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 80th 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.
