Inter-Rail

In, let's say, July 1977 (when I was coming up 19), I was on vacation from university, and I set off across Europe with an Inter-Rail card. The plan was to go on a Christian working holiday in Italy for a couple of weeks (I had joined the Christian Union in Fresher's week), then to take the train up to northern Sweden and meet my parents there for a holiday at the summer cottage. 

The plan went wrong as soon as I boarded the train at Staplehurst station. I then discovered that I'd left behind the address of the place in Italy I was meant to be going to. I could have done various things to rectify this if I'd had sufficient initiative and hadn't been so intensely shy and ashamed. I did none of those things. I could remember the name of the nearby town (Castiglione della Pescaia, I think it was) and I supposed  that when I got there I'd be sure to see signs for the Christian camp-site.

But when I did get there, I saw how unrealistic I'd been. The town was far bigger than I'd imagined, and was not set up solely to cater for people searching for what (I now began to realize) was possibly not the only Christian camp in the region. Even so, it could probably have been sorted out quite easily -- just not by me. 

I slept in a vineyard and then I began to walk towards town but was certainly not going to try and speak to anyone. After an hour, before I even entered the town, I changed my plan, went back to the railway station, and got on a train. I whizzed randomly up and down the length of Italy, sleeping on the night trains. I rang my parents and asked them to inform the Christian organization that I wasn't going to be turning up. (I assumed they could find out the number, though I'd made no attempt to find it out myself.)

After an hour between trains in a place called Firenze (I went into a big domed church that had a portrait of Dante) I decided I'd had enough of Italy. I headed north. 

At some point I left my sleeping bag in the rack when changing trains: whatever. I didn't look out of the window much. I just carried on reading Spenser's Faerie Queene, the only book I'd brought with me. (I actually read all of it, and I wonder if that would ever have happened otherwise.) 

Through the alpine tunnels, across Austria, Germany, Denmark, then Sweden. I arrived in Sundsvall very early in the morning and walked across town to my grandmother's flat, but the door to Elevgränd 4B was locked. I threw gravel at her third-floor window but couldn't raise her, went to sit in the play-park, felt chilly, walked back to the station, took a train to Stockholm, and came back at tea-time.

Of course Mormor wasn't expecting me so soon, but she was brilliant. We couldn't communicate very well -- my Swedish was stuck in early childhood, and she never got far with English -- but how glad I was for that welcoming home! 

I stayed with Mormor a few days, and I suppose we played cards (a game called Fem Hundra, but I can't remember the rules) and I suppose we ate kåldolmar but this is guesswork. The only thing I definitely remember about that stay with Mormor was finding a copy of Blow Your Face Out, a double live album by the J. Geils Band, in a local shop. I bought it on the strength of a positive review in the NME, and God I loved that album to bits. 

Then I set off again, this time all the way up to Narvik and then once more whizzing up and down Sweden and sleeping on the train. (I never tried to stay anywhere because that would have meant talking to someone.) I came back to Sundsvall just about when Mum and Dad were arriving in the Volvo estate. 

*

Anyway, that's all background to these extracts about Mormor from a poem-fragment that I wrote several years after her death in 1997. (The rest of the poem is nonsense, but I thought these bits were just about worth copying out before I binned it.)

Few were the times we met

when I was a child and you were old.

Few were the words we spoke

and fewer what we heard, in a different language.

Night followed day then, too.

I was running away, and soon we were going away.

You fed me, then I looked at the wall

as I washed up, stacking the dishes.

Later, there were peppercakes and perhaps cards.

But I was so full with you!

---

I know you don't exist. I think your ashes

are in Sundsvall's cemetery, or else

it's only a memorial slab. But if you're

impossibly out there, you know all languages now,

even mine; in all that knowledge does it still

mean anything? You had grey, curly hair, 

as soft as a fleece, I thought,

and a round kindly face, until near the end

when they had to cut some of it out.

Those were the days we found ourselves

in new parts of Sundsvall, a grand hospital

and peaceful homes with smiling staff;

at the funeral we were smiling, too.

It was April. I had never been there in April before;

so crisp and cold, the rivers still icy,

snow on the hills and the land

not quite monochrome, the birches were actually purple.

---

There are many things in this flat

I do not want to tell you about; for example,

the ugly bug in the tequila-flavoured lolly.

I am protective of you; I don't think you would understand.

it's seven years since you died, and that came after

a long old age. 

---

Me, Mormor and Annika

Mum, Mormor, Annika and me

More family history...birth stories

As mostly recounted by my Dad, probably with some legendary colouring. 

They were married at Sköns kyrka, a little bit north of Sundsvall (on the mainland opposite Alnö).

My mum's mum (Sigrid) was worried that Dad would faint at the altar for lack of sustenance. That morning she cooked him a plate of his favourite food, macaroni cheese. 

After their teetotal wedding reception, they set off on honeymoon (a lake stuga at Österström, near Liden). My dad managed to smuggle a bottle of wine onto the bus. When they got there, they found they weren't the only drinkers. Sounds of revelry surrounded an illegal still. My dad says there was someone playing the musical saw, too.

A year later (1958) I was born. My mum was in the hospital in Eastbourne. Dad, rather anxious, rang and asked if he could visit. "Husband? Certainly not! Stay out of it, none of your business," he was told. He saw me for the first time when I was presentable. 

Annika came along four years later. 

When mum's waters broke, they were in the middle of entertaining a male visitor who didn't know much about babies (not being "that way inclined", my Dad remarked). "Mightn't I just have one more cup of tea?" he inquired as they rushed about, getting everything together for the dash to Oakham hospital (in Rutland).

We were living in rural Leicestershire. Mutti (my dad's mum) had travelled up from Eastbourne to look after me. 

The hospital was short-staffed. Dad was instructed to wait with Mum and only to call for assistance when the baby was actually coming. 

After a couple of false alarms (for which he was told off) the baby really was coming. Now a nurse took his place, while he sat and waited behind a screen. Afterwards the nurse was ecstatic. "I've never delivered a baby before!" she told him. She had been drafted in from a nearby hospital that didn't have a maternity unit. 

It was at Oakham, too, that Mum unwontedly lost her temper. In those days newborns were looked after separately to allow mums to get some rest. But Mum could hear Annika crying and wanted her. The staff resisted until Mum threatened to get up and fetch her baby herself. Annika was very hungry. For some reason she had not been absorbing food properly in the womb. 

On the whole Annika is considered to have survived by the skin of her teeth! 

I remember when I first saw her, a red little bundle in the gloom of the Morris Oxford when we came to bring them home. 

Fifteen years later, when Mir was born, things had changed.  Fathers were now expected to be present and to hold their partner's hand during the birth. So Dad was there with Mum, but after a while with nothing much happening the nurse said that he might as well go and get a cup of coffee, because it's going to be hours yet. 

He set off dutifully to the restaurant. When he came back, Mir had already been born. "She took me by surprise!" the nurse remarked. 

Sitting around at Mum n Dad's

 

Dad got his penknife and fixed the top of the water bottle I'd brought from Somerset and couldn't unscrew.

We were discussing school meals. My mum had bought this tart at Blackbrooks for us to share, but my dad didn't fancy the custard. I used to loathe custard at school too, but now I've dealt with the issue by simply calling it vaniljsås, and then I like it.

My mum went to högskolan in Sundsvall. She was a shy eater and didn't have school dinners. She went home in the lunch hour instead (though she didn't necessarily eat much at home either).

Once when she was going home she was followed by Tok-Bertil ("Mad Bertil") and had to take refuge in a shop. The shopkeeper had to call for her mum to come and get her. 

Tok-Bertil was the well-known local idiot. He may easily have been harmless, or he may not. No-one knew, but you didn't want to be followed by him.

My mum has been friends with Berit since they were 11. (She has an even older friend, Bo.)  

Dad said that when he was at school in Penrith they used to bait the village idiot. Shocking, but it was just what schoolboys did, in those days. (c. 1945).

Once, in the 1970s, my Dad was in the Penrith area and decided to visit his old school. He sauntered in to what was now a police HQ and began taking photos. 

Security descended. It was at the height of IRA activity on what was then called "the mainland". My dad was questioned at length by an unsmiling intelligence officer. When he tells this story he makes himself sound like a slightly hysterical Bertie Wooster, prattling away fondly about his schooldays. 

Eventually the intelligence officer decided my dad actually was as oblivious as he sounded. He ordered him to walk to his car without looking to left or right, get in, drive away, and never come back. 

My mum did national service. She was a "Lotta". She did it with some other girls from her school. Her best friend Anna-Greta, Birgitta Pettersson and Margareta Alvar. 

She learned how to spot planes and to radio in the details. She had a muster point with instructions to assemble if the sirens went, meaning Sweden was at war. They also sold hot drinks at ski events, wearing their smart uniforms. 

Portrait of Ptolemy I (on a coin by a later Ptolemy).  

From my dad's collection of ancient coins. I spent an hour chatting with him about them, and took numerous photos, most of which were total failures. 

Portrait of Alexander the Great bearing the horns of Ammon, on a Thracian coin from the reign of Lysimachus. 

Lysimachus, like Ptolemy I, had been one of Alexander's generals.

Ptolemy wrote a history of Alexander's campaigns. It's lost, but it was one of Arrian's main sources. 

The books you live with. My mum is reading Lilla Marilla for the hundredth time. 

This is one of the Anne of Green Gables books by the Canadian author L. M. Montgomery; the final one, in terms of the narrative sequence, though not the last to be written. In English it's called Rilla of Ingleside. It was written soon after WW1, which plays a big part in the story. 

Annika shares mum's passion for the Anne of Green Gables books. My dad considers them too sentimental; the only L.M. Montgomery book he has any time for is The Blue Castle.

New age

 

Hypericum pulchrum. Battle, 30 June 2022.

For various reasons I'm not going to have much time to blog over the next month or two. Anyway, here are some pictures of a little group of Slender St John's-wort (Hypericum pulchrum) that I saw while walking with my family in Great Wood, Battle (E. Sussex) last Thursday. This is a managed woodland and it's good to see the variety of wild plants slowly increasing. The best place to see Hypericum pulchrum in those parts is, or used to be, Fore Wood in Crowhurst (ancient oak woodland). Hypericum pulchrum really is beautiful, like its botanical name. The stems and buds are often reddish, but not on this particular specimen.

In Sweden it's called Hedjohannesört (i.e. "Heath St John's-wort"). It's a rare plant there, growing only on heaths near the west coast. 

It occurs in most of the British Isles but has somewhat declined in central England since 1950. It only likes acidic habitats, which perhaps accounts for why I've never noticed it in my thirty years of living in Frome and Swindon. 

Hypericum pulchrum. Battle, 30 June 2022.

Detail of the previous photo. You can just make out the black dots on the edges of the petals. You can also make out the toothed sepals mentioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Le mille-pertuis élégant est une espèce branchue qui croît dans les bois et dans les bruyères, avec des tiges en forme de colonne ; les feuilles embrassent la tige ; elles sont unies et en forme de cœur ; les calices sont dentelés, avec des dents garnies de glandes.

The Elegant St John's-wort [Hypericum pulchrum] is a branched species that grows in woods and heaths, with columnar stems ; the leaves clasp the stem ; they are plain and heart-shaped ; the calyces are toothed, with some teeth furnished with glands. 

(from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique, Letter XV, 4 June 1776)

In later life Rousseau (1712 - 1778) had become an excellent botanist. He was still in robust health when he wrote this letter, but a few months later he was concussed in a Paris street accident (Oct 1776), and he began to suffer seizures. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 2 July 1778.

These letters on the elements of botany, written to instruct the daughters of Mme. Delessert, were published as a book in 1785 and were much admired. Goethe said: "It's a true pedagogical model, and it complements Emile".

*

The lichens and mosses are especially delightful. The restriction of my mental horizon to the microcosmic beauties of plant life is one of the few consolations left to me on this earth, and I hope to spend my last years focused on my botanical studies, which never seem to progress, which move about in circles of forgetting and remembering, rotating on the same spot, without utility or value to any one else, but which for that reason are all the more precious to me. ...  I no longer want to be seen as a writer or a philosopher in the eyes of the world, and maybe if I complete my recollections of the life I have led I will at last be able to quench this compulsion to write things down, and finally be granted by God the quietness of mind that I will need to enjoy my last years on this earth. I had thought briefly of writing a compendium of plants, a botanical encyclopaedia, but the task is too great for me to complete, my knowledge is inadequate.  . . .

(from Andrew Key's Ross Hall (Grand Iota, 2021), a novel about Rousseau's time in England).

*

The OED does not commit itself to a specific explanation for the vernacular name "St John's-wort". Similar names occur through much of Europe, from Portugal to Serbia to Norway. 

The usual explanation is that Hypericum perforatum (the most common species) comes into flower around the time of the Feast of St John the Baptist (24 June). This theory works out all right in much of the British Isles, but it doesn't make sense in, say, Spain, where "hierba de San Juan" comes into flower in March. 

One of the earliest OED entries, from a herbal in 1530-ish,  notes the alternative name "Herb John", which of course resembles the form of the name in Spanish, etc. This format also links it to some other vernacular names that still survive today: e.g. "Herb Robert" and "Herb Bennet". "Herb Christopher" clings on as an alternative name for Baneberry, and (according to Mrs Grieve) also seems to have been applied to Royal Fern. "Herb Gerard" (Ground Elder, Goutweed) is supposed to be named for St Gerard of Toul (c. 935 - 994) who is said to have begun using it to treat gout.  In none of the other cases is there a clear "explanation" for the name; we can guess that three of the names refer to major Christian saints, but "Robert" eludes us.  

What is apparent is that the plants concerned were all used medicinally (though Baneberry is highly toxic). I suppose what I'm suggesting is that these names achieved fixity because they both resembled each other and differed from each other, which is the perfect combination for educative purposes. The original reason for such and such a species acquiring such and such a name, if there ever was one, is lost to history. The names survived within herbalist circles because of their intrinsic memorableness.

Hypericum pulchrum. Battle, 30 June 2022.

Things I learned while away in Sussex:

Bexhill-on-Sea has its own flag (since 1893). We saw it being displayed among the union jacks in the main streets.

How to play Shark Tag in the swimming pool. 

Two versions of a Swedish counting rhyme. To me they are just nonsense, so apologies if they contain anything offensive!

My mum's:

Binke bane koff

Koffe lane doff

Doffe lane binke bane

Ulle dulle doff!

My nephew Finn's:

Ulle dulle doff

Kinke nane koff

Ettan pettan puff

Du får en knuff

av puff!

Here's a very rapid one from Laura's Somerset childhood, perhaps with faint traces of the days when children were taught Latin.

Eeny meeny maccaracca

Dare down dominacca

Chickaracca bominacca

Om Pom Push!

The sung version of the alphabet in US English. You can sing it to the melody of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (but miss out the middle part).

A-B-C-D-E-F-G

H-I-J-K l-m-n-o-P

Q-R-S-T-U and V

Double-U X and Y and Zee

There is a Swedish equivalent, but it's a bit different towards the end. "dubbel-vi"is promoted to the end of the third line, and this allows room in the fourth line for the three additional letters in the Swedish alphabet: Å, Ä, Ö. (oar, air, err)

My English grandmother used to teach us a brisk marching chant that went like this:

Abaca Defaghij

Kalama Nop

Qrestuvee Double-you

Ex Why Zed

Actually, this was my pedantic rationalization of what she was saying. It really sounded more like this:

Abaca Deffergee

Kalama Nop

Restervee Double-you

Ex Why Zed

When we tired of this marching chant, she had another one to keep us moving smartly along Eastbourne sea-front. I'll need to put in bar lines for this one:

                 L                   R                   L         R     L          R       L

           I ||: had a good | home that I | LEFT, |      | LEFT, |        | LEFT, a |  

                R                L                    R            L     R            L    R

               home that | always was | RIGHT, |      | RIGHT, |     | RIGHT, and| 

                L                     R          L          R     L           R      L

               I always was | sorry I | LEFT, |      | LEFT, |       | LEFT that|

                R                 L                   R           L      R            L      R

               home that | always was | RIGHT, |      | RIGHT, |       | RIGHT. ( I ) :||

*

OK, that's all that time allows for now. See you for the occasional flying post in the weeks ahead. 

 

The Gustafssons

My Sundsvall grandparents were Klas and Sigrid Gulliksson.

This post focusses on the family of my maternal grandmother (mormor). She was born Sigrid Matilda Gustafsson on 26 June 1906. (Mum says that Mormor hated the name Matilda!)

It's a companion to an earlier post which focusses on my grandfather's side of the family, the Gullikssons: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/05/min-morfar.html

Sigrid was the youngest sibling.

Karl Gustafsson (1868 - 1937)  m.  Amanda (1872 - 1927)

                                          |

Anna  (1898 - 1976)    

Ida (died in childhood)  

A boy (Signe? died in childhood)  

Greta  (1901 - 1988)

Sigrid   (1906 - 1997)

One of  the surviving nuggets of family history is the coincidence that the birthdays of Karl, Ida and Greta all fell on the same day, 24 August. 

Karl's name was also spelled "Carl", e.g on his Kungliga Patriotiska Sällskap medal. 

Inscription on a pewter vase, a birthday present to Karl from his children in 1929. 

Karl Gustafsson

Karl once owned the Belgian pinfire pistol that I remember from my dad's gun collection. Dad used to say it was so flimsily made that it was more likely to injure the user than an assailant. 

Karl came from Uppsala. He travelled long distance between Uppsala and Sundsvall with the brewery's casks of alcohol. There was some danger of being robbed on the way. His forebears had been Walloon; Huguenots who brought iron-mining expertise to Sweden.

(But I feel there's a chronological mismatch in the idea that the pistol has anything to do with his Belgian ancestry. Karl's pistol was modern. But with a surname like Gustafsson, Karl must have been at least two generations removed from any Belgian connection.)

It wasn't necessarily strong alcohol. He also brought the casks of "svagdryck", very weak beer that townsfolk drank instead of water, which could still carry disease in those days. (This was the basis of the "beer soup" that my mother, according to family legend, largely lived on as a child. She was a nervous eater, a condition made worse by anxious relatives fussing over her.)

Amanda Gustafsson

Amanda was from Sundsvall. When Karl and Amanda married they lived near the river in Sundsvall (Selångersån). Karl worked for the brewery in Sundsvall. 

Amanda died when Sigrid was about 21. By the time of Sigrid's marriage Karl was elderly and not very well. His feet had been frozen on those Uppsala-Sundsvall trips so he had bad circulation. 

His house was Albäcksgatan 4. This was also Klas and Sigrid's first home. They lived there to take care of him. He died when Eva was about one year old, and they left Albäcksgatan when she was two or three. 

She could already talk. Both her memorable phrases are cellar-related. She used to say "Är de jåttar, mamma?" (Is it rats?) and "Kas eldar!" (Klas is lighting the stove!) He had to do this once a day. Banked up, the stove in the cellar would stay alight and provide warmth for the next twenty-four hours. 

*

Sigrid was fourteen years younger than her husband Klas. I don't know when they got married but Eva (my mum) was born on 7 September 1936. Sigrid was 30 and Klas was 44. 

Anna never married. When I knew her she lived in Falköping. Greta did marry (Erik Andersson; they lived in Stockholm), but it was a late marriage and they did not have any children. My mum was in effect an only child and an only grandchild, on both sides of her family. (There were other children on Klas' side of the family but they were in America and no-one would ever meet them. In those days, emigration was a forever thing.)

I knew Mormor and her sisters Anna and Greta far better than I ever knew Morfar or his relatives. (In her later years, after Erik's death, Greta lived much of the time with Sigrid.) I knew them all as beloved presences, as kindly and loving relations. 

But as a child I lived only in the present: their nice homes and generosity and food and laughter. Because of the language barrier, I never knew much about them. 

And generally I still know less about the Gustafsson side of the family than the Gullikssons. Maybe one factor is that Eva herself never knew either of her Gustafsson grandparents.  

Two of the Gustafsson girls. Anna and Greta, I think.

Anna Gustafsson

I loved Moster Anna dearly. Partly because of her delightful personality, and partly because we usually visited her near the beginning of our summer holiday in Sweden, after long days of driving through France, Belgium, Netherlands, West Germany and up through Denmark, the distances ever elongating. To arrive at Anna's welcoming apartment in Falköping was to feel that now the most precious part of the whole year had well and truly begun. 

When Anna was still living in Sundsvall she worked for a certain doctor Svensson. And so did a lady called Berna. 

And thus it came about that Berna and Willem Eriksson became friends with Sigrid and Klas. Berna and Willem had a son Bosse who was three years younger than my mother Eva. Lacking any young relatives of her own Eva always referred to Bosse as "my little brother". They have remained lifelong friends. Bo and Gunilla live in Borlänge (Dalarna).

Anna never married. In Falköping she was "föreståndare" in charge of the food at a fancy hotel; a catering manager I suppose. But I think she had retired when I knew her. 

Her flat was nicely furnished and after her death some of the furniture came to my mum and dad's house in Battle where they became the setting of numberless family feasts and games of Canasta: the white dining table with its two leaves, the dining chairs, and the cabinet for the best crockery; all "Orrafors", designed by Carl Malmsten in 1962 and 1963. 

Greta Andersson

Greta was a cook for a well-off family in Stockholm. She married Erik Andersson late in life. Perhaps Erik was already retired, because no-one can remember what job he did. First they lived in a flat in central Stockholm. Dad remembers when he first drove there; Mum could make out the street from the flyover but finding the right exit was a nightmare. 

Later they moved out to an apartment in the "dormitory town" of Kista. After Erik's death, Greta lived most of the time with her sister Sigrid. 

I think the little vacuum cleaner that I still use came from Moster Greta. 

Sigrid Gulliksson (min mormor)

After Greta's death in 1988, Sigrid was lonelier than ever. Her health declined and she eventually went into care, with symptoms of Alzheimer's before the end. My mother flew back and forth from England; she went nine times in Sigrid's final year.

According to Mum, one of Sigrid's favourite sayings was Alla sätt äro bra utom de tråkiga! (All ways are good except the boring ones.)

Also according to Mum, Sigrid was fond of this snatch of song:

Hejsan grabbar, ska ni vara me' ?
Ja min lilla flicka, var lugn för det.
Ska vi dansa hambo, ska vi dansa vals ?
Nej min lilla flicka, jag dansar inte alls !

Sigrid was not impressed when Eva, then about eleven, suddenly needed seven fillings in her teeth! There had been a craze at school for collecting toffee-wrappers, which of course meant you had to eat a lot of toffees. Despite this indifferent start, Mum (nearing 90) still has all her teeth, as she proudly points out.

Mum's cousins.

Amanda had siblings, though I don't know how many or their names. Anyway, it was through one of them that Sigrid had a first cousin called Bernard, married to Anni. I don't remember them, but my Dad met them.

Bernard and Anni had two daughters. 

One was Sylvia, who married Ragnar, one of eleven children from a poor family from the remote hamlet Återvänningen. Sigrid remained close to them and I remember Sylvia and Ragnar fondly. It was at their house that I first tasted surströmming. They had a daughter Inge, who married Lennart. Inge died recently (2023).

Bernard and Anni's other daughter was Aina, who married a bus driver called Yngve. They had two children, Monica and Lage. 

When Sigrid died in 1997, I met mum's cousins at the funeral; Inge, Monica, Lage and their partners. They were now Mum's closest relatives in Sweden. For the next fifteen years or so Mum and Dad used to meet up with "the cousins" each summer while they were in Norrland. 

I've visited Monica's home several times and am still in touch with her. She and husband Leif (truck driver, now retired) live in Ljustorp. They have one daughter, Annica.

Mum told me that when WW2 started and the future of Sweden was uncertain every Sundsvall family had to have cases packed for evacuation, and their own plan was to go to Ljustorp, so I suppose Aina was already living there.

Eva with her doll

Eva with Michael

Klas and Sigrid with Michael

Eva, Greta and Sigrid

Min mormor

The turning back

 

As far as I can remember the first time I met Monica and Leif was at Mormor's funeral in 1997. Afterwards we repaired for fika (coffee and cakes) to the restaurant on Norra Stadsberget in Sundsvall. This was the town where my mormor Sigrid lived and died, and where my mum grew up.  

With Mormor's death, Monica was now one of our closest relatives still living in the north of Sweden, though she's a distant cousin. Monica doesn't like travelling outside the north, and we haven't been there for a while, so it's been a few years since we met face to face but we're still in touch. 

I'ver never exactly known how my mum is related to Monica, and I still don't. But anyway, last week when visiting my mum she began to reminisce about her country cousins. She was uncertain about some details, and I may have misunderstood others, so this grades into legend. (The placenames are all in the outback of northern Medelpad, close to the border with Jämtland.)

Basically, there were two sisters in  Lagfors. One was called Sylvia and the other Aina. Monica is the daughter of Aina and her husband Yngve. (Now in their seventies, Monica and her husband Leif live at Ljustorp, near to Lagfors. Their daughter Annica is a nurse.)

I remember Sylvia from my childhood. At that time Sylvia and her husband Ragnar were living in (or near?) Sundsvall and they were good friends of my grandparents. They had a house with a large garden. I remember being there one sunny day towards the end of August, chasing round the raspberry bushes with my sister and sampling the yellow fruit, also tasting a forkful of surströmming and the hearty laughter when I recoiled from the novel smell. 

Ragnar came from a remote hamlet in the endless woods north of Lagfors. The name of the hamlet is Återvänningen, which means "the turning back". 

It gained this name because it marked the southernmost point reached by the invading Russian army. 

Ragnar was one of many siblings. When the Russian forces were approaching (this was in about 1912), the villagers abandoned their homes and fled to pre-planned locations in the woods. But when Ragnar's large family reassembled, his parents discovered to their horror that one toddler had been left behind, little Anna. But there was nothing to be done about it now. The Russian troops were entering the village. 

They didn't stay there long. When they had definitely gone, the family returned to the village with heavy hearts. And there they found little Anna. 

She had been sitting on a garden wall when the troops filed past. She had been very impressed with their smart appearance. One soldier had given her a little coin, a silver kopek that she clutched in her hand. 

*

How much of this is true I don't know. It is true that there have been Russian incursions into northern Sweden. For instance, there was a brief Russian occupation of Västerbotten in 1809. (This was during the "Finnish War", when Finland ceased to be part of Sweden and became part of Russia instead.) There was also a Russian presence in northern Sweden during an earlier conflict (1719-1721).

Återvänningen is a real place. It's an odd name, but I've so far been unable to track down any written source that relates it to a Russian invasion. 

 

At Wivex

Some time around 1950, Eva (later, my mum) got onto the bus outside her house in Fridhemsgatan to travel the short distance into central Sundsvall.  On the bus, to her astonishment, was a black man, the first she had ever seen. He was tall and well-dressed. He was a musician, he was carrying a trumpet in its case.

They were heading for the same place, of course; Wivex, the dance hall (danspalats) in Sundsvall town centre. Eva was starstruck. Later, while he was playing, she stood right next to the stage. I would have married him instantly, she reminisced last week. No doubt there were plenty of other Sundsvall girls who were thinking the same.

(A little later, my mum became a big fan of Sammy Davis, Jr.)

In Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1951.

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021015971387/ungdomstraff-pa-wivex-med-dans-och-umgange . The photo is in Sundsvall Museum.]

In Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1954

[Image source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/011015443785/reportagebilder-fran-danspalatset-wivex-i-sundsvall . The photo is in Sundsvall Museum.]

Danspalatset Wivex opened in 1941 and ran until 1979. The illuminated sign at 16 Torggatan still lives on. (It's currently a hair salon, Salong Wivex.)

The dance hall was a place for singles to meet. Eva once spotted the husband of a distant relative among the Wivex crowd. That was not OK. She considered him a shady customer after that.

Outside Wivex, Sundsvall. Photo from 1959.

*

Jonny Campbell (1917 - 2010)

[Image source: https://jazzkjeld.typepad.com/neworleansdelight/2010/11/johnny-campbell-er-d%C3%B8d.html .]

I cherish the belief, though I can never prove it, that the musician Eva saw that evening was Jonny Campbell. In which case the instrument was a saxophone, not a trumpet -- and she saw a true legend. 

Jonny and his brother Jimmy were the multi-talented sons of Afro-American tap-dancer William Campbell and his Danish wife Oda. During the Nazi occupation of Denmark the brothers were in the Harlem Kiddies, one of Copenhagen's most popular dance groups (it had three black musicians and a Jewish singer!). Later, for instance as the Jonny Campbell Sextet, they toured Scandinavia extensively. Jonny played the saxophone and clarinet, Jimmy the guitar. You can hear them both in action here:

*



Springtime for two fingers


Amazing number of violins
that lay hidden under the snow!
Now the black cases are open.
The lemon butterfly fine-tunes
its wings. The swallow
up-dives from the lake.

The long silver strings
stretched between the mountain and the valley
start to vibrate.
Everything imitates everything.
The eaves of the roof imitate
the tree sparrow's chip chip.
What does Plato say about the frog?
That she imitates the purling stream!

I enrol in the school of nature.
Turn my score to face its master:
the origin of all music.


My translation of Våretyd för två fingrar by Werner Aspenström, from his 1956 collection Dikter under träden (Poems under the trees). Werner Aspenström (1918 - 1997) was born in Norrbärke in Dalarna.

Two more poems by Werner Aspenström: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/05/werner-aspenstrom.html .]

*

This poem was made into a song by the Gävle composer Bo Linde (1933 - 1970), appropriately with a two-finger piano accompaniment. (Fjorton sånger om våren, för sopran och piano, op. 40.)

soldering iron

Last week I was at the funeral of my uncle Tony, in Hove. It was the same spot I was at a year previously, for my aunt Julie. Now the two are together again.

My dad produced a picture of him and Tony in 1941, when they were in the Lake District, evacuated there from Eastbourne. They were on a bike ride. The ten-year-old Tony's confidence with the bike, leant negligently against him, was in marked contrast to his cowboy-hatted younger brother's excitement and anxiety. Tony had just taught him to ride. For my dad a bike ride was a literary experience whose meaning you could express in words; for Tony it was something deeper and less articulate, something you did and were good at.

Strange contrast to their later lives: then it was Tony who seemed like the anxious one, kindly but shy, awkward with social settings. He had trained as an engineer with the RAF, later he was an electronic engineer for radio and TV manufacturers. He and Julie lived quiet lives, wrapped up in their hobbies. I can't think of Tony without thinking about things: his collection of the oldest radios, his model aeroplanes and trains, his 78s (later, CDs) of Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Chet Atkins, Elvis Presley, his books of silent movie stills. I feel I have quite a lot in common with him, but we never really got to know each other, the shyness was too deep on both sides. At the funeral my dad recalled Tony's shapeless working jacket, bulging with components, screwdrivers, flux, a soldering iron...  When we emptied their house last summer, one of the rooms was entirely devoted to little labelled cabinets of screws, transistors, diodes, terminal clips, wire.

Coincidentally, the next day I had to buy a soldering iron. I've never used one before, but now I had no choice. For weeks the driver's side rear light hadn't been working; indeed the bulb wouldn't even fit, the bulb-holder was so badly corroded. And even if I could have fitted it, it wouldn't have worked, because one of the connectors had simply flaked off and disappeared. I really needed a new bulb-holder, but I couldn't source one. So I had to fix up what I had with adapted bits from a not-quite-mirror-image bulb-holder for the passenger's side. It was a hideous job, but after many hours of intricate work clumsily executed with inappropriate tools, much cursing -- and eventually some poor-quality soldering -- I am legal again. It was a bodge, the inevitable resort of those (like my dad and me) who would rather spend time reading.    

12, Bath Road

Following my last post, I found myself revisiting my grandmother's house, which I still know so well.

Those grandparent addresses, 12 Bath Road and Fridhemsgatan 11 ("elva"), were the continuities that stuck. We ourselves, like other young families going places, moved house every couple of years, but Mutti and Mormor were more stable.

"Mutti" was our English grandmother, Ruth Peverett née Plowright. She lived in this quiet cul-de-sac street in Eastbourne, a street that I childishly assumed was named after the kind of bath you have before bed-time.

Mutti named her house "Odd Corner", but when you wrote a letter you still had to write "12 Bath Road". "Odd Corner" was optional, it was one of those things I conceived as a touch of extra pleasure to the recipient; as when I wrote " , Esq." to my father.

And I noticed that the shape of the street,  which ended in a blank wall, did indeed resemble a bathtub. Along both sides were small terraced houses. No. 12 was the innermost on one side, apart from a small office, a broker's or something. All the houses looked much the same, but the doors were different colours. Mutti's was black, which I considered very stylish. Though my secret favourite, a little way up the road, was primrose yellow.

*

We come into the hall, a corridor with a staircase at the far end. The doorway into the rest of the ground floor is on the right. Here in the hall was the bust of Beethoven, looking fierce and gloomy, and also the grandfather clock that we used to wind every other morning. As I tour the rooms now, I can see all the objects, one by one, so vividly that it's hard to believe that they aren't still there. But I know they aren't. After all, one of them, a heavy dome of blue Venetian glass, is right here today in my own flat in Swindon (I use it to prop open the bedroom door).

It was a small terraced house, with a cement back garden that contained a stone owl and a hydrangea planted in a bath-tub. To one side, a shed with an outside lavatory.

Sometimes I think I remember the house better than I remember Mutti herself.

But it isn't true. It's just easier to pin down static objects. A person is never static. Here she is, first thing in the morning, kneeling on the mat while she lays the coal fire in the grate. She's scrumpling up pages from an old copy of the Radio Times, or the church magazine. (She also used these resources to make squares of toilet paper.) When she's ready, we light a spill and apply it to the fire lighters at rear left, and rear right.  If the spill is less than half burnt, she stubs it out for next time. We see the warmth long before we feel it, like the sun on a winter morning.

If I ever chance to meet Mutti again (it's a chance I can't quite bring myself to give up on), I feel we won't be strangers, we'll interact as in this memory.

And yet I also know that even while she still lived, we had lost our togetherness. I was in my twenties, she was in a care home. I had already mislaid my Mutti and didn't know how to bring her back when I visited her. The present moment took over from nostalgia: the ceaseless shifting of her foot as she sat in her armchair and we tried to chat, but she now had no life of her own to chat about, and mine felt difficult to share. 12, Bath Road had gone while I was away at university, preoccupied with my own life, things that then seemed more important.



*

The glass dome, now in my flat

*

Repeatedly, if not regularly, new memories of that place and time still come back.

Mutti used to make rice cheese, a meal I adored just as much as the macaroni cheese we had at home. 

Mutti used to fold over the end of the sellotape so you didn't have to pick at it. (A lesson I ignored at the time, but have taken on board fifty years later.)  She pronounced it SEALOTAPE. She also pronounced Marmite as MARMEAT, I suppose on the French model. 

When Annika was born in October 1962, Mutti stayed up in Leicestershire to look after me.

I remember Mutti taking me to evenings of chamber music somewhere just up the road near the town hall (Haydn? Dvořák?). And to the rehearsals of the visiting symphony orchestra at the Congress Theatre: attending them was free.

When I returned from a summer fortnight in Lorraine at the age of fifteen, I stayed with Mutti (Mum and Dad would still have been in Sweden). I was in love. I told Mutti about Christiane Trabuc from Marseilles, at that time the most beautiful girl in existence. Mutti's eyes lit up, she was very encouraging; it was a side of her that I hadn't seen before. It made me certain that Mutti herself had been in love with her handsome French friend Pierre, whose photo hung on the wall above the dining table, along with a painting of a Paris street scene. 

A few years after that (I must have been at uni by now), I took it into my head to pay Mutti a surprise visit at 12 Bath Road; to come and stay with her. I thought it would delight her. Her look of shock when she answered the door, her evident difficulty at adjusting to my plan (I can't remember now if I did stay or not) . . .it remains with me as one of my grievous memories. One of those moments when I stupidly realized that things weren't the same any more, that Mutti was old and anxious and frail, and that the safe haven of my childhood no longer existed. 

The stone owl, now in my sister Annika's garden

But I find I'm repeating a poem I wrote thirty years ago. I've managed to track it down, I'm not recommending it, but it's useful for me so I'll paste it here.


*




Mutti


When I was a child & you were old
Your shadowy friends, the telephone calls
That interrupted our play - & how they'd talk!
But in the darkness of eight o'clock,
As definite as the hall clock,
I had you to myself & knew in sleep
How you put yourself to bed without a thought
Of anything but library books due for return
& the shoes put out to take to the menders.

The breeze in the road that blows the raindrops
Into resembling snow;
A cry of gulls out there,
Of rigging & the shouts of men
Preparing a ship to sail,
Not well imagined, but with a remembered scent
Of the morning wind flapping in flintwalled streets
On the way to church.

I am a little boy, whose feet stop well short of the bed-end, leaving a tranquil space that is draped in a gaily checkered shawl, & here the hot-water bottle makes an isolated hummock, like Glastonbury Tor.

Their origins & purposes obscure, I lay
& stared for a long time at the boxes
On the dresser, glass & pewter, intricate
& utterly placid, before it occurred to me
That it must be morning.

"Is that you dear?
Grannie's still in bed."

I never saw you sleep. I snuggled in beside you
While you read the prayer-book, advancing the bookmark
To another page, then turning to the end
To read a psalm. Later, I watched you dress,
Intrigued by your wrinkled belly and behind,
Folded like whipped cream in a bowl.

Then you fiddled at your dressing-table with an ebony hand-mirror, or tiny jars in silver braziers, half-full of vermillion & turquoise paste. You also powdered your nose, which age had softened and enlarged, so that like other grown-ups you appeared gigantic, even arboreal.

On an awkward knee-high table by the bed was a wireless installed by Tony; it gave constant trouble, you couldn't even tune it, you always said: "I'll ask Tony to fix it." & you pretended you didn't need it. Sacrifice was your commonest key.

In the days before my appetite increased
& yours disappeared,
Sometimes you made porridge in a small unstable saucepan.
Having styled yourself Mutti,
You persuaded me that you were somehow German;
Like your alpine jigsaws & Oberammagau.
& besides, you'd played the violin.
You appeared to inhabit the world of Brahms or Beethoven.

You gave me toast, cut into ranks of soldiers,
& spread with dripping & Marmite, which you mispronounced.

The dripping (later I worked it out) had been carried home triumphantly in a bowl covered in muslin, from a house where you had been asked to "help out", the fruit of a patient, humble request. I've heard you ask for vegetable water, & refuse to budge despite dissuasion, despite embarrassed offers to purchase all kinds of fresh vegetables for you. You had grown accustomed to the borders of service, rejecting thanks & rejecting thanks until our gratitude was swollen & inflamed like a fire to which you had applied the bellows. This odd behaviour was forgiven you.

Inappropriate, 26-inch screen,
Twin-garage gold, you wouldn't wear
Even in August in a garden
Where your dark silver hair & brooch,
Settled on coal-grey,
Defined your later age
& your attenuated ceremonial,
Empty of robust macaroni-stuffing appetite
If not compulsion.

That was when you visited
Cross-country, changing at Heathfield;
I imagine you over-heating
Toting a tiny suitcase
Of olive-black leather
Or some cheap substitute
Not without elegance
The neatness of rationing.

Adolescence's
Quick sympathy, long absences,
Clumsy calls you couldn't manage:
It is autumn, beauty.
& you getting smaller,
Breasting the leaves,
Gasping for air.

With iron face I mourned your destruction
Before it happened. Perhaps you didn't see,
In the long quiet pauses, while you shuffled your feet,
& I timed my visit to end for the train.

An evening alone, & with inordinate effort
I try to recover the rules of a patience
We shared a quarter-century ago.
"Once in a Blue Moon" you said it was called;
But I must misremember, for it comes out every time.

And what was her name?
How fully I enjoyed the lack of confidences,
Your ready recognition
That all was beyond me.

Frank and Alexa's circle

This is another foray into the vacuums, tittle-tattle and misunderstood facts that constitutes family history (a topic I always listen to with fascination, but  never seem able to retain).

There was an intellectual circle in London in, let's say, around 1900. There were many such circles, of course, but I am interested in this one because it includes my great-grandparents: Edward (known as Frank) Plowright, a bank manager in Croydon, and his wife Alexandra (known as Alexa), née Porecky.

Alexa's father Alexander, born in 1814, had emigrated to England from Poland via Paris. He was variously recorded as "Médecin", umbrella-maker, "Inventor in Mechanics", "Commercial Agent in gold and silver leaf", "Trading in leaf gold"... We still have designs for paddle-wheels and umbrella-opening mechanisms.

In subsequent years family opinion was divided on whether Alexa was of Jewish extraction; Marjorie (her eldest daughter) always maintained it, but my grandmother Ruth (5 December 1897 - 10 September 1985) always denied it. Most likely Marjorie was right. A record of Alexa's birth (6 December 1859, soon after her father moved to London) records her names as Sarah Sulamith. Doubtless Alexa was not a practising Jew by the time she married; she was perhaps a "free-thinker" more than anything. Ruth inherited Alexa's lovely jet-black hair, and in turn passed it down to my dad. (When I knew Ruth, she was a devout Christian, but I didn't realize that this was not an inheritance from her parents, but rather something she had inherited "upwards" from my father.)

Frank and Alexa's circle, if it really did exist and is not just post-posited, had two geographical centres: the Doughty Street area of Holborn (home of many writers, most famously Charles Dickens back in 1837-39), and Croydon, where Frank and Alexa gave at-homes. I have a vision of a house with a lovely large garden; my grandmother must have told me about it.

Its luminaries included the young composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (born in Holborn, lived in Croydon) and Ramsay MacDonald, co-founder of the Labour Party and subsequently Prime Minister. Chesterton and Shaw, among others, were said to be occasional passage migrants.

Alexa, an idealist and intellectual, corresponded with MacDonald about the Labour movement. She also received affectionate letters from the elderly Francis Espinasse, the "Nestor of Victorian journalism", author of Lancashire Worthies,  biographies of Voltaire and Renan, etc.

Frank and Alexa had six children:

Marjorie
Dickie (died in childhood)
Ruth (my grandmother)
Joan
Esther
Oliver (known as Bobby)

After six children Alexa didn't want any more. That might be one reason why Frank began a second family with a girl he met in a shoe-shop in Midhurst. Her name was Nell Azulay (a Sephardic Jewish surname, incidentally). Alexa, now needing her own income, began to work as a masseuse. A highly respectable kind of masseuse (probably best seen as kind of alternative health therapy); but in order to maintain the respectable air she needed to be safely married, so would not countenance a divorce. Hence Frank and Nell were unable to marry until Alexa's death.

All the girls were educated at home, except Esther, who was deemed "too much of a handful".

Ruth was musical. Like Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie Walmisley, she attended the Royal College of Music, as a violinist. As a child she had known Coleridge-Taylor well (he died when she was 14), and later remembered playing for Elgar and Delius. (She recalled Delius as paralyzed and blind, so this would probably have been in the mid 1920s.)

Marjorie inherited her mother's intellectual passion. She was the only one of the siblings seriously interested in literature (accordingly, she was my dad's favourite aunt). She went from Catholicism to Unitarianism to Communism to atheism. She married "beneath her"; John Mantle, a Southampton working man and a Catholic, who already had two children by an earlier marriage (Pauline, who became a nun, and Jack, a posthumous VC -- he died, aged 23, heroically manning his anti-aircraft gun on HMS Foylebank in Portland Harbour on July 4, 1940). Joan and Howard (see below) helped Marjorie's husband John Mantle to set up his own shop, but he over-extended and went bankrupt. Later he was a cargo checker at Southampton docks. One of my vivid childhood memories is going out for a winter walk in the streets of Southampton with John Mantle after morning porridge; I was instantly very fond of him, as of Uncle Howard -- I suppose I missed having a grandfather to hand.

Bobby (as he was known -- his given name was Oliver) trained as a GP. He became known as "Hampstead's Doctor", according to Melvyn Bragg. This was in his Guardian obituary of Bobby's son, the radio producer Piers Plowright (30 December 1937 - 23 July 2021), Bragg's friend and fellow Hampstead resident.

Joan, who trained as a dancer, married a wealthy director of Woolworths, Howard Dear (Howard's brother was the film director Basil Dearden). When I knew them they lived in a big house at Reigate just below the crest of the North Downs; Annika and I remember Christmas gatherings there, in particular the luxurious gifts in the crackers. Howard and their adopted son Andrew were both loud buoyant personalities; Joan was static, gracious and smiling. She ordered Howard around, and the miniature dachshunds got under our feet and yapped. Uncle Howard and I agreed in preferring Indian tea to China tea. 

During the war Joan was living in a cottage, somewhere in Kent I think. One day she woke up to find smoke outside all the windows. Terrified, she called the fire wardens. But when they arrived, they found the cottage was not on fire. It was draped in the diaphanous veils of a deflated barrage balloon! 

Inevitably, I suppose, there was sometimes a perceptible distance between the better-off, smart, Londoners (Joan, Esther and Bobby) and the less well-off elder sisters they generously assisted, Marjorie and Ruth.  Ruth had married a fellow-musician, a cellist named Roy. They played in palm court orchestras. But the marriage broke down. Ruth raised her two boys as an impoverished single parent.

In later life Ruth was good friends with both Pauline the nun and "Auntie Nell" the former shoe-girl. In fact it was Nell who first invited Ruth and her young family to come and stay with her in Eastbourne.  Here Ruth settled, my dad grew up and, in due course, I was born.

When my dad and his elder brother Tony were boys (late 1940s) they lived in Gildredge Road. They used to buy their minimal groceries at Sainsbury's in Cornfield Road. Ruth received very little support from her estranged husband. Once she even took him to court and won, but the support soon dried up again and she couldn't afford to keep trying; there was no legal aid in those days. To make some money, Ruth used to work at an antique shop in Gildredge Road owned by Mrs Bedwyn. The snag was that Mrs Bedwyn herself often had no money. Instead Ruth sometimes received payment in the form of antiques. These were the nice pieces that I remember many years later in 12, Bath Road. Some of them later came to Mum and Dad's living-room in Battle; for instance the sofa with inlaid wood and the cabinet with a "secret" pop-up top, operated by a trigger in one of the drawers. 

Dad's desk came from another source. Ruth saw it at a greengrocers in Gildredge Road, on the corner of one of the small streets leading to Grove Road. They were using the drawers to store vegetables, but were willing to sell it to her for a pittance. The desk is starting to fall apart now, but it's had another eighty years of good service.

Alexandra Porecky

Between the death of her father and her marriage to Frank, Alexa had a brief career as an actress. My only photo of her comes from this period. It shows her in a farce-comedy, Our Flat, which was played in Hastings in 1891. The critic of the Hastings and Bexhill Observer (August 22, 1891) observed that Miss Alexandra Porecky's role as Madame Volant "was especially well-sustained".

[Our Flat, written by Mrs H. Musgrave, was first performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, on 13 June 1889.]

Ramsay MacDonald (1866 - 1937), photo from the early 1900s

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramsay_MacDonald ]

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875 - 1912)

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor ]

Around 1910. Frank and Alexa with (L-R) baby Esther, Ruth, Joan, Marjorie.

Around 1917. L-R: Ruth, a nanny (?), Esther, Marjorie, Frank, Alexa, Bobby, Joan.

An undated plan for "Semi Detached Houses to be erected at Foxley Lane, Purley, for Mr Plowright, Edridge Road, Croydon". I wonder if these houses were ever built? 

A young Ruth Plowright (my grandmother)

Recital given by Ruth and her future husband at Croydon on 20 May 1922.  On the programme, in addition to Tchaikovsky, Franck, Rimsky-Korsakov, etc, there was naturally some Coleridge-Taylor. Ruth ended the concert with his African Dance No IV (Op. 58). Prior to that, Roy had performed a piece called Réverie by "G. Coleridge-Taylor", with piano accompaniment by the composer. This was  the late Samuel's daughter, Gwendolyn Coleridge-Taylor, now nineteen. As "Gwen", she was a close friend of Ruth and Roy. (She had been composing since the age of 12. Later she preferred to use her second name, Avril.)

Gwendolyn Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903 - 1998)

[Image source: https://musictheoryexamplesbywomen.com/composers/avril-coleridge-taylor-1903-1998/ ]

For much more information see Charles Kay's excellent essay "The Marriage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Jessie Walmisley" (Black Music Research Journal, vol. 21 no. 2 (2001)):

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3181601 . (After many years of neglect, Avril Coleridge-Taylor's music is starting to be heard again, e.g. at the Proms and on Radio 3.)

Frank in later life (c. 1930).

Leading Seaman Jack Mantle (1917 - 1940)

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Mantle ]


Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: African Dance No. 4 in D minor:

https://youtu.be/rGINItWQf0o