Upstairs at Blue House Farm, stands an enormous chest which was built by our ancestor Per Olson Löv: This chest is filled to the brim with ‘stuff’. Before dementia completely overtook her (I won’t say ‘got the better of her’ because the best shone through to the very last ) mummy asked me a number to times, to help her sort it out. But each time we got as far as lifting the lid, her energy deserted her and she’d ask me to leave it for another day.
It’s a chest full of stories and family memorabilia and with a history of its own. In the early nineteenth century it survived a house fire by being heaved out of an upstairs window onto some straw. The person that did the heaving was our ancestor Karin Månsdotter. When we were children, we were often told the story of how Karin found a hoard of treasure in a field close to the family farm. But as she stooped to gather it, she startled a dragon who woke from his sleep and drew everything that was left into a hole in the ground with one great sweep of his tail. From that event, Karin salvaged a ring and a bracelet. I am the one who has inherited the bracelet but the treasure trove of family stories that mummy left us, is even better. All true of course. Some of it slighter truer. And telling us as much about mummy the narrator as about the ancestors.
I’d like to preface the following with this: “One thing good about death, “ said mummy “is it means “fewer people around to contradict you.”
Ten or so years ago, we visited Olofshylte in Småland on our way to my cousin’s island. We wanted to see the old farm house that Per and Karin had built 200 years before. We wanted to see the place where mummy spent her childhood summers with her cousins; the tree that our grandfather climbed to swing his legs and read books 100 years before Maia my daughter was born and we wanted to know if the well was still there, over which Lubeck the horse had dangled one of Oscar’s little sisters by the petticoats when she was just three. Everyone came running and shouting. According to mummy the horse grinned the whole time till he got bored and dumped our great aunt back on the ground. He knew exactly what he was doing, she said, and took great pleasure in its effect.
The house had been newly painted – primrose yellow. Mummy’s cousin Sigvard had re-roofed it and restored the surrounding barns. We looked about for Sigvard himself, or someone to tell him that we’d passed by. But it was mid-day and there was no-one to be seen. Only a tiny old woman shuffling across a field with a plastic bowl in her hands. Mummy thought she was “Probably off to dig up some potatoes for her tea” She always had an explanation in the form of a story unfolding. In Copenhagen she’d stolen a lick from daddy’s ice cream and then when he wandered off, tossed the remains into a bin. Later in the day he suddenly wondered what had become of it. “Don’t worry” said mummy when he looked indignant, “right now there is some small Danish rat licking his lips and patting his tummy with satisfaction. You’ve made him very happy.”
The road to and from Olofshylte was raised, narrow and gravelly and the car skidded this way and that. Daddy was driving in front with Danny and Maia and I was endeavoring to keep up in mummy’s Metro with Polly in the back seat and mummy beside me. But it was’t far to Västra Torsås. There in the churchyard we easily found the graves of our great grandparents and of Kind Uncle Albert “who held you” said mummy “on his knee when you were four and sang to you about the magpies on the roof of this very Church.
“I must have been such a nuisance” she continued,” I remember he and his wife offering me all sorts of treats when I was twelve or thirteen but all I wanted was a horse. I begged to have a go on a horse. So one evening Uncle Albert walked me to a place where there were dunes everywhere and there, sure enough, was a horse tethered to a post, munching on what grass it could find. I heaved myself up on the horse’s back. I admit I had to have some help. Uncle Albert then stood back. And the horse went on munching the grass as if nothing had happened. So there I sat. Presently Uncle Albert lit a cigarette and stood smoking and looking sometimes at the horse and sometimes at the sea. I also watched the horse, waiting for it to do something. And the horse went on munching the grass. It was the only sound to be heard. That and the gentle lapping of waves against the sand. Presently Uncle Albert and I lost interest in watching the horse and we watched the sun set instead. At length, my Uncle Albert asked me if I’d had enough of the horse and when I nodded, he helped me down.”
This memory came as a surprise to me. I’d always thought she distrusted horses profoundly. One of the earliest pieces of advice she ever gave us children, concerned what to do if charged by stampeding horses: “Lie down and pretend to be dead.” As far as I know the only time she ever lay down and pretended to be dead was when someone threw a snowball at her head on her first day at school. It made her slip on the ice, so pretending to be dead was a way of making her assailant feel sorry for being so mean, which worked, because later she became one of mummy’s best friends.
Back in Västar Torsås churchyard, we found the graves of several other ancestors but nothing for Karin herself, nor for Per. I thought about our ancestors standing where I was standing just then, in celebration and in mourning. It seemed very apt that their bones should be rooted in the same earth which had given them their living. I liked the thought that they’d been nourishing the landscape for their descendants for centuries. Our forebears grew flax on this land. We know that our great grandmother wove all the family linen, so the land had clothed them too.
Our next stop was near Ryd, just to get out of the cars for a stretch. I took deep breaths of fresh air and waded for the fun of it, through hip high Timotei grass. Whilst on his march to Leipzig, (he traversed the whole distance on foot, to fight Napoleon) Per Olson sent a letter to his family (it’s somewhere in the chest) describing how much warmer it was in Denmark than in Småland. The snows had scarcely melted at home, but that far south, the Timotei grass was ‘already long enough to hide a dove’. In the summer of 1812 all the roadsides would have been lined with the ancestors of the same wild lupins, cornflowers, huge purple clover heads and cotton grass that mummy was so familiar with as a child. She loved wild flowers and knew all their Latin names.
The landscape around Olofshylte is in all sorts of ways surprisingly unchanged because so dominated by nature. Just like the backdrop to an illustration in a children’s book. And the child in the story with white hair, tip- toing forward, shoulders hunched and hands ready to pounce on the cake, is mummy, aged between seven and ten. A quiet child, already used to spending hours in her own company.
“When I was young” she said, “we had a cat who sang to the birds. He sat all day on the widow sill watching them and snoozing in between. All the same I was a very lonely child. I used to dream of having masses of children. I drew them and cut them out and made paper clothes for them and propped them up in front of me.” “I also invented my twin sister. I drew lots of strip cartoons of us and all the fun we had, playing in the hay in ‘our barn’, picking apples in an orchard, going swimming, skiing, lots of things like that.” “In between meals, there was silence” save for the sound of typewriters tapping in the library and from her mother’s room. “Conversation at meal times” she said, “was never abrasive. We mostly talked about books, current affairs, politics – though not deeply, science which interested all of us, medicine and anything amusing we’d read in the papers. And we all had our favourite cartoons.” her parents always included her in any discussion or debate and this made mealtimes such a highlight of the day, she continued to think it important for families to eat together and swap entertaining stories and news all her life. Something I think that we have all taken greatly to heart.
One day when we were very little, mummy took Adrian and myself by the hand and led us crouching into a dark and prickly corner of the garden where the trees and bushes grew densely and where the atmosphere was perpetually dark. “I want you to look very closely at this plant I have discovered. But on no account are you ever to touch it. It’s name is Bella Donna. Deadly Nightshade.” We stared transfixed. “It is deadly poisonous. I want you to make sure that the little ones don’t play anywhere near it.” With a firm grip on each of our hands she allowed us to stare at the plant which we did, for a long time until curiosity satisfied, we were ready to return to playing in the sunshine.
“Depression, moodiness. It goes with the TB type. We can’t help it.” she said, but she was far too resourceful to linger there for very long. For years she told the story of how one of our ancestors encountered the devil in the forest, disguised as a dog with coal red eyes. Eventually I asked “alright, what kind of dog was it?” “Oh, some kind of poodle.” All drama deflated in an instant. I knew her to walk the long way round every cow field we encountered, however long it took to negotiate the briars and gorse bushes, and I knew her to ring me up with descriptions of weird and worrying clouds hovering over the garden. But sometimes the very act of taking her fears seriously, was enough for her to grow bored of the whole thing and she’d get snappy.
A family tradition that mummy frequently observed herself, was the habit of ‘keeping dusk’. It’s lovely to know that the women in our family for generations, stopped work in the ‘blue hour’ at dusk and paused to light a candle. “It was a time to let nature’s light take over. To stand on the veranda or at the window and gaze outwards and perhaps to sing a little.” Mummy always lit a candle at meal times or when remembering someone in prayer. It was a symbol of the sacredness of the moment. The narrative mummy gave us is telling in that many of the family characteristics she described, were her own traits too – traits she was keen for us to be aware of – some to embrace them and some to fight.
So while touching on her father’s anxiety and morbidity, she emphasized his love of order and impeccable honesty. The chest may have landed with a neat thud, back in the early 19th century, but the contents today, look like they never stopped falling. Our grandfather, who was given the chest when he was still a boy, was exceedingly careful of it, and scientifically methodical in his cataloging methods of the contents. When it was in Södertälje, I remember the chest being full of small and very neat brown paper parcels tied up with string. Each parcel bore an explanation of its contents in Morfar’s careful copperplate handwriting. I knelt on the carpet beside him and waited to see if I would be allowed to make a lucky dip. Sooner or later, I’d resign myself again, to politely admiring the sacred relics of his youth as he displayed them to me one at a time – the three legged Dala horse, the remains of a wooden trapeze artist on sticks etc.
When it came to her mother, mummy tended to gloss over the fact that she spent most of her life in bed and emphasized her passion for reading and writing, her love of food and of music and above all her sense of humour which was completely without malice.
Surprisingly she insisted that her family weren’t in the least bit opinionated. Mummy had some opinions. And our grandmother had some too: “My mother would have been very pleased” she said “with Sigvard’s work to the farm buildings. “She did not approve of drafty old houses. She detested the popular idea of ‘cosiness’. She liked modern houses. Quaint old red cottages she associated with cold draughts and dampness and the smell of cabbage.”
Mummy told me all this in a tone of strong approval. But on another occasion, she confessed to her own guilty love of ‘cosiness’: of white wallpaper dotted with sprigs of flowers, of soft warm lighting, of kitsch Christmas posters with tomtar and everything in its right place: forsythia twigs in a jar on the table for Easter; ironed table cloths. She liked what she called ‘real’ things. On her shelves and window ledges, she created worlds within worlds as opposed to beautiful ‘still lives’. A fishing rod for the banana plant, a sprig of tinsel and three ginger biscuits arranged round the cat’s bowl at Christmas, a few scrutty shells and a safety pin in the fruit bowl. Even before the onset of dementia, she worked hard against complacency, perfectionism and good taste. She thought these things lured us away from reality. Imagination was not an escape for her, but something akin to a game of chess, a means of keeping your wits about you and of outwitting the poodle devil. For Mummy, good and evil equated to trust and fear: “Which will you allow to rule your decisions? Will you let fear dictate your life? Or will you trust God to lead you to him and act on that trust?”
I treasured her company and her conversation all my life. I greatly miss her witty running commentaries as we drove around the countryside, her childhood memories, her philosophical reflections and many contradictions. I love her refusal to be buttonholed and I applaud her extraordinary courage. Especially towards the end of her life when she had real reason to be afraid yet managed to cling and finally to wholly relax into her trust in God. Mummy has left us with a mental landscape and a cast of ancestors and friends, as familiar as Pippi Longstocking or Piglet and Pooh: Too many stories to recount here, but enough to give you a flavour of the treasures in the family chest and to evoke for a moment, the spirit of the person who inhabits them: Gunvor: ‘Mrs Troll’.
