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 to a Christian work-camp 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 when 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 work camp.

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 realized) was possibly not the only Christian work 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 in Firenze, a name I didn't recognize (where 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 Germany, then Denmark, then Sweden. And when I got to Sundsvall I showed up at my grandmother's flat. Of course she wasn't expecting me so soon, but she was brilliant. We couldn't communicate very well -- my Swedish was childish, and she'd never managed to learn any 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