A boy's journey

Father, you died too young and left me when I was too young, at 14, … and within the next few days we were forced to leave the home you had lived in for over 16 years. My mother was practically forced to throw away almost all there was to know about your life.

I have my memories of you, a few hundred photographs and some letters only to go by.

You were the only son of a Mathematics teacher and a nurse. He was 44 and she was 25 when you were born in 1893 in Jönköping, Sweden. Along the way, he had become an ordained minister in the Swedish church. Your mother was a Jewish lady whom he had met while studying in Helsinki, Finland.

Olga Elizabeth Federmesser and Carl Fredrik Lindvall, 1892.

Your father, my grandfather, had written a schoolbook on mathematics which were used in some of the high Schools at that time. You showed me a copy once. I leafed through the pages, much too young to understand the content, but remember the author’s name. Carl Lindvall.

I have a few pictures of him in a starched shirt. He looks strict.

You never saw any of his strictness, if it was for real. He passed away (sometime around your first birthday in 1894), of an unspecified illness of the kidneys. I gathered this from your mother’s letters to her friends.

Your mother had to soldier on alone. She became a midwife at the local hospital, a position that she resigned from in 1904 to start her own “home for fallen women”, women who had become pregnant without family approval or support.

It must have been successful. It operated until the end of the 1920s, for over 25 years. The frequent health inspections proved that there were enough sheets and towels for all residents, as proven by the reports filed.

Many children were born there, but many children also died, far more than would have been normal for the time. Perhaps the new mothers, or fathers, didn’t care for children born to unmarried women?

You, dear father Harald, were the eyestone of your mother.

She gifted you so many things, a new Malmsjö grand piano when you were 23 and a new Ford model T car a couple of years later.

Your new grand piano

Posing in your 1918 new Ford model T, assembled in Sweden.

You were a good student, even though your studies were interrupted for a few months around 1915, when you were drafted as a soldier in the Swedish army.

Among other things, that you told me, you were taught to lie on your back and shoot at airplanes. Some who did that broke their collarbone from the recoil.

You had a lively growing up time in and around Jönköping, a city that you always loved. You sometimes brought me there and I met some old friends from your student days.

Your first study career led to a degree in Economics from Stockholm University. You were an old graduate, 30 years of age in 1923.

This was in the middle of the mini depression after WW1. Germany experienced hyper inflation and the Swedish economy was a bit shaky too.

You got a job in Stockholm, dealing with real estate.

Fresh out of university, facing the world in Stockholm.

There you decided to continue your studies, eventually graduating as a lawyer. You passed the Bar exam in 1932.

There are many photographs of you with pretty women. Your cousin, Tage Hjälmerdal, whom I met a few times in later years told me that you were quite a lady’s man, with many adventurous affairs.

One of them was with the daughter of the owner of a chocolate factory in Gränna, some 30 km east of Jönköping. You would drive your open top Ford car there to visit. You told me that there were bowls of chocolate in every room, including next to the bed in the guestroom.

I told you that you should have married her, then I could have had chocolate every day.

You finally got engaged at around age 30 and remained so until you met my mother-to-be in 1932, some nine years later.

Your ex-fiancée eventually became a librarian in Vimmerby. We stopped at her apartment on a Sunday afternoon late 1953, when returning from a visit to your old friends in Jönköping.

I asked her why she was still unmarried after all those years.

The engagement photo, 1923.

“I loved your father too much”, she said.

You, father, didn’t comment on that.

You seem to have lived a high life, borrowing a lot of money over many years.

This led to a somewhat difficult situation around the time you met my mother in 1932. This was just after you had left Stockholm to start your legal career at a lawyer’s firm in Karlshamn, a small town of about 12,000, in the far south of Sweden.

In Karlshamn, you soon teamed up with the local theatre society and music club. That’s where Inga Rosholm, my mother, met you.

At the theatre club in 1933. You, father, in the big hat,
my mother Inga looking at you from the right side.

You seemed to have returned your ring to your old fiancée at about that time, and then pursued my mother.

Even though you were engaged, you still fell head over heels in love with my mother. Yes, she was certainly beautiful, 23 then, 17 years younger than you.

Inga with her whippet Lou-Lou in 1934

She was well educated and well travelled, spoke fluent French after a couple of years in France, and even played the piano quite well.

You always loved music, long before you got your own grand piano in your childhood home. During your years in Stockholm, you had befriended many musically inclined persons, and even, on occasion, played the piano with the Stockholm Symphony orchestra. Quite an achievement for a non-professional pianist.

The monetary troubles of yore hounded you all your life, and even affected us, your children, after your untimely death.

The car dealer came up the day after your funeral and demand to get the keys back. My mother sold off every last vestige of your property, including the grand piano and your much-loved summer cottage.

To be able to get married, your future father-in-law, Olof Rosholm gifted you 10,000 kronor, about CAD 90,000 in today’s money. That loan was never paid off and I can tell that my grandfather was never happy about that.

Did you have a happy marriage?

Funny I should ask. There may not be a yes-no answer to that question. You did, of course, have some happy years in the beginning but they may not have lasted.

The old photos all show my mother happy, playing with her dog or children, us.

Perhaps your ongoing monetary problems came to weigh too heavily on your mind. You had to, personally, go to the bank every single month to pay the entire loan off, including the last month’s interest, then renew your loan at the same time. This was by växel, no longer a common way to borrow money.

My mother had many ideas about being married to a man of high social standing. You got a huge apartment, soon added a full-time maid, and once I had arrived, a live-in nanny. This must have cost a lot of money.

I know that your job as the city treasurer was very stressful. The great game of politics was continually played out.

When I was a little older and got a grasp on where you were, professionally, I remember you saying.

“Bengt, never deal with other people’s money. Don’t mix with politicians and whatever you do, never deal with lawyers.”

I may not have understood what that all really meant at the time, but true to form, I have tried to avoid all of that in my life.

You were almost old, at age 47, when I was born. For the first seven years of my life your walked with me and we talked a lot, but I cannot recall many other interactions, father-son.

My second Christmas eve, December 24, 1941

You said that I always asked so many questions. I probably did and have never stopped asking questions since.

With mother, you lived a very intense social life. Dinners, parties, social clubs, & more. You were a member of the Swedish society “Myran”. I had to return many documents and some stamps after you passed away.

After I was born, you rented a cottage some 15 km away. You could travel there by train. We, my sister and I, and mother were there all summer while you were working in the city, and only came for the weekends. They were often full of socializing, my mother loved to entertain.

My early childhood was happy. We, my sister and I were well looked after.

Me and Marie-Louise playing in my bedroom

Then after Christmas 1946, something changed.

You became angry. You and mother screamed at each other, almost uncontrollably. You made my sister and I cry.

I went to nursery school every day. The first load of bananas had arrived in Sweden after the war. I had one in my lunch bag.

You and mother were screaming at each other in the stairwell of our building.

You grabbed the paper bag with the banana and threw it down the stairs so hard that the banana broke and turned into mush.

I said that I would still eat it.

I did, but it was many years before I could eat a banana again without remembering the salty taste of my tears.

Then, by Easter, we went on a long automobile tour to visit an old friend of yours, just the two of us. You were mysteriously quiet all that drive, both going and coming back.

Picture from that trip. Easter day, April 6, 1947.
My mother was not there.

We arrived home in the late afternoon several days later. It was still daylight.

Deem my surprise, half of all the furniture was gone, including one half of the double bed in your bedroom. Little did I know then, but you never, ever slept in that bedroom again.

My mother and sister were not there, and my mother never set foot in the apartment until after you were dead, seven years later.

It took over 25 years until I learned what had prompted that huge change in all of our lives.

You had found my mother in bed with your best friend, after a shared lunch. You returned to fetch a forgotten pipe, and there they were.

I knew nothing about any agreements, if there were any, but from that day, on, it was you and I, father.

An early camera lesson for me.
How to take a self portrait in a mirror.

You tried to get a maid to come and live in the maid’s room, as before, but that never worked out well. They didn’t stay.

The last one had a funny ending.

She would get phone calls from her boyfriend late at night. Our telephone was in the office, where you now slept.

To solve this, you moved the telephone to the pantry, with an extremely short cord. The only way to talk on the phone was if you sat on the floor. There wasn’t enough room for a chair, or even a stool.

After a few nights, talking to her boyfriend, sitting hulked down on the floor, you came in and told her to leave.

“Be gone by the morning.”

She was.

The apartment was not kept well after that. You would, occasionally pay one of the cleaners on staff at city hall to come an take a swipe at our abode too.

There was an incident that I can still chuckle over, even if I was only little boy when it played out.

One of the city hall cleaning ladies, married with children my age, took a liking to us. She declared that she would become my “substitute mother”.

She would often come to set things straight after the working day and even, on occasion, prepare dinner for me.

Once, the dinner was spaghetti with ketchup, an easy to make and serve meal in its own right.

She broke the spaghetti when she put it into the boiling water, making them all short – an inexcusable way to destroy the enjoyment of having spaghetti. They must be long, the longer the better, so you can properly suck them in.

To add insult to injury, instead of melting butter to put over, she served browned margarine.

This is enough – I will complain to father – and I did, once you came home from one of your often occuring evening meetings.

I never saw her in our home again, and I didn’t miss her cooking either.

Father, you had a real problem. A little boy at home, a home with nobody to look after him.

The summer of 1947 was long, warm and sunny. The fancy Ford V8 car was soon gone and we traveled to the cottage by bus. It took about one hour, including 15-minute taxi ride from the last stop.

You often left me with the Jonson family when you went back to work in the city. I had a great time at the farm and really enjoyed my time there.

The men at the Jonson farm and me in the summer of 1947.

As fall came about, you left me with the Jonson’s for the winter and I started grade one in Grönteboda school. It was a two-room school for all classes, from first to ninth grade.

The entire school at graduation time, spring of 1948.

Oh, how you suffered when you came for visits that winter.

The bus-routine was not very convenient, and you used a small motorcycle. It was an hour’s trip. You arrived very cold, literally frozen to the bone, some Friday nights.

But – you never gave up on me. If the weather allowed, you came.

The next fall, 1948, I was eight and ready for grade two. By this time, you had worked up the courage to take me home, with or without domestic help.

This did create a problem. Now there was nobody who could cook for me.

That issue was soon solved. Restaurant Reval was located less than one block away. It was on the second floor, over a pub, with a grand view of city square. You got meal tickets and we dined there five nights a week, for years, until the cost became too great and we continued in far less sumptuous surroundings, the “milk-bars” that served the shift workers.

At the Reval, you were good friends with the door man and coat checker. He gambled on the horses, you bought tickets to that occasionally, and he also sold smuggled cigarettes.

You used to buy oval-shaped mild (?) Turkish cigarettes from him. I even tried smoking one, once, but almost threw up. I never tried smoking again. Perhaps the cigarette wasn’t mild enough?

This restaurant served many of the sailors and officers of the many ships in harbour. Some paid with smuggled cigarettes, exchanged for Swedish kronor by the doorman.

Your coupons paid for an appetizer, a main dish and dessert, quite standard, of course.

Since I was “little”, I had smaller meals. The standard appetizer, S.O.S (Smör, Ost, och Sill), butter, cheese and salted herring was mandatory, by law, to accompany your optional schnapps.

This was certainly not a great delight for a boy.

You always had one schnapps before dinner, carefully measured out from a government approved dispenser.

I used to nibble on the cheese only.

Then followed an indeterminately long pause, very boring for me. I would use the matches on the table to build log houses, or to draw figures on the starched white tablecloth, until the main dish arrived. When I got my first ballpoint paint, I drew with that one too. The maitre’d got very upset and you had to pay for a new tablecloth that day.

The short walk home after dinner was always cold. It was very uncomfortable. Perhaps the body had sent too much blood to my stomach and the rest would freeze.

You still didn’t know how to cook. Our weekend meals were often hotdogs or beans, or anything that was easy to warm up right out of the can. E.G. Johansson’s delicatessen, across the street, must have made a good profit from all the expensive canned imported food that you bought.

We started our travels to the cottage in late April, or as soon as the snow showed signs of melting.

You, the cottage owner, in full splendor, still in office garb.

There you always had plans and projects. You were happy to work outside, even if you weren’t very good at it, or even worse, suffered lots of bodily pains by Monday morning.

You overdid it, whatever you were doing.

I fully understand your wish for hard physical work. Your office work was stressful.

You took on extra work, perhaps for extra income.

To be stand-in chief of police was not conductive for an uninterrupted night’s sleep. We lived such that the police station was across our yard, but you still had to get up when the phone rang, get dressed and attend to the crisis du jour.

As a lawyer, you were the court prosecutor. I cannot tell how laborious that position was, but I do remember how you, after hours, poured over thick piles of legal work, in your private office at home, the same room as where your single bed was. It was not a regular bed but a chaise-long, bent at one end. It could not have been comfortable.

You gave me the ex-marital bedroom. You hade never slept even one night in it after my mother left. I had my toys, and my ever-growing model railroad there.

I, of course, often visited your large office on the first floor. We lived on the third.

Karlshamn City Hall, your office window
was No. 4 from right on bottom floor.

Your secretaries were always very friendly, and I was sad to see someone leave. You complained that it was hard to get a secretary who had strong fingers, could type many copies and wouldn’t get pregnant within the next few months.

You were so busy that you did not quite know or could have much influence on what I did.

One thing that I didn’t do, was any homework at all. You may have told me to, but nobody was there to check me. I winged it at school and got passing marks only in the subjects I liked.

Fortunately, that included German, English, physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. In biology, I had straight As for the duration of my high school studies, from the first to the last year, when I finally dropped out of school at age 16. For the rest of my subjects, there were long strings of red-penciled Cs and Ds on my report card. I was held back to redo two years.

What could you do?

Once, you got angry and said that you would hit me. Our apartment rooms were connected in a circle. I had soon outrun you and that was the end of that.

You never carried a grudge, neither on me or as it seemed, on anyone else.

I always knew that there were many people in town who respected and liked you. The friendly faces of the people we met, the many you stopped to talk to and the various service people we interacted with.

Sure, you had political enemies, but they were very civil when you met, as I saw it. They may have been terrible in meeting rooms and at writing memos, but I, of course, knew nothing of that.

I know that we paid for our own electricity. The meter reader, a friend of yours, had a motorboat that we sometimes went fishing from. He was also a very honest man and would duly record our excessive power consumption every month.

Excessive?

Yes, when I was alone after dark, I would switch on every single lightbulb I could find. That included inside the closets and also to leave the refrigerator door ajar, for that light to shine out.

No talking-to could alter that. I was mortally afraid of being alone, and to be alone with a dark room near was an impossible thought. What would be hiding there? I had probably seen too many horror movies.

The movies, ooh the movies.

The Grand movie house, one of three.

You told me that you always liked movies, and we often went. With your official position came free tickets to all entertainments of any kind, movies included.

The choice was obviously unlimited. Do the math yourself. Three cinemas showing two different movies each, every week. That makes six a week. We sometimes saw them all if they were good.

I saw it all, love, horror, mayhem, violence, beauty, your favourite stars, and science fiction. Weren’t these movies restricted? Not for me, you brought me in after the show had started, nobody saw how short I was then.

The one that I loved the best?

Not one, but the Sunday matinée “Indian and cowboy” movies, plus all the cartoons.

Was there one that scared the living daylight out of me?

Yes, a rather tame science fiction movie, Jules Verne’s “War of the worlds”. Your friend, Miss Ohlin, the librarian, didn’t stop me when I took the book out earlier. Add the special effects of the movie and I didn’t sleep well for a while.

If I screamed in my sleep, you would come in, light a dim lamp and bring me a small glass of milk.

Then I felt so much better.

While I had a long bath, you would play the piano in a room far away. I would hear the music through the walls. I had a large cow-bell to call you, should my bathwater cool down and need reheating.

You had found the bell in a field once, when we had stopped the car and were stealing apples.

Yes, even the, sometimes, chief of police wasn’t averse to stealing a few apples if his son was hungry in the car. I often was.

Me and our 1948 Renault Juvaquatre

About driving, you taught me to sit by your side and operate the steering wheel from age 11. The summer I was 13, I sat on pillows and drove, learning the intricacies of changing gears. The roads were not much travelled and we never had any incident of any kind. I knew how to slow down and shift into first gear at road construction sites. The workers would look at us with surprise in their eyes.

Did you look after your health well?

Probably not. My mother told me in later years about your obsession with “healthy food”. Were you the guilty party when I, as a newborn, didn’t get enough calcium (milk) and developed rickets?

I still have a bent back and protruding ribs as a souvenir from that short period of time, in 1940.

What I saw, probably after the value of milk had been so severely drilled into you in 1940, was that you just loved yogurt in all its forms. There were always a few yogurt-making bacteria strands at work in our kitchen. Sometimes you forgot a bottle, it would explode and create a royal mess.

Others were in open plates in our cold room. They usually fared better.

In any case, you have left me with a life-long liking of yogurt and other milk-based products.

My lack of weight was always a concern for the school nurse. You knew each other well and I had sometimes seen you talking amicably to each other in town.

Not so this time. She came to our apartment with a stern warning to you, my father, and said,

“Harald, you must feed your son better”.

You argued loudly and you threw the door closed after her, hard.

How could you feed me well? I often skipped the mandatory school lunch, the restaurant food was not all that appetizing, and what else we had may not have been all that nourishing.

In any case, I ended up with Iron-pills, large and impossible to swallow, sugar coated or not. I methodically threw them in the garbage, one every day, until they were all gone.

The, as prescribed, fish oil didn’t do much better. I learned to take a deep breath, allow the fish oil into my mouth and then sneak away and spit it out, holding my breath for “minutes”, or at least long enough to exit.

The medicine must have worked, I cannot remember any more comments from the school-nurse.

But I was truly hungry a lot. On my way home from school I passed K-G Andersson’s grocery store. He kept all his chocolates behind a sliding glass door. I helped myself to what I wanted.

This all went into his ledger and once a month he would, personally, come to our apartment to collect what was due. So much chocolate.

Once home from school, I’d let myself in and have an early dinner on cookies, marmalade and chocolate, accompanied by a sampling of the five newspapers that you got every day.

That’s how I learned a lot about the world. Reading. (I still do.)

My teeth were suffering badly. What did a soon 60-year old dad, you, know about proper dental hygiene? You never knew, but the fall after you had passed away, at age 14, I needed to have 42 cavities filled and four teeth extracted.

Now it seems strange. I know that you were very careful with your own dental hygiene, why did you not look after mine?

You never told one single bad word about my mother. You didn’t communicate much either. I found some letters you had written to each other, about us, the children. That was all.

We, you and I, loved each other and probably lived very well, all considered.

Your fiancée, Maj Swanström, and her mother Alma were welcome guests. Maj was fully 25 years younger than you. Her mother was three years older than you. An odd couple.

You introduced her for the first time the summer of 1948, abut a year after you had separated from mother.

Marie-Louise, Maj Swanström, and I
doing roof repair on the cottage summer of 1948

They were both very nice to me, and they added much pleasure to my life both with you and for the next 40 years.

There is so much more I want to tell you, my father.

I was too young to understand the difficulties you had with me, the so unsuccessful student and too successful troublemaker, and my sister. You never knew, but may have suspected from her erratic behaviour, that she would develop serious mental problems in her life.

Your end came suddenly.

You had been off work for circulatory problems for a few weeks.

While on our last visit to the cottage, you had accidentally started a grass fire, one that almost put the forest on fire. We were both up all night putting out little residual fires.

On return after that sleepless night at the cottage, you had a visitor in our apartment. He bluntly told you, I was there, that you were not to sit at the King’s side at his upcoming state visit to Karlshamn, only a week away.

You would be relegated to sit at a side table.

You never made it to that dinner.

All this had probably caused too much stress. You had a stroke, while we were setting the table for lunch in the kitchen, and died less than six hours later.

That ended a happy time in my life, followed by much hardship, both for lack of money, my mother didn’t earn much, and because of the increasing family effects of my sister’s approaching mental illness.

I know that you will never read this. You have been gone for 66 years, as I approach my 80^th birthday.

Father, I still love you and thank you for what I got from you. The knowledge and the genes you passed on have served me well.