space

Online text (Caxton's edition)

While I was writing about experimental poetry, in my previous post, I kept thinking about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, which I finished re-reading this morning (in the slightly abridged edition of the Winchester manuscript by Helen Cooper). For this writing too, like the samples I quoted then, creates a dream space and has a problematic relationship to significance in the world we inhabit.

Yet Le Morte Darthur is a thoroughly medieval construction. Caxton, anyway, had no anxiety about its significance. Quoting St Paul ("But all is written for our doctrine"), he pointed out its treasure trove of examples of noble and ignoble behaviour and urged his readers to emulate the former and to avoid the latter. In fact, to read it in the same way as a history book, though Caxton admitted that his readers might have their own views about how historical the Arthurian stories were. In the infancy of printing, he reasonably expected that his principal audience would themselves be nobles, like the jousting knights and their ladies, though he urged readers of all classes "that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to follow the same".

Nevertheless the resemblance to modern experimental writing isn't pure fancy. Medieval books weren't made in the same way as modernist poems but they are fully as composite: the result, in Le Morte Darthur, is an extremely dynamic inner space. Malory's work, written in 1469-70, is based mainly on the French Vulgate Cycle from more than two centuries earlier: this cycle was already composite in nature, the work of many hands and deriving in turn from Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth and others. Malory also used English sources closer to him in date: the alliterative and stanzaic Morte Arthure poems from the end of the fourteenth century. Accordingly, the main sections of Malory's work have each of them a rather different character. But within the sections, too, there is a composite feeling: different sources, intrusions by Malory himself, a sudden switch to another source. The ground shifts beneath our feet. Time has a fitful and local presence (children emerge only as adults, and no-one grows old). The vocabulary changes from page to page; characters become inconsistent with their former appearances and events we think we know about are recounted differently. Contrary to what Caxton would lead you to expect, morality is also inconsistent. Malory repeatedly lands us in situations that are good in one moral code but bad in another. In his blanket use of terms such as "worshipful" to describe people whose adventures constantly land them in moral hot water, we see the distant ancestry of Clarendon's belief that the ruling class need not be bound by the rules of personal morality. (A belief that is sturdily reviving in our own times.)

In the opening pages, in Uther's reign, we have an Archbishop of Canterbury: in the final pages, after Arthur's death, we have a sometime Bishop of Canterbury living in a hermitage near Glastonbury. That typifies the slippage between concrete historical institutions and a sort of fairyland that occurs throughout the book.

In the "Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake" we unexpectedly find ourselves at Tintagel (Caxton VI.10-11), and become aware that up to that point we have had no idea where Launcelot's wandering adventures have been taking place, other than by such descriptions as a "fair highway" or a "deep forest". After this brief glimpse of a real place (complete with its real bridge and village), Launcelot dives back into the trackless forests again. At the end of this section "Sir Launcelot came home two days before the feast of Pentecost; and the King and all the court were passing fain" (Caxton, VI.18). Here too are the various folk he has rescued, helped, overcome or jovially tricked.

But where is this "home"? In Malory's book this is often elusive. Sometimes Arthur's court is not in a defined place. At other times it becomes more definitely "Camelot". Camelot, in earlier Arthurian romances -- Chrétien is the first to use the name --,  is potentially many places and yet none. On a few occasions Malory tells us that it is Winchester (but Caxton said it was in Wales). It's only towards the end of his epic that this location becomes more grounded. Finally the name "Camelot" is allowed to flutter away on the breeze; the scenes where the Lancelot and Gawain parties fall into fatal dissension around the hapless king are now merely Winchester, and later Carlisle.  And once Mordred usurps the kingdom, this kingdom is the bare unvarnished England of Winchester,  London, Dover, Salisbury Plain, Glastonbury, Amesbury... "Camelot" has gone the way of individual jousting and giants and forests and romance: it now belongs to an otherworld of the past.

Lancelot's own castle of Joyous Gard is apparently near to Camelot; at least it is in the Book of Tristram. But at the end, when all those mists of romance are clearing, we are told "Some men say it was Alnwick, and some men say it was Bamborough".

The coldly emerging England of "Lancelot and Guenivere" and "The Death of Arthur" is in especially marked contrast to the previous section, "The Tale of the Sangreal". Here the romance world of "Tristram" is transformed into an even more otherworldly landscape. As the knights depart on this glorious but disastrous quest, they enter a spiritual realm that resembles neither fabulous Camelot nor cold England, a landscape where nothing can be pinned down, though we are at one point in Scotland and, of course, finally in the Middle East. Magical boats allow a kind of warp drive, knights meet and re-meet but there's no geography to it.

But overall Malory's geography, in the late 15th century, is far less fanciful than in, say, Wolfram's Parzival, though it coexists inconsistently with the vaguer geographies of his predecessors; because the medieval book contains, and embraces, what it has outgrown.

"It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England..."  In Malory, the Arthurian legends, drawn from Celtic lands and becoming the delight of all Europe, have been refocussed on England.

With the emergence of England comes also nationalism. In the "Book of Tristram" we're surprised to hear, at one point, that Cornish knights had a reputation for cowardice; that kind of national stereotype seems to belong to a different age. But actually, the nationalist world picture is already in Malory, prefiguring the tropes of Shakespeare's history plays a century later. A foreign authority seeks tribute, the king defies him ("Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome" cf. King John). We wonder if the portrait of the unchristened knight Sir Palomides (basically good and noble, but also passionate and treacherous) contains seeds of later negative oriental stereotypes. In, for example, the portrayal of Gawain and his brothers, the sons of Lot of Orkney, we sense an emergent feeling about Scottishness that isn't purely neutral. And we're reminded quite insistently about the French origins of Lancelot and his relations. When things fall apart in "The Death of Arthur", one of the many transformations is learning that Lancelot is effectively "lord of all France". And there follows a national invasion by Arthur and Gawain with "three score thousand" men (cf. Henry V). The last, most extended, and most depressing of all Malory's hundreds of knightly jousts takes place in Benwick (which Malory says is Bayonne or Beaune) (Caxton XX.20-22). Over a period of weeks Lancelot and an implacable Gawain fight it out endlessly and to no result. Gawain will not yield; Lancelot could kill him but won't do so, out of respect for both Arthur and "my lord Gawain" (The respectful Lancelot seems to conceive Gawain as having some feudal rights over himself and the other knights of the Round Table). Meanwhile, behind Arthur's back, Mordred is usurping England.

Malory's book never mentions trade, commerce, merchants. Occasionally there is a ploughman, a doorkeeper or a cook but essentially he has stripped off all the lower orders. There's no agriculture. Seasons are of no significance except in connection with important feast days (especially Pentecost). Weather is mentioned very rarely indeed (once or twice there is a tempest: in the "Tale of the Sangreal" they are part of the spiritual landscape). As in other Arthurian literature there are no Jews, though there exists a remarkable 13th-century Hebrew manuscript containing judaized Arthurian episodes (Melech Artus).

just writing

I want to believe that some blogs achieve more than ephemerality,  and here's one that I'm still reading, though it came to an end in 2010, Jenny Allan's Intermittent Voices. This was the post for 7th September 2008.


juggernauts at dawn


probability discusses the case, pinning hopes on the background in accordance with genuine conditions, shell-shocked and heedless of foresight she ushers in piffle emanating from the wrong end of the stick – the backroom word is: hold your tongue, for the grapevine enlightens the grindstone at all turns

in defence of halcyon days she winds up finishing off the golden touches, leaving only their indents to smell the roses into pacification – peace talks in the flower beds, the rookie thorn dead set on a duel

midpoint handicap, the difference between being thrown off balance and compensating, it’s a short fall of untrimmed habit, patching up each rung of the stairway, going halves on equal opportunities, agreeing on another time for nowadays, it’s a preview of ‘on the spot’ that dates back to a posthumous eve

unruly light, when will it be dawning again? or is this the terminal knot no-one counts on as we proceed slavishly recurring, the sun’s groupies, in the making of, or hand in hand with, the majority, all pending the next instant to robotically be tricked by drill, permeated becomes addicted becomes tamed and our own winning ways docilely impress the rut

tramlines of behaviour, she too can head, is heading for disorder

lying on her back and watching the juggernaut sweep everyone up into play, the future is close at hand, make a distinction

*

There are so many kinds of experimental writing, but I do have a soft spot for what isn't pre-programmed or explained. Jenny's writing is social and witty, but through its endless constructions of spatial architecture out of clichéd idioms it arrives at an alienation from its own crowded corridors: it produces a feeling of human isolation. (I seem to remember she admires Maurice Blanchot.)

The romantic, the quixotic, the unexplained. I enjoy the intensity of my attention as I read. For it's a fact that the world, too, doesn't explain itself, and always means more than what you can say about it.

I find this quality too in Richard Makin's writing. It is not very communal or correct, not apparently very concerned with politics or society. It's willing to inhabit a dream space without preconceptions of what may come from all this. It's difficult to choose a page to quote from the enormous Dwelling (2011); one is uneasily aware of the promises of the facing page. But here is some of p. 518.

*


   It lay in wait. I was much younger. Reading is impossible. These tricks drive me mad. I fixed the time and the place, all recognizable events (incendiarism, the poison cup). I paid dearly. A flap of mucous membrane was stretched taut across the orifice.

   Still, it's a beautiful island. Who was declared petroleuse for the day? We had our own duty machine and a book of shares. He offers no comment. We three make quite a team. I ask him what is going on in the background. He refuses to say. An antique bone handle and potsherds were found.

   The domestic tort. One of the most squalid pieces of light and shade imaginable. Far off, the keen of a foghorn -- bury me standing et cetera. At the apex there are ruins. Some paragraphs demonstrate abrupt changes of style.
   Trout hovering in light-stained water. Assassin.

   Tracing the history of the other senses will prove more difficult. Nerves are unsheathed and put to the torch. A pool spread out from under the container. The carpet was yellow. One surface is no longer in contact. I am inside. Words are becoming less and less necessary. Everything happens at once, at once.

   Hermit cell. Familiar tightness bursting in chest. The ligament between the valves has snapped. Having two separate singularities, a vacuum can survive outside of itself.

   A bittersweet little morsel.
   The glass box touched the bottom of the sea. Some had axes, some had saws, some had hammers. I'm understood. A thin sheet of skin separates us from the surrounding spaces. The question is not what you looked like. A bunsen flame was applied, beneath.

   Wide-where, dazzling white light. A trustworthy oration. At last the end, surcease. Where.

   Somebody once fashioned an unreal. Anyway, there is the after, where more human happens. He says our relationship to objects has declined. (There never was nor can be et cetera.) This one has been labelled. I am delivering. The crime of wilfully infecting a body has been waived.

*

How are such texts constructed? I've written before about how there's no such thing as "making things up", but I think Jenny built primarily from her own invention and linguistic resources: that requires incredible tenacity. For Richard's stupendous epic you can suppose he's mined texts from science, geography, archaeology, anatomy, navigation... It approaches an encyclopaedia, a wikipedia by one person (though, as it frequently and sardonically acknowledges, it contains no information whatsoever).

The appeal of the texts isn't principally in the enigma of their production. It's possible to have a much more explicit methodology and yet the artefact remains as mysterious as ever.  A chance to quote another favourite experimentalist, Gale Nelson:

*

Prodded oolong tea in debt but veils long
secret lists of verdict's ending on lusted
trembling calls. Shadow dooms dull patter, doubt doubles
song's floated past sand's aria. Preach long our best
gang's soothing steed, coin the sod here
or drown tea at every dock's fast keel.
The sea races, are you that fast? Trust that old
pale iced wing on which all doubt and prior
redoubts hone in. Orb sings then loses me
on fretted seas, then spots tea that seems red but
foils as green. Long sea dash speaks above
these crashes, bubbles down this throaty song in
lunging wreck. Unlauded green essence,
land at sea's last bid. Oolong iced,
oolong under all the thirst stalls. Brood ice --
shred those blood-red doubts and shout best
yelps along precise cloven seas. Tread
their folded red boots in tea, then burst
all avid feet, bring frozen cup of stale
green bitter spills -- lick up this feud and fend
it. Calm battered voids or shout back these last
youth-addled causes. Trade that ice,
guard the tea's smooth entry. Bring faster seas
then quit song's bend. You know those four
oaken tree stumps strung there in
damaged husks? Grace enacts loss, entices grave
falls. Proof refracts the oolong
suds. Now it seems lost. Net shamed oaks: lost but that
lacks much easing, endures loss. The housing of
dignity is beyond the ire. Larks bend and soft songs burst
that trembled islet long dead in alcove's
frigid ease. This use must stall by
last lone sea's ebb. Oak's ill roots flow, but no
sea is gone. It sails on, fills on
each shire's ledge.


This poem comes from This Is What Happens When Talk Ends (2011), a book in which, it's explained, the poems follow the vowel-sequence from various famous Shakespeare passages (this poem follows the "To be or not to be" speech in Hamlet). Part of the fun is admiring how the poem circles specific topics (such as iced tea), all the time within the tyrannous constraints of the poet's methodology. But iced tea is a small part of the strange imaginary world that we readers enter here, and likewise in the other two pieces I've quoted.

You may have noticed that all of these were published at least eight years ago. To an extent that reflects changes in my own economic circumstances and literary preoccupations (I don't, alas, now buy many books of new poetry), but I find myself wondering, too, whether it reflects a change in the culture of western nations since 2010: the growing sense of crisis and the increasingly embattled and politicized discourses in which so many of us now feel involved. Whether our civilisations no longer seem to afford the space for such free explorations as those I've quoted.

Jenny Allan simply disappeared from view as an author. Richard Makin produced the much briefer Mourning in 2015 (a mere 250 pages) and was heavily involved in the Arca Project (2017), an art/text exhibition paying tribute to W.G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn (1992). A fairly short prose piece, Insane Leonards, was published in Hastings Online Times in 2014. Gale Nelson is an active academic at Brown University (Providence, RI). He is surely writing but I'm not aware of any more recent publications.

Min morfar

Klas and Sigrid had a sole child, rather late in life*: my mother Eva. When she married an Englishman it must have distressed them to think of her making her home so far away from Sundsvall. But when I was born and we returned for a long visit, their delight in their grandson is easy to imagine. There are many photos of a proud Morfar with me when I was a baby boy who had inherited his blue eyes. For a man who never had a son, to have a grandson would have meant a lot.

But as it turned out grandfathers would never play a large part in my life. I barely knew my English grandfather, meeting him only twice so far as I recall. And Morfar+ (Klas) died on the morning of Christmas Eve when I was about ten. I remember my mum's anguish when she answered the telephone. So far away! Later that day, I thought how strange it was to be unwrapping a Christmas present from someone who had already died. (It was a reclining dog, with a nodding head.)

Morfar had had a bad stroke around five years before, affecting both his speech and his mobility. In England my early bilingualism had foundered. We could only afford to visit Sweden every other year, so Morfar and I never had much chance to overcome the language barrier. After the stroke I became rather afraid of him; I was always a shy child.

Once we were alone together in the living room of the flat. I was playing by myself. Morfar was sitting in his invariable armchair, well dressed as ever (Morfar always wore a tie). Suddenly he rose: he wanted, I thought, to show me a kindness and to bring us closer together. He managed a step or two, and then he collapsed to the floor. "Morfar's fallen over!" I shouted, very alarmed. Mormor and my mother came running from the kitchen. They settled him down, but the emotional barrier between us, as much as the language barrier, never thawed any further. I loved him because he was my Morfar but I never knew him as a real person.

* Not late in life by today's standards. Klas was 44 and Sigrid just 30.

+ Swedish has two words for grandfather:

morfar: mother's father
farfar: father's father

Likewise mormor (mother's mother) farmor (father's mother), moster (mother's sister), faster (father's sister), morbror (mother's brother), farbror (father's brother)

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Henrik, my great-grandfather 

Karolina, my great-grandmother 

Klas Henrik Gulliksson was born on 7 July 1892. Three months before he was born, his father Henrik had died of pneumonia. His mother Karolina lived on for many years after her husband's death; my mother knew her.

(Henrik made the large rocking-chair that still gets passed around the family and is currently at my sister Annika's house.)

Klas had four elder siblings. Henning, Hildur, Lydia and Karl, who was just two years older than Klas.

Three days after Henrik's sudden death, a lady visited and offered to adopt little Lydia, then about four; it wasn't unusual in those days. But Karolina would rather have starved than lose pretty Lydia. 

Henrik's death certainly put the family in difficult circumstances. Karolina had been a teacher at Borgsjö before her marriage, but now when she re-applied she was refused. She had become a Baptist, and could not teach in schools linked to the Church of Sweden. 

So, instead, she resorted to sewing waistcoats. Hildur, then about nine years old, was often left in sole charge of the other children: Lydia and the two baby boys. Henning, the eldest son, was the only child to receive a full education. 

Karl and Klas, those two young boys, tumbled up together. They were a naughty pair. When Karl was only four he threw a fork at two-year-old Klas. Karolina found it sticking out of Klas' pate; apparently no serious damage was done. When they were a bit older they sneaked off to swim in Selångersån (Sundsvall's river) or to creep under the chain and ski down the out-of-bounds slope beneath the ski-jump on Södraberget. 

Karolina with her grand-daughter Eva (my mum)

Klas, Lydia, their mother Karolina, and Karl

Henning Gulliksson

The family could only afford to educate one of the children. That was Henning. When he was at home, he passed on his knowledge to his brothers and sisters. Henning became relatively well off. 

When my mother was two, the house Klas and Sigrid moved into (Fridhemsgatan 11 in Sundsvall) was Henning's: Klas couldn't afford to buy his own. Henning built the house with a man called Lindgren. Henning lived there with his first wife Svea until her death.

Henning and Svea had one child, a little girl who died after just three days.

(My mum was born to Klas and Sigrid three years later, and she was treated with perhaps painful protectiveness, because she was in effect the only child on either side of her family; Klas and Sigrid were not young parents, and all Klas' and Sigrid's siblings were either single or childless or had emigrated to America, never to be seen again.)

For Svea the whole thing was so traumatic that she swore never to go into hospital again. She died, a few years later, of a burst appendix.

It was after Svea's death that Henning moved to Stockholm in connection with a job in publishing. Thus Fridhemsgatan 11 became available for Klas and Sigrid to rent. 

Both Albäcksgatan and Fridhemsgatan are in the suburb Södermalm (though the Fridhemsgatan house is very close to Östermalm). Södermalm was a residential expansion of Sundsvall, south of the railway. The name was changed in about 1900; it was formerly Stenhammaren, which had acquired something of a reputation as a red light district. (The novelist Lars Ahlin was born in Södermalm in 1915.)

Fridhemsgatan 11

Eva, my future mum, stood in the street and told the passers-by: "I used to live at Albäcksgatan 4 and now I live at Fridhemsgatan 11." 

Klas and his family had only moved a few hundred meters. Albäcksgatan 4 had belonged to Sigrid's invalid father Karl. They moved in so they could take care of him. He died when Eva was only one year old. 

At Fridhemsgatan Fru Wahlström, Svea's mother, still lived upstairs. Klas and Sigrid shared the house with her when they moved in.

My earliest datable memory is from that house: a Christmas when I was three. Jultomten (Santa Claus) visited the house that day. He scraped the snow off his boots and announced: "Here is a present for a little boy who is three." I hesitated, being a stickler for accuracy, and said "Well, I'm three and a half!" The present was a metal pick-up truck, coloured orange and white, with a crane and a hook you could wind up and down.

Fridhemsgatan 11 was a lovely wooden house, with Falu Röd Färg (dark red) walls and white-painted window and door frames: the traditional colours of such houses. They only occupied the downstairs: there was another tenant above them. This was where my mother grew up. The house had a fine cellar and a big garden containing currant and gooseberry bushes as well as raspberries along the back fence. In my summer memories the garden is always sunny, but in winter it got no sun at all for six months, because of the rising slope of the South Mountain just behind. Around the time of Morfar's stroke they moved to a third-floor apartment on the north side of town: Elevgränd 4B. Of course I remember this flat much more clearly than Fridhemsgatan, but that's for another post.

By the time they moved to Fridhemsgatan Henning had a good job in Stockholm. He was an editor for a major publisher, perhaps Bonniers but no-one is sure. Like many Swedish dignitaries he was a Good Templar, that is, a strict teetotaller. It was important for his reputation that he never even attended a gathering where alcohol was served. When my mother and father got married in 1957, the toasts were in sparkling pear juice!

I don't remember Farbror Henning but as I was born in 1958 I suppose our lives probably overlapped a bit. His death was a sad accident. He slipped on an icy street and slid under a moving bus. He was run over by the rear wheels. 

When I was a little older we used to stay at Faster Selma's apartment in Stockholm: one of several stopovers on our long journey north. Selma had been Henning's second wife and was now his widow. I remember her cloudily: a tea-party, and some forgotten joke about jam. Usually we used the apartment when Selma wasn't there. Probably she was away at a summer cottage, like most Stockholm residents at that time of year.

As it happened it was through Selma that we acquired our own summer cottage. She put us in touch with her sister Esther, who lived in Sollefteå with her husband Helge. They had a summer cottage in the Indal valley, but family troubles meant they hadn't gone there for eight years. It had no electricity or water. When we went over to see it we had to battle through the young forest that had already grown up. For forty years it became our heaven on earth.

 

Lydia and Hildur Gulliksson 

Hildur Gulliksson / Nordine  (born 1 April 1883)

Hildur emigrated to the USA. She got married there and became Hildur Nordine. 

I've managed to find a little more genealogy related to her husband Carl . Carl Axel Nordine (1889 - 1943) was six years her junior.

She had four children. Her son Ivan died in the Vietnam war. One of the daughters was Alice Linnea ("Lin"). My mother was in touch with her and met her once, in New Hampshire. 

Hildur Gulliksson

Lydia Gulliksson

Lydia Gulliksson 

Lydia

I and Annika remember Lydia very well, though not, I am sure, the way she should best be remembered. When we were very young Lydia, who never married, had her own flat in Sundsvall. I remember her as an elderly woman with short black hair, a strict Baptist, teetotal and a bit austere (but she's laughing heartily in the photos where she's giving me a carry). Around the same time as her younger brother Klas, she suffered a catastrophic stroke. After that she lived a lingering half-life in care homes for another decade or more. Visiting Faster Lydia was a regular and dreaded part of our annual holiday in the north. She lay there like a frail bundle of bones, scarcely a hump beneath the bedclothes: the bed was a narrow single bed but she made it look big. Mum and Dad spoke to her and went through rituals of greeting, talking about the holidays, pointing out us children (who added our weak smiles), or a new bunch of flowers beside the bed, and so contriving to eke out a near-monologue. The ghastly Lydia, with well-combed thin white hair, was unfathomable, barely capable of a syllable or flicker of feeling. I don't know if Lydia had Alzheimer's or was simply too weak to say or feel anything.  Mum would stay a bit longer while we and Dad went off to the beach at Björkön. When the visit was over we cried, but not much: we'd cried before, but nothing would or could ever change, so what was the point.

It was only many years later that I began to be interested in my family past and to learn what a dynamic and active woman Lydia had been. She decided never to marry while her mother was still alive, in order to look after her. She must have been about fifty by the time Karolina died, and she never did marry.

I'll find out properly one day, but I know she was heavily involved, I think as a teacher, in church charitable work. She worked as caterer at the Baptist orphanage at Mjösjö, a remote but pretty spot in the hinterlands (Bräcke kommun, Jämtland), about 100km from Sundsvall. During WW2 it took children from both Finland and Norway. (Lydia got medals from the Finnish refugee organisation. ) Later it was involved with the "kolonibarn" charity, providing summer holidays for the children of the urban poor. 

My mum went there in her tenth summer, making friends with Anita Björnsson, a girl of the same age who lived in the farmstead next door (there were only about three houses in Mjösjö).

My mum remembers an occasion when they walked two spaniels together, and made the mistake of letting the dogs off the lead. The dogs promptly went off gallivanting in the forest and didn't respond to the girls' calls. It didn't go down very well at home, though the dogs did drift back eventually.

Anita's home struck Eva as quite strange. There were so many flies in the kitchen that you could hardly raise the juice to your lips, but no-one seemed to notice. Anita lived there with her mum, but Eva never met her dad, who seemed to be always away. They were allowed to play in "his" house (a separate building). Here they found lots of empty bottles, which (coming from the Baptist establishment) made a very grave impression on little Eva. 

When she was a little older Eva went back to Mjösjö, this time as a volunteer helping with the kolonibarn. 

Many years after that, Mum and Dad went back and they found Anita still living at Mjösjö. She loved the horses and had taken on the farmstead. Her life was a strange contrast with her rather glamorous sister Monica, who had gone off to Italy at the earliest opportunity. 

Karl

Like Hildur, he emigrated to the USA. He went there at a young age, perhaps 20 or even younger. He was unsettled in northern Sweden. In his early years the other children used to call him "Nigger", in reference to his dark complexion and prominent lips. 

He was a house painter by trade. When he got to America the family lost touch with him for many years. We can only guess why. Perhaps one issue was the family's strict religiosity. In America, Karl married a Swedish woman who had been married before. That might have been unacceptable to Karolina. Karl and his wife had one child, a boy. 

All this was only discovered when, years later, Karl unexpectedly showed up at his sister Hildur's place (in New Hampshire?). Only then did he learn of his mother's death, years before; there had been no means of telling him. 

Whatever the reasons for this isolation, Karl made a new life for himself in America. I'm not sure whereabouts he lived, but when he died the local newspapers praised his energetic contribution to the life of the community.

Klas Gulliksson

Klas

So, my grandfather. Most of what I know about Klas's younger life is encapsulated in the page of the family album shown at the head of this post.

By the age of thirteen he was working. His first job was as a beater in a fur factory. Something made his lungs bleed: fluff or leather fibres or dust, I'm not sure which. 

He was "in the cavalry" as a young man, but what cavalry, and for how long, I don't know. Then he was a wage clerk for the railway during the building of "Östkustbanan": the new coastal route from Gävle - Sundsvall - Härnösand, now the principal rail route to the north, opened in 1927. The photo of the logging camp may come from this period.

Klas on a converted motorbike

He's standing in the middle of the group of five revellers. They could be anywhere in northern Sweden, but I've always imagined this photo shows either the North or South mountain in Sundsvall: both popular locations for a day out. The girl beside him isn't Sigrid, so perhaps she was an early flame; or it could be his sister Lydia. (An old photo of Sigrid appears at the bottom right.)

Klas and Sigrid (a wedding photo?)

Klas and Sigrid a few years later

Klas' signature, on Eva's high school report for Spring term 1952. ("målsman" means "guardian")

In 1924 Klas became a cargo inspector at the docks in Sundsvall. (Coincidentally, the same job my great-uncle John did at Southampton.) At the docks he was known as "Gullik". He retired on the 12 March 1963, when he was seventy. I know this because I'm looking at the Seamaster watch he was presented with. The watch is engraved "Långvarig trogen tjänst" : the standard phrase for these occasions, meaning "long faithful service". The watch is one of those self-winding ones: I've given it a good shake and it's working, after at least ten years of lying in a drawer.

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Karolina (Klas' mother)

Karolina had travelled from Värmland with her father when he came to Sundsvall looking for work. She was 9 years old at the time. They travelled by horse and cart. I suppose this was around 1870. Karolina's mother and siblings remained in Värmland until the father was properly settled in Sundsvall. 

Karolina baked and sold food at the factory gates on payday (Friday afternoon).

Later, she was an itinerant teacher at Borgsjö, 80km west of Sundsvall in the Ljungan valley. (Sundsvall, on the east coast of Sweden, lies between the mouths of two major rivers, the Indal just to the north and the Ljungan just to the south.)

I'm not sure how many siblings Karolina had, but she was the eldest.

Johan and Hilda Floberg

Klas's cousins

Karolina had a younger sister (moster Marie), who married a Herr Floberg and had two sons, Johan and Albert.

Johan Floberg had a farm at Johannisberg, a little downriver from Borgsjö. His wife's name was Hilda.

At the farm they needed help at hay-making time, and my mother went there with Klas at least once (she speculates that Klas couldn't get away very easily at that time of year, a busy time in the harbour). My mother remembers pitching hay up on to the rick and sitting on the top of it. The Johannisberg farm, like many others, contained two homes: a cosy winter one and a more open summer one. Another memory: Hilda setting out food for the workers in the veranda (farstubron) outside the summer home.

The Flobergs had two daughters, Elsie and Jonny, and a son Pelle.

Elsie and Jonny both married. Jonny's husband was a musician who played in a dance band. They had two children, Benny and Ingerla.

Pelle was the youngest. He was a few years older than my mother; he was good-looking and bright and he received more education than most. At one time he got a job in a chemical factory outside Sundsvall, making plastics, and then he stayed for several months with the family at Fridhemsgatan.

A little further up the Ljungan valley from Borgsjö and Johannisberg is Ånge, and here my mum had another distant relative.

Tant Judith Siljeström, who had a daughter called Lillemor, was related in some way to Johan Floberg (presumably on his father's side). The Siljeströms had a big house and were well off, they owned a shop and were considered more genteel than mere farmers. Tant Judith was very fond of Klas's sister Lydia, who had rather genteel manners herself.

Photo taken outside Lidens Gamla Kyrka. Michael in the arms of Moster Anna, Mum, Mormor, Morfar and a pal whose name I don't know.


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Zone S, number 116 in the cemetery at Sundsvall. It says:

KARL   GUSTAFSSON
*1868                +1937
 HUSTRUN AMANDA
*1872                +1927
        DÖTTRARNA
ANNA  *1898   +1976              (moster Anna)
GRETA  *1901  +1988              (moster Greta)
KLAS    GULLIKSSON.             (morfar)
*1892                 +1968
   HUSTRUN SIGRID                 (mormor)
*1906                 +1997
   
Hustrun = wife
Döttrarna = daughters

Hedge Mustard (Sisymbrium officinale)

Hedge Mustard (Vägsenap - Sisymbrium officinale)

So far as I'm aware every plant in the Brassicaceae is more or less edible.

Despite its common name in English (and Swedish), this species isn't in the same genus as any of the three species that are used to make my favourite condiment (Sinapis Alba, Brassica juncea, Brassica nigra).

Nor is it in the same genus as the rocket normally eaten in salads (Eruca sativa). But it has been suspected as being the "English rocket" with yellow flowers referred to by some early botanists. The fresh leaves are certainly very good eating.

It's native to Europe and very common; also introduced in the eastern USA.

After six months of unobtrusive greening it suddenly rockets forth in May (though "rocket" in that sense has no etymological connection with the salad rocket). It looks like a completely different plant.

 The flowers are very small but the ever-elongating sickle-shaped flower shoots with appressed fruits are unmistakable.

The winter/spring leaves have quite a distinctive shape: Runcinate with a truncate terminal lobe, if I'm using the terms correctly. The leaves that appear in the upper storey when flowering begins have a very different shape:their terminal lobes are even pointed.

Sisymbrium officinale. Frome, 3 August 2019.

Sisymbrium officinale. Frome, 3 August 2019.

30 June

26 May

26 May

26 May

26 May

20 May

13 May

4 May

4 May

28 April

28 April

22 April

13 April

10 April

12 February

27 December

25 November

17 November

13 November

12 November

21 August

There's a bit of a "second wave" in around August, which is what these photos show. The plants are generally small and have a speeded-up life-cycle, so you can see basal leaves, flowers and fruit all at the same time.

8 August