DRAFTS Chapter 1. Summer 1954, Sweden

I left school as soon as I reasonably could, aged 17, with a handful of O and A levels. Not enough for university, but that was the last thing on my mind. It was high summer and I had six months to fill in before two years of National Service, which I planned to serve as a conscientious objector.
I cant remember who thought of Sweden, probably my mother. She had kept in touch with Pym, a Swedish girl who stayed with us au pair some years before, looking after Richard and Susan, our youngest two. (I was the eldest, then aged about 11, with Martin in between.)
The Pym I remembered her was a big cheerful young woman, already quite grown up. Now she was married and living in Stockholm. The pictures she’d sent showed her husband rather pale and thin by contrast. Pym found a Swedish newspaper ad for a job in Are, a ski resort in northern Sweden. English-speaker wanted to help hotelier learn English, for keep and pocket money.
I got on a boat from Newcastle to Trondheim in northwest Norway. Going up the gangplank, I found I had shrunk. Normally I was quite tall (for that time) and was used to looking over most people’s heads. Now I was overshadowed by bigger men, my ears scuffing their shoulder-pads. Looking up, I asked the nearest man ‘Are you big or am I small?’ ‘We play basketball,’ he said, and I was glad I didn’t.
On the boat, almost before we left port, I got talking to a young woman beside me at the rail. I was usually quite shy and felt pleased to have made contact. We watched the land disappear then explored the boat together. Back on deck, we got talking to another man, a bit older, and shorter, than me. But fit-looking, broad-shouldered and trim in a business suit. He worked at the Finnish consulate in England, he said, and was on his way home for a holiday.
Towards evening, the sea got rougher and we reached for rails and banisters to steady ourselves. We made our way to the bows, where the Finn took off his coat and asked one of us to hold it. Standing face-forward in the angle of the bow, he gripped the rail on either side, took a little spring, and inverted himself. He stood on his hands, now facing us, upside-down, his back to the sea. For a while he hung there, vertical, swaying to counter the movement of the boat as the bow-wave churned below. Then over he flipped again, landing on his feet between us. Our companion was impressed, naturally enough, while I had rather hoped he would disappear.
Soon it was time to eat and we found a table together in the dining room. The boat was pitching but the table was fixed to the floor and had a rim round it to stop things sliding off. The chairs were loosely anchored to the floor with chains. The meal began with a thick brown soup. As I bent towards mine, the boat lurched forward, then back. A gap opened up between me and the seat of my chair, and my soup-bowl jumped the table rim to take my place. As I sat back, the soup, still in its bowl, was waiting for me. I sat in it.
My companions laughed, though not unkindly. They passed me napkins, and I went off to wash and change. I rejoined them as soon as I could to finish the meal, but soon afterwards we got separated. For a while I looked for them, and thought I heard their voices from what I thought was his cabin.
Next day, our boat stopped off at Bergen, before heading north up the indented Norwegian coast. The heights and depths of the fjords restored my spirits, putting the trivia of shipboard life in perspective. Who cares about mealtimes, drinks, who-gets-girl and what you're missing on some other deck? Beyond the high cliffs and deep, dark water there was little sign of fertile greenery. I realized why the Vikings had sailed in search of other shores, if only for something to go with the fish. And because rowing and sailing in open boats, though difficult, may be easier than finding your way through forest and rock. (Same with Greek heros and Arab invaders with their 'ships of the desert', though that didn't occur to me until years later.)
From Trondheim, where our boat turned round, I got a train across the Swedish border to Are (there’s a little o above the A, so Are becomes Oar-e). There couldn’t have been many other solitary teenagers coming off the boat, and my host soon waved to me. He looked a bit like Clark Gable, always friendly though we never got to know each other well. The English lessons were his wife’s idea and he mostly preferred to work, or play, on his own. Perhaps she had hoped my presence would keep him in check. Sometimes I would tag along with him, sometimes, when there was a dance or social event in the village, he would take a Swedish krone note from his pocket and say ‘Have fun with the girls.’
At one dance in the village, the girl who caught my attention was a sparkling blonde with twirling skirt and bright red lips. A fine dancer she was never without a partner and always surrounded when the music stopped. When I described her afterwards, I was told she had two children, no husband or man in tow. I marveled. I couldn’t imagine an ‘unmarried mother’ being generally feted in an English town or village. I enjoyed the freedom I found and felt in these new surroundings. At the hotel, the owners, staff and guests seemed to mix as equals, sharing meals, entertainment and outings. I liked the place, the people and the food. I’d always enjoyed coming down to breakfast. At home we rarely had cooked breakfasts. My mother put her own childhood ill-health down to a diet of meat three times a day, beginning with loaded sideboard for breakfast - not just bacon and egg, but kidneys, kippers, kedgeree. At home we had muesli before it became fashionable, and a now-extinct cereal called Honey Grains, like fossilised wood-chippings. Now in Sweden, the cool smorgasbord just suited me.
After meals, I helped the maids to clear up. One of them, the elder of two regulars, was called Gun. She had brown curly hair and lived in with a room of her own. She spoke a few words of English and seemed glad of my company. I got the feeling she came from a poor family, but one of the nice things about this place was was nice not knowing, or needing to know, people’s class and accent. If the Swedes had a queen, there must have been some equivalent to our Queen’s English. Sometimes in the evening I would sit with Gun in her room while she knitted or sewed. It was peaceful and she would talk about her boyfriend who lived and worked somewhere far up North. At school I had learned about Lapland, with northern lights, steel towns flaring and hammering through endless night. (A bit later, my brother Martin went to work in the stripmill at Ebbw Vale, where sooty sheep skipped out from under tank-engines. Until it became a garden-centre and the fleeces whitened up again.)
Once or twice during my stay, Gun’s young man came striding down from the hills. No blonde Norseman, but a Celtic or Mediterranean god, olive-skinned with black hair and flashing eyes. He wore heavy boots, thick socks and – at least in my mind’s eye now – some sort of cross gartering. He came across country, not by roads or beaten tracks, but guided by compass or stars. I’ve forgotten his name and what he did for a job. But I was impressed by him and he seemed happy for me to keep his girlfriend company. One time, while Gun was busy at work, he told me of the time they first went walking together. Cross-country of course, through forest and tundra. Only at the end of the day, when they took off their boots, did he see that the insides of hers were sticky with blood, her heels peeled raw.
There was another maid at the hotel, younger and prettier. She lived at home and I knew her less well, but one day she took me to meet her family. I couldn’t place them on any social ladder. Their house was of clean white timber set in bright green grass, no fence, no drive, no car in evidence. Inside, the kitchen, dining and living areas were divided by bamboo trellis work and climbing plants (a style that later became common in UK coffee bars). Everything seemed clean and bright, and I felt more at ease than I would have a strange household nearer home.
There was another Gun, not working at the hotel but there as a guest on holiday. She had a nice figure, nice clothes and curly dark hair. She had more time for me than Gun the maid and I was encouraged to keep her company. Perhaps she was recovering from something, an illness, break-up or break-down. Mostly she was cheerful, but sometimes looked sad when she thought nobody was looking. The 'u' in Gun sounds like the 'oo' in good, and we became good friends. It may have helped that we could hardly talk to each other. She spoke no English and my Swedish hardly progressed. Sometimes we went for walks, but she seemed happier listening to music. We sang and danced together, often on our own, to records on the hotel gramophone. Some of the records I knew, some were new to me. Long before Abba, there was a Swedish Doris Day – or Alma Cogan - called Alice Babbs, who sometimes sang in English. There was also Glen Miller, and the two of us did our own cover of American Patrol taking different instrumental parts (the band in the Glen Miller film did something similar in their bus.)
One of the good things about ballroom dancing was that you didn’t need some other pretext for holding each other. As sexy as you made it, but non-committal. We might have kissed, but playfully and that was as far as it got. I hope this Gun's alive and remembers me as warmly as I remember her.
Sometimes, my task would be to take little groups of guests up to the mountain on the skiers’ cable lift. I had a free pass and often went up, on my own or in company, sailing over the birches and pines to the scrubby rock and lichens above. These mountains were not cut sharp like Alps or Dolomites, but hard-worn rounded lumps. In sunshine, the bleakness was softened and coloured by lichens, like rust and verdigris on metal roofs..
Back in the valley, beyond the village and hotel, lay a long deep lake. The hotel must have had its bit of gravel beach with a rowing boat. One day Clark Gable took me fishing. We had a bundle of light net and took it in turns to row. Well out, with the water as deep below as the mountainside above, we unwound the net and dropped it in. We could see the net fall into place like a fine curtain below. Since then, I’ve read of Swedish lakes being poisoned by British acid rain. Then, or so I imagine, I saw a trout swim into our net. From far above I could sympathise as it hung itself.
Another time, another guest. The young woman I took to the beach one day seemed more worldly than either of the Guns. When we got there, she wasn’t keen on rowing or swimming but lay down in the sun and shut her eyes. I sat down beside her, looked at her, then across the lake, then back at her. She smiled and undid the buttons of her blouse. I bent over her and she put an arm round me. When my hand moved to her bra, she sat up and took it off. This was new. I felt honoured and emboldened, but she stopped my hand when it reached her belt..
The hotel also had a sauna room. I tried it once but cant even remember if I was in company or on my own. More memorable was another basement ritual, in which everyone took part. Instead of the usual dinner upstairs, we gathered by lantern- and candle-light to eat raw fish, salted and left to rot in a vat. The mush that came out had a taste a bit like anchovy sauce, made eatable with sheets of crisp, white unleavened bread. We washed it down, and took the taste away, with schnapps and songs.
One night we drove off in a convoy to another village or resort. On the outward journey, I was in the back of a big American car belonging to one of the guests. Its cushions were so deep and suspension so soft that we hardly felt the roughness of the dirt roads through the forest. I was surprised that such a modern country should still have unmetalled roads, but was told that tarmac would not stand the winter frosts. Now, in late summer or early autumn, it was still warmish, and the road surface reminded me of red grit tennis courts.
In the forests, we were told, there lived wild elk. I saw their heads on walls but never on legs. At a certain time of year, open season was declared on these big harmless animals. A lot of elk and some shooters get shot.
The party we went to that night was no hunt-ball and what I remember best is the van.ride afterwards. Half a dozen of us younger ones piled into the back of a van for the journey to a bunkhouse where we were to stay the night. I’d got acquainted with a girl from Lapland. She had high cheek-bones, was shaped like a cottage loaf and smelt of grass-mowings. In the van, we rocked and rolled willy-nilly round the floor with every bend and bump in the road. We braced ourselves against any bit of van in reach and clung to each other for stability. Soon I was safely entwined in the lap of my Lapp, big warm arrns and legs folded tightly round me. We were saved by the bell, or the brakes, as the van drew up.
We disengaged and tumbled out into the air. In the sober light of the bunkhouse, the women moved to one end, the men to the other. Goodnight, sleep tight in our narrow bunks.
My last ride to the mountaintop was on my own. I went up in the cable car and came down on foot. It must have been about five miles, not straight down under the cable line but skirting the hillside diagonally toward the hotel. There was no obvious path but it seemed easy enough to find ways down over the rock, then on between pine and birch. Sometimes there were scrubby bushes on the rock that I took to be cranberry (lingon in Swedish, I remember the word from a song). The only major obstacle was a river, flowing waist deep down a rocky gully. I walked along the bank looking for a way across but didn't find one. I took my clothes off, tied them in a bundle with my belt and threw them safely to the other side. Now I had no choice but to climb in. To stop the current tumbling me downstream, I clung to rocks, half diving from one handhold to the next. I got out cold but elated, only slightly bruised, and put on my clothes. I ran a lot of the way to the hotel. There was always hot coffee, in a metal pot on the kitchen range.
I returned to England via Stockholm, stopping off for a day or two with Pym. She was obviously glad to see me and her husband, Olle, who worked for the post office, was pleasant in a mild way. While Olle was at work, Pym showed me round the city. She took me to the famous city hall. A modern Hampton Court, with a tower and golden whaat-not on top. We walked, bussed and boated round that city of islands. One island was a sculpture park, the first I’d seen, with statues standing or lying about on green slopes, framed between trees and views of the sea.
Pym’s English was good, so we talked quite a lot, and she took me to see her mother who had also visited us in England. On my last morning, Olle said goodbye and left for work as I was finishing my breakfast. At one point Pym, busy round the kitchen, stopped behind my chair, stood a moment, then bent over me. She took my head in her hands and pulled it against her body between her breasts. Perhaps both us were taken by surprise, and if there had been more time she would not have dared. As it was, we had a bus and boat to catch and our little sculpture – brother-and-sister, lovers, mother-and-child - dissolved into rucksack and sandwich box.
About 50 years later, after Olle died, my brother Richard called on Pym when he went to Stockholm for a talk. Richard was the toddler Pym had cared for when she lived with us. Now, as an old woman in her Stockholm flat, she confided in him. Her husband had never been a husband to her, not as a man to a woman. No sex, no children... Richard said she still sounded angry, indignant.
In writing this, I realize that it says more about me than any of the girls, women, I describe. Or men, for that matter. Those few weeks in Sweden were a liberating time for me, aged 17, just out of an English public school, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Before going to that all-boys’ school I’d been for several years at a co-ed boarding school. When I left, aged 15, I was just beginning to realize that I could get on with girls. Miss Watts had paired me with Elspeth Reynolds, queen of our class, to read Romeo to her Juliet. Or was it Hamlet and Ophelia, or Macbeth and Lady Macbeth/ Anyway, we shared a book and a desk. At weekends, in the common room, a Somerset girl call Jacqueline would sit next me on a sofa. She was in the class above mine (as was Rolls, who had paired up with Elspeth R). While we listened to the Billy Cotton Band Show I could stretch my arm along the sofa-back, beneath her honey curls to touch her neck.
Miss Watts was an exception among my teachers. I left that school early because most of them, including the headmaster (Rabbit) found me troublesome. And when my family moved out of London to Berkshire, there was another Quaker school - Leighton Park, Reading - in easy reach. I cycled there daily, as did Martin and Richard later. Leighton Park was boys-only, and by the time we got home it was 9.30pm, too late for another social life. (By the time it came to Richard's turn, he could turn to Susan's friends).
On the way to school, l often passed a girl cycling in the opposite direction near Loddon Bridge, She smiled widely, bent low on her racing bike, red lips and flying hair. I hoped one of her tyres might puncture or her chain jam so I could stop and help. Perhaps if I had engineered my own breakdown, she might have stopped for me. Why didn't I think of that?
In the holidays, there was an occasional dance, perhaps a kiss. One summer holiday, when the field behind our house was harvested, I helped stook up the sheaves. I worked with June, the farmer’s daughter. She was about 16, precociously beautiful and found it natural to kiss and cuddle when we stopped and rested in a corner of the field. There was a small island of corn left standing in the middle as the reaper-binder made its last few turns. The other laborers were spaced around the perimeter waiting with sticks and guns for the rabbits to break cover. June’s accent would change between talking to me and the other men, from BBC to Berkshire and back. When I asked her out, she said ‘What will I do when you go back to school?’ She became a hairdresser and developed a glandular condition that made her fat. Occasionally I saw her, heavy, almost featureless astride a big horse. Her father, another heavyweight, was disabled when a bullock crushed him in his barn.
Sweden for me was a discovery and a rediscovery, picking up where I’d left off a few years earlier in co-ed school. I noticing the way my hosts, easy-going hotelier and hardworking wife, came out to welcome a couple of old friends. They didn’t just embrace, but jumped into each other’s arms, an exuberant lquadrille.
I never saw my parents greet each other like that, or not until they were much older. When they were both in their late eighties, I took my father to visit my mother in hospital. Until a few weeks before they’d been together at home, my father chronically ill and my mother helping care for him. It got too much for her and she went down with pneumonia. My mother was taken to hospital, and my father to a care-home. After a week or so, when my mother was recovering, I went to visit them. To get them together, I wheeled my father out of his ‘home’ and into my car. Looking over my shoulder, as if I were stealing him. When we got to my mother’s ward, she was lying back in a chair beside her bed. As I manoeuvred my father’s wheelchair toward her, they recognized each other. My mother opened her arms and my father threw himself forward, the wheelchair tipped and he fell face down on top of her. Both happy, and unhurt.

DRAFTS

Introduction

I have already written quite a lot about my childhood, the war, boarding schools etc. Some of that was for a thesis on 'Learning from experience' and/or 'Mutual education' and much of what I described might feel familiar to many people of my gender, age and class – male, 75 and upper(?)middle.
So this time I've started at the point where I left school, with a few months in hand before what was then another obligatory stint for most people: National Service. In my case, for reasons I'll explain, this became International Service, a rather different way of learning from experience.
The trouble is, the longer I live, the less of it I remember. Memory gets erratic with age, and the longer you live, the more of what happens seems more or less familiar, well-known enough to be taken for granted rather than remembered. It's basic to our mental economy that we save our consciousness, and conscious memory, for the new and unexpected, until that too becomes routine, our responses suitably automated, so we can save the screen for...something new and unexpected.
I'll be writing in a hurry, and it will show, because I want to get it done. What follows will be not so much a finished work as a set of drafts in more or less chronological order. When things seem to relate across time and space, or just for fun, I'll jump to match. One feeling I have about time is that in some way it's all here anyway, with now no more real than then, my life no more substantial than anyone else's, born or unborn. This is easier for us to grasp in space, where we don't for a moment assume that a stretch of the road that is out of sight to us does not exist...
I thought of heading this bit of work just 'Drafts' but then came the pop-up puns, familiar as fleas, in waking life as in dreams. From drafts, to draughts, to draft-dodging – since I was to refuse military service – to draught-dodging, more suitable to a man of my age, with fingers that lose their circulation when my hands get cold... I always had a bad circulation, but when I joined Reuters and spent much of my time on a mechanical typewriter I stopped getting chilblains. I cant remember now whether they came back when I left Reuters for other sorts of work.
I think I had already set my mind on journalism before I left school, except that nothing about me then was really set, and certainly not by me. It might have been different if there had been anything I could do about it, but first there was the two-year stint of national, or international, service. If I had been more academically inclined, I might have deferred my military service and eventually escaped it that way. As it was, and unlike most other boys, I had been presented with another option. My mother was a Quaker and I went to a Quaker school, so I knew that there was such a thing as 'conscientious objection.'
That was one way in which I was different, but then everyone is different in many more ways than one. More importantly, I had, and have, more in common with others, with everyone including you, than there is to set us apart. If that were not so, if this story was just about me, it wouldn't be worth me writing. The value of what I'm doing, if any, lies in the fact that our lives and worlds run into and through each other. My experience is not just mine, possibly not mine at all, just part of the world that composes it.
Social world, material world. I say 'material world,' not to make it mechanical or unmysterious, but because I don't feel comfortable with mental apartheid. I dont know much, but what little I know, or imagine, cannot be cut up into separate compartments, 'material,' 'spiritual' etc.
Just as, in the physical sciences, matter and energy cannot be properly distinguished. Life is at once more mysterious, and messier, than the classes and distinctions we put on it. I feel as Huck Finn did when he was taken to live with the kindly Widow. (I once talked to a 'freedom-fighter' – 'terrorist'? – who said that his goal was a nicely-set table and a clean white cloth.) For Huck Finn, being taught manners in a fine white house, it was this sort of thing that put him off. What he longed for was the confusion of his old hogshead home: 'In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better'
I've just googled those words to check, and find that in my memory I'd included non-food things like candle-wax. I cant remember whether I first read that passage for myself, or if my mother read Huck FInn to us - my brother Martin and me - as children. (I was the eldest. Richard and Susan, nos 3 and 4, would still have been too young.)