How I Learned to Understand the World Read online

  He urged me to be grateful toward all the countries and their soldiers who had shouldered the heavy burden of fighting and defeating the Nazis and their allies. But he disliked the Soviet system. “We’re against both the Nazis and the Communists,” Pappa always said. Even early on, I was included in that “we.” And he was horrified by the colonizing wars started by European countries, some of which had themselves been so recently occupied by the Germans.

  Dad dreaded making a fool of himself in front of educated people. He didn’t like the buses because he was unsure about how to get a ticket. He wouldn’t browse in bookshops because he wasn’t clear about how to approach the till or what would happen once he did. When he did grocery delivery jobs for a while, he was sometimes offered something to eat by upper-class folk. He always said “no, thank you,” aware that he lacked proper table manners.

  Shopping in the private-enterprise supermarkets was out of the question for him. He only went to the Co-op, the shops owned and run by working-class people like him. The Young Eagles, the scouts club run by the Social Democratic Party’s youth section, was the only organization for youngsters run by the party. The working-class movement offered group identity to its members and made my dad and his friends feel safe.

  After the war, he held down a few short-term jobs. Then he landed the post as coffee roaster at Lindvalls Kaffe and stayed for almost forty years. In the evenings, he would go down to his carpentry workshop in the cellar. Broken things were mended in my family, not thrown away: when the handle on our first plastic bucket cracked, Pappa made it a new wooden handle.

  Pappa, a fit and athletic man, was the best orienteer in Uppsala County. When something interested him he always managed to do it well. He was always ready to join in and his can-do attitude inspired all he undertook. For example, there was the time when my reckless friend Hasse rammed his bicycle into a car and the bike’s front wheel got twisted into an eight-shape. All the local children knew that the bicycle belonged to Hasse’s mother and they also knew what would happen next: “Hell’s bells! Hasse will get a hiding tonight.” Hasse was often beaten at home. Quick as a flash, my dad gathered up the boy and the bike, and took both down into the cellar. Pappa set about straightening the front wheel; he pulled it and hammered it until the wheel looked perfect again. He replaced the ripped inner tube and found the right paint to cover the scratches in the lacquer. After an hour and a half, Hasse walked home through our housing estate, pushing a fine-looking bicycle.

  * * *

  My father’s family were ordinary working-class people but my mother was born into society’s very lowest stratum. It was her mother, Grandma Agnes, who had pulled them out of shaming deprivation and into a respectable life. To outsiders, Agnes might well have seemed like just another old woman in a care home but to us she was a heroine.

  When Mum asked her then eighty-eight-year-old mother if there was anything she could do to make her happy, Agnes answered: “Find out who my father was.”

  Agnes was born in 1891 in Uppsala County. Her tiny first home was on the outskirts of a village. She always said it was no better than a hovel with a dirt floor. Her mother, who was nineteen years old when she had Agnes, never spoke about her daughter’s father.

  Years later we learned about a tradition that gave an unmarried woman the chance to identify the father of her child by giving her newborn the same name as one of his legitimate children. In Agnes’s case, her mother had worked on a farm where the farmer’s wife just some months earlier had given birth to a girl named Agnes. The man himself and maybe the local community would have understood.

  I was an adult when I asked my grandmother if she had felt deprived during her childhood. Her reply was immediate and definite: “No, I didn’t. Not ever. Mum put food on the table every day. We had a roof over our heads, and clean, warm beds to sleep in. We had shoes on our feet and could go to school every day.”

  All of my grandparents attended school for four years. How much did they learn? I remember how Grandpa Gustav had to spell the words one by one in order to read a newspaper. Neither of my grandmothers could read me stories, and my paternal grandparents could not read aloud to each other from the newspaper.

  My parents were literate enough to read novels for pleasure: the generations went through stages of reading ability, from illiteracy to basic reading skills to competence in their own language and, finally, to coping with foreign languages. My grandparents reached, at best, only a basic reading level. My paternal grandfather even advised me against bookishness: reading harmed the eyes, he insisted. He felt like an outsider when his children and grandchildren “buried their noses in books,” and preferred carpentry and talking about matters he understood and liked.

  One of my questions for Grandma Agnes was why she had married an alcoholic. Hadn’t her own foster father taught her enough about living with difficult men?

  “I fell in love,” she replied unsmilingly. She had found the men in the village unkempt and coarse: “The farm laborers never missed a chance to slap my bottom or touch me in other rude ways,” she said. “They would call me all sorts of names because of me being born on the wrong side of the blanket. They knew I would never dare tell my foster father.”

  Then, one summer, Ville turned up to dig ditches in the parish. Ville’s father had been a landless farm laborer but the boy had grown up on the outskirts of Stockholm and served in the army. He helped Agnes carry the milk pails, complimented her hair and always washed at the end of a working day. Ville was not only clean and polite but treated Agnes as a person worthy of respect and not as a bastard child. Such good manners were unheard of in the village. Agnes became pregnant within a month. Ville obeyed the unwritten rule for proper conduct at the time: sex before you marry is acceptable but if you father a child you must marry.

  Ville, my maternal grandfather, was an alcoholic who tried to stay sober but lapsed periodically. He was a skilled bricklayer, earned good wages when he wasn’t drinking and never beat his wife or his children. Agnes had three children. Her goal in life was to see to it that they had a better life than she had. On two occasions, illness was a serious obstacle to achieving her goal: first, tuberculosis and, later, cancer of the colon. Free universal healthcare came to the rescue. Agnes was cured of tuberculosis and, miraculously, of cancer, too.

  Since my mother and her sister were below school age when their mother was in the hospital, they were cared for in a state-funded children’s home. During her convalescence female Salvation Army soldiers taught Agnes how to use a sewing machine and she convinced Ville that it would be worth buying one. Making clothes for the children would save money in the long run.

  Sewing meant more to her than clothes for her family. It brought her dignity.

  My mother’s childhood was insecure and unpredictable. She started in primary school in the autumn of 1927. She was enrolled in a fine, newly built school at Vaksala Square, not far from where they lived. Agnes had made her a new dress and held her hand as they walked to school on this very special day. When they arrived at the square and saw the school building, Agnes had to stop to take it all in. Her own school had been a small wooden house and it seemed beyond her wildest imagination that her daughter should be taught inside a school that looked like a fairy-tale castle. She squeezed my mother’s hand and whispered: “They must think people like us are worth something because they have built you such a beautiful school.”

  Inside the school my mother met a teacher who was even more impressive than the building itself. Miss Brunskog was well trained for her job, highly motivated, and keen to use modern teaching methods. She was part of what the state-funded schools could offer to the children from Uppsala’s remaining slums, with their still nameless lanes and alleys. These children were not only very well taught but were also, just as importantly, given self-confidence. The teacher arranged for my mother to go to summer camps for children with tubercular parents. She could talk forever about these wonderful summers. The high point was when
they were taken to see Selma Lagerlöf, who lived at Mårbacka, not far from the camp. Mum remembered how she and her friends sat on the floor and listened as one of the greatest names in Swedish literature read aloud to them from her own books.

  At school, my mother caught tuberculosis, the disease that nearly killed her own mother. The state-funded health service looked after her and, while she was recovering at home, the family were given tokens to exchange for free milk from the local corner shop. She told me of how embarrassing it felt to pay with a token, because it signaled to other shoppers that she was from a tubercular family. All Agnes said when she complained was: “Oh dear. But the milk is tasty, don’t you think?”

  Her mother was satisfied if the family had a good life and material needs were met, one way or the other. Yet my mother wanted more and was frustrated because she lacked what she wanted most of all—a good education. She loved her studies but there was no way she could persuade her father to let her carry on after the end of the six foundation years. It seemed a special injustice when, in her last year at school, a teacher asked her if she wouldn’t mind tutoring some of the more well-heeled children in her class. Why should she help them achieve the marks they needed for entry into higher education when she had not been allowed even to apply? So at the age of fifteen, my mother started work as a delivery girl for the local grocer’s shop.

  * * *

  My family history over the past century has helped me to understand developments in the wider world. There had been famine years and extreme poverty in my grandmother’s recent past, awful conditions that were the main reason why so many of my ancestors migrated to Illinois, Minnesota, and Oregon in 1846 and later. Grandma Agnes and Britta, my mother, were able to make the move from crippling poverty to quite contented lives thanks to many factors coming together and reinforcing each other.

  In the first place, Sweden’s economic growth explains how my Grandpa Ville, could always find, despite being an intermittent alcoholic, bricklaying work in the construction industry. His wages grew steadily and so he could afford the cost of a sewing machine despite often spending recklessly on booze.

  Secondly, there were the state-financed social services, which included not only healthcare and schooling but also children’s homes and rehabilitation clinics for alcoholics. Grandpa Ville, for one, would have been worse off still without the treatment he received in one of these clinics. While he was there, he wrote love letters to his wife. We still have one of them, so full of love and deeply passionate pleas for forgiveness. It helps explain why Grandma put up with a married life of constant insecurity.

  Thirdly, civil society stepped in at several stages to support and even rescue my marginalized family. Such civic support ranged from the sewing lessons given to Grandma Agnes by the now defunct “slum sisters” of the Salvation Army, to the cultural education my mother, Britta, received from undergraduate volunteers at summer camps. I have come to regard my background as shaped by the combined enterprises set up by the private marketplace, civil society, and the government. My grandmother’s and mother’s families were lifted out of destitution. Children of my generation benefited from the protection of the welfare state.

  True, economic circumstances changed faster than cultural and social norms. Attitudes toward sexuality remained unchanged for an astonishingly long time and the acceptance of sex as an aspect of day-to-day life was utterly taboo. In particular, I’m thinking of access to contraception and also to what we now refer to rather pompously as “sexual and reproductive health and rights.” Women in my grandmothers’ and mother’s generations were not supposed to take pleasure in sexual intimacy and were denied the right to plan when to conceive—outcomes of cultural norms that guided political decisions. Having given birth to three children and barely survived TB and cancer, Grandma Agnes decided that she didn’t want any more children. Bringing up the three she had was more than enough responsibility. She had heard about a man who would explain how to use condoms. (Informing the public about condoms—let alone making them available to the public—was expressly forbidden in Swedish law from 1910 to 1938.)

  One day in the mid-1920s, Grandma and some of her women friends heard that, someday soon, this brave man would stand in the main square in Uppsala and talk about condoms. They steeled themselves and risked going along to listen to him. The man—the leader of Sweden’s most left-wing party at the time—climbed up on a wooden box and gave a straightforward speech about how couples have the right to make up their own minds about when to have a child together. The police arrested him the moment he produced a condom from his jacket pocket to show the gathered crowd.

  A decade or so later, in 1935, my mother was fourteen years old. Her best friend, also fourteen, became pregnant. She lived in an apartment on the same landing as Mamma’s family, on the second floor of a tenement block. The girl’s pregnancy proved what most people had suspected: her father had been abusing her for a long time. Soon, the entire block knew. The father was interrogated by the police and a few days later the local vicar called to talk with the family. He blamed the mother: it was her fault that her husband had been having sex with their daughter—the mother had obviously not been “available” enough.

  This was the reality of life for my mother’s generation. She was eighteen years old when she fell in love with my father. Between them, they had no idea about contraception and she became pregnant. She was working full-time doing grocery deliveries while pursuing her dream of higher education by going to evening classes. In other words, the young couple had very little money and my mother did not want to have a child just then. She searched for a way to have an abortion and heard of a doctor with a private surgery. He was also known to reduce his fee for low-income clients.

  Mamma went to see the doctor late one afternoon. She was mortified when he requested her to strip and walk around naked in his surgery. When he asked her for sexual services in return for the abortion, she left. Her only other option was to approach someone at work who was known to perform cheap abortions. This woman turned up in my mother’s single-room apartment one evening. Her approach to the job was to advance a knitting needle into the womb. During the night that followed, my mother gave birth to a dead fetus and immediately burned it, as instructed, in her small stove. She was lucky to escape the life-threatening hemorrhages or infections that were very common outcomes of these interventions.

  Contraception became more widely available following the information breakthrough that accompanied the launch of the National Society for Sexual Information (RFSU) under the leadership of Elise Ottesen-Jensen—who became so famous in Sweden that people knew her by the name “Ottar.” It was mainly in response to agitation by her organization that the Swedish parliament legalized both information about and distribution of contraceptives in 1938. To this day, RFSU has remained Sweden’s key condom supplier. My mother and my grandmother never missed any opportunity to praise Ottar for her contribution to these life-changing decisions.

  * * *

  When I was in primary school, my father would sometimes take me to the lectures given at the city’s branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF). The lecture theater was a big space that could hold audiences of many hundreds. The lecturers were often explorers who described their experiences in faraway countries, using a modernized version of a magic lantern, a forerunner of the projector, that displayed enlarged black-and-white photographs on a screen. For me, a young boy, these evenings were truly magical. It was thrilling to go with my pappa to events for grown-ups and I was fascinated by the stories from the colonized countries in distant parts of the world.

  The talks were very varied and some of the lecturers were especially impressive. Eric Lundqvist was one of them: he was a game warden who went off to the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s to take up a post offered by the colonial administration that ran what is today Indonesia. Lundqvist married a local woman and later became a well-known writer, admired for his understanding of both the area�
�s natural world and its society. Both my parents read his books and liked his public stance as an anti-racist.

  The explorer and speaker Sten Bergman, a biologist with an impressive knowledge of nature in general and birds in particular, was in some ways Lundqvist’s direct opposite. In one of his evening lectures, Bergman deviated from the subject of bird-watching in New Guinea to show a short, silent film shot in black-and-white. It featured an odd experiment on the local people: he had made them raise a smooth four-meter-tall pole, which was smeared with soap and had a new, fine-looking axe driven into the top of it. The locals were urged to climb it and we watched their doomed attempts to get the axe. Halfway through, my dad stood, took my hand and said: “Let’s leave now.” As we walked out of the hall, I saw that my dad’s face had gone pale, as it did on the rare occasions when he was angry. He whispered to me: “That man shows no respect. Bergman is a snob. His idea of fun was to trick these people into looking comical just because they wanted the axe. But they are forest dwellers and could use a good axe. I can’t stand his attitude.”

  One evening at the Education Institute, I ran into my classmate Ingmar, whose dad also used to bring his son along to the lectures. Ingmar’s dad was a minister in the Swedish Mission Church and had worked as a missionary in French Equatorial Africa. He had once come to our school and given an illustrated talk about this work. I remember it well: the colonized country he described was very different from anything we knew. For all that he was a man of the Church, he spoke most of the time about practical ways of helping the natives—as we called the Congolese people at the time—especially with education and healthcare. When Ingmar was ten, he left school to go with his family for a third tour in the Congo.

  For a child of my social class, it was unusual to have such close contact with someone who had traveled to Africa and actually lived there. After Ingmar left, my teacher picked me once to post a letter to him from everyone in the class. I can still recall the excitement I felt at sending my first ever airmail letter. The address of the boarding school for the missionaries’ children read strangely and I learned for the first time the name of an African city—Pointe-Noire, now the most important port in the Republic of the Congo.