A Winter Book

  We sat in a row and watched them sail away. Sometimes you could get a glimpse of the boat but sometimes you couldn’t see them at all.

  Mrs Seaforth looked at Mr Seaforth and said: “Think carefully what you’re doing.”

  “I’m thinking alright!” he answered. “Do you think this is easy for me? But I’ve made up my mind. I shan’t take any notice of the whole thing, and I shan’t accept a single bottle or a canister, either. In any case, I’m on holiday and I’m not the only one who’s taking them home. And they’ve eaten my sandwiches, too. Jansson would understand what I mean.”

  When Daddy and Mr Hermanson came back, they were soaked to the skin and very cheerful, and immediately they came ashore they went to fetch the canisters. They took one each, but Seaforth didn’t take one at all because he was being loyal to the coastguards.

  “But they promised us four,” said Mrs Hermanson. “And three bottles of brandy.”

  “That was while they were scared,” said Daddy. “When we got them home they changed their minds, and said one canister for each family.”

  “That’s three, then,” said Mrs Hermanson. “And we can share the Seaforth’s.”

  “That wouldn’t be right,” said Daddy. “There are principles involved in this. Two canisters, and that’s all. Besides, the journey itself was worth something. Women don’t understand these things.”

  We hid the canisters in the seaweed.

  Towards evening the wind died down and we sailed home, each family going their own way. Then we put the canisters in the fish-cage. We said nothing, we kept quiet.

  There are people who sell canisters that they have found and overcharge for them. That’s no way to behave. Others row the canisters to the coastguard. It happened once in Pernby.

  To buy a canister is like cheating the government, and anyway is too expensive, and one doesn’t do that sort of thing. The only proper way is to find a canister and preferably save it at the risk of one’s life. Such a canister is a source of satisfaction and does no harm to anybody’s principles.

  But a boat that has floated ashore or is just drifting is an entirely different matter. Boats are serious things. One has to search and search until one finds the owner even if it takes years to find him. It’s just the same with fishing-nets that have broken loose and are drifting. They must go back to their owners. Everything else one is allowed to keep – logs, planks and pit-props and net-floats and buoys.

  But the worst thing one can do is to take flotsam that has already been salvaged by someone else. That’s unforgivable. If it has been piled up against a stone or collected in a neat pile with two stones on top of it, it is reserved. You can reserve it with two stones, but three are better. One stone is not to be relied on, because it might have got there by accident. There are people who take other people’s piles, or even worse just take the best things from each pile. I know! If one has rescued a plank, one always recognises it again. And often one knows exactly who has been where one left it. But one says nothing about it afterwards, because that would be in bad taste, and in any case who told one to reserve things with stones instead of making two trips to row everything home?

  What is right and what is wrong is a very sensitive matter. One could say a lot about it. For example, if you come across a boat floating all by itself with a cabinet in it full of canisters, it goes without saying that one searches for the owner of the boat and keeps the cabinet oneself, if it is a nice one. But how many canisters is one allowed to keep? There’s a lot of difference between a canister in a boat, in the undergrowth, or in the water, or in a cabinet that is in a boat.

  Once I found a boat made of bark that was called Darling. It was very beautifully made with a hold, rudders, a wheelhouse and cloth sails. But Daddy said I didn’t have to find out who owned it.

  Maybe nothing is so important, provided that it is small enough. At least, that’s what I think.

  High Water

  ONE SUMMER THE BOATHOUSE WAS EMPTY BECAUSE Old Charlie was out fishing all the time. Mummy sat on our veranda and drew illustrations and sent them to town with the herring boat. From time to time she took a dip in the sea and then she went on drawing again.

  Daddy looked at her and then he went and looked in the boathouse and in the end he went to town and fetched his modelling stand and box of clay, his armatures and his modelling tools. He turned the boathouse into a studio and everybody got interested in it and helped him. They tried to tidy up all Old Charlie’s tools and wanted to clean the floor, but that they weren’t allowed to.

  Daddy got cross and then they understood that, for Daddy, the boathouse was a sacred place and not to be disturbed in any way. Nobody went down the field near the beach and the boats had to tie up at the herring jetty.

  It was a very hot summer and the wind never blew.

  Mummy drew and drew, and every time a drawing was cleaned up with a rubber she allowed herself to take a dip. I stood next to the table on the veranda and waited till she held up a drawing so that the Indian ink could dry faster and we both laughed because we were thinking what it was like in town when drawing was done at night and made you so tired that you felt sick. Then we ran down to the beach and jumped into the sea. When Old Charlie had people from town staying with him, I had to wear my knickers in the water.

  Daddy was working in his new studio. He went there after he’d been fishing and had his breakfast. Daddy loves to go fishing. He gets up at four in the morning and takes his fishing-rod and goes and looks at the bleak fish in the bait box.

  It was so hot in the bay that the bleak all died, and we put out the net almost every evening just off Sandy Island. We put a packet of crispbread for Daddy on the veranda every morning. He filled his pockets full and rowed out through the sound.

  A mooring-stone is very important. One can look for hours without finding a really good one, as they have to be slightly oval and have a notch in the middle. In the morning Daddy goes fishing by himself. Nobody interferes with him and nobody says he mustn’t. The lighting is wonderful then and the rocks look just as good as if Cavvy had painted them. One just sits and looks at the float, and one knows the fish will bite and when they’ll bite. There’s a rock underneath the water that has been named after Daddy; it’s called Jansson’s Rock and will be called that for ever and ever. Then one makes one’s way home slowly, looking to see if there’s smoke coming out of the chimney.

  Nobody else likes fishing. But Mummy helps with the bag-net and sits at the helm and trails a trolling-spoon. She has no sense of where the right spots are, but that’s something people are born with and it’s seldom found in women.

  Daddy went to his new studio after breakfast. It was just as hot every day and there was never any wind.

  Daddy got more and more glum. He began to talk politics. Nobody went near the boathouse and we didn’t bathe near there either, but went to the first bay instead.

  The worst thing was the way in which Old Charlie’s visitors behaved. They went out of their way to cut Daddy off and, when they saw him coming, addressed him as ‘Sculptor’ and asked him whether he had had any inspiration or not. I have never heard anything so tactless. They crept past the boathouse in an obvious way, putting their fingers up to their lips, whispering and nodding to one another and giggling, and naturally Daddy could see the whole performance through the window.

  And the worst thing was that they suggested motifs to him. Mummy and I felt so terribly embarrassed for them, but what could we do?

  Daddy became more and more glum and in the end he didn’t speak to anyone at all. One morning he didn’t even go fishing but stayed in bed staring at the ceiling with his lips pursed.

  And it got hotter and hotter.

  Then all of a sudden the water began to rise. We didn’t notice it until the wind got up during the night. It all happened in half an hour. A mass of dry twigs and rubbish from the yard was blown against the window-panes and the storm roared through the forest, and it was so hot that one couldn’t even
bear to have a sheet over one in bed. The door was burst open and we ran out onto the steps and saw that there were white horses behind Red Rock, and then we saw the water glistening right up round the well and Daddy cheered up and shouted, “Well, I’ll be damned! What weather!”, and put his trousers on and was outside in a jiffy.

  Old Charlie’s visitors had been blown out onto the slope in their nightshirts and stood there all huddled together and had no idea at all what to do. But Mummy and Daddy went down to the beach and watched the jetty floating away towards Reed Island with all the boats pushing and nudging each other as though they were alive, and the fish-cage had broken adrift and all the pit-props were floating out through the sound. It was marvellous!

  The grass was under water, the sea was rising all the time, and the storm and the night made the whole landscape look quite different.

  Old Charlie ran to fetch the clothesline and Fanny stood there shouting and banging a tin can and her white hair was flying in all directions. Daddy rowed out to the jetty with a line and Mummy stood on the shore holding it.

  Everything lying on the slope below the house had floated out to sea and the offshore wind was carrying it out towards the sound and the wind was getting stronger and stronger and the water was rising higher and higher. I was shouting with glee, too, as I waded up and down and felt the floating grass getting tangled round my legs. I was trying to save planks and from time to time Daddy ran past hauling logs and shouting: “What do you think of this! The wind’s getting stronger all the time!”

  He flung a rope to the visitors and shouted: “Take hold of this, damn you! We must get the jetty up into the field! Do something! Don’t just stand there!” And the visitors hauled on the rope and were soaked to the skin in their nightshirts and had no idea what fun the whole thing was, which served them right.

  In the end we saved everything that could be saved and Mummy went into the house to make tea. I pulled off my clothes and was wrapped in a blanket and sat and watched Mummy lighting the fire. The window-panes rattled and were quite dark and it started to rain.

  Then Daddy burst in and went into the kitchen and shouted: “Damn it! Can you imagine what’s happened! The clay looks like porridge. It’s a damned nuisance, but there’s nothing to be done about it!”

  “How terrible,” said Mummy, looking just as pleased as Daddy.

  “I’ve been down to the first bay,” Daddy said, “and it’s blowing hard down there and a whole load of logs is floating in. I’ve no time for tea now. I’ll be back later.”

  “Alright,” said Mummy. “I’ll keep it warm.”

  Then Daddy went out again. Mummy poured out tea for us all. It was the best storm we had ever had.

  Jeremiah

  ONE YEAR TOWARDS AUTUMN A GEOLOGIST WAS LIVING in the pilot’s hut. He couldn’t speak either Finnish or Swedish; he just smiled and flashed his black eyes. He would look at people and immediately make them feel how surprised and happy he was to meet them at last and then he just walked on with his hammer and hammered a rock here and there. His name was Jeremiah.

  He borrowed a boat to row out to the islands and Old Charlie stood and sniggered at Jeremiah because he rowed so miserably. One felt embarrassed for Jeremiah when he took to the water and Daddy wondered what the pilots thought when they saw him rowing.

  It was very sensible of me to look after Jeremiah. He couldn’t even tie a proper half-hitch – when he tried to, it looked more like some kind of bow. Sometimes he even forgot to tie the boat up. But it was because he didn’t care about anything else in the world except stones. They didn’t have to be pretty and round or odd in any way. He had ideas of his own about stones and they were quite different from anybody else’s.

  I never got in his way and I only showed him my collection of stones once. Then he put on such a great show of admiring them that I was embarrassed. He overdid things in the wrong way. But later on he learned better.

  We walked along the beach, him in front and me behind. When he stopped, I stopped and stood still and watched while he hammered away, but I never came too close. He hadn’t often got time for me. But sometimes when he turned round and caught sight of me he pretended to be terribly surprised. He bent forward and screwed up his eyes and tried to look at me through his magnifying glass, then shook his head as though it was impossible that anyone could be as tiny as I was. Then he saw me anyway and stepped backwards in surprise and pretended that he was holding something very, very small in his hands and we both started to laugh.

  Sometimes he would draw both of us in the sand, one very tall and one very small, and once I was allowed to borrow his jersey when the wind got up. But otherwise he mostly hammered away at the rocks and forgot all about me. I didn’t mind. I always walked behind him and in the morning I waited outside the pilots’ hut until he woke up.

  We played a game. I put a present on his doorstep and then hid myself, and when he came out he found the present and was delighted. He puzzled over it and scratched his head and threw his arms in the air and then began to look for me. He looked in a rather stupid way, but that was all part of the game. He had to take a long time to find me and to discover how terribly tiny I was. I tried to make myself smaller and smaller so that he would be delighted. We hammered away at the rocks for many days together. Then it got cloudy and windy and rather cold, and then she came.

  She had the same kind of hammer as Jeremiah and walked around hammering in exactly the same way as he did, and she couldn’t speak Swedish or Finnish either. She lived in Old Charlie’s sauna.

  I knew that Jeremiah wanted to hammer on his own. He didn’t want her to come with him but she just came. If one wants to collect stones, one should be allowed to do so on one’s own. She could have looked for them on her own, but she didn’t. She kept appearing from a different direction and always pretended to be surprised at meeting Jeremiah. But her game of pretending was phony and hadn’t anything to do with us two.

  I followed behind with Jeremiah’s little box and stood waiting while he hammered away. I made sure that the boat was properly tied up. But of course we couldn’t play our game of how tiny I was while she was there.

  In the beginning she smiled at me, but in fact all she did was bare her teeth. I stared at her until she looked away and went on hammering. I followed them and stood waiting, and every time she turned round she looked at me and I never looked back at her. We froze because the wind blew right in our faces and the sun never shone. I could see that she was freezing cold and that she was afraid of the water. But she came in the boat too and she never let him go out to the islands by himself.

  She sat in the stern and gripped the gunnels with both hands and I could see from them how scared she was. She pressed her knees tightly together and craned her neck and gulped. She didn’t look at the waves but just stared at Jeremiah the whole time, and he rowed zigzag as best he could against the wind, and off they went together and got smaller and smaller.

  I wasn’t allowed to go with them in the boat any longer. They pretended that it was too small. It was a stout flat-bottomed boat and I could well have sat in the bows. Jeremiah knew it but he was afraid of her. I waited until I saw them set off and then come back to the bays. Then I would hide in the shelter of a rock and watch them, and wherever they came ashore I was there to meet them and tie up their boat.

  I knew that nothing was fun any longer and couldn’t be, but I followed them all the same. I couldn’t stop following them, every day and all day until the evening, and I had my own food with me. But we didn’t swap sandwiches any more. We kept ourselves to ourselves and we all sat at the same distance from each other and none of us said anything.

  Then we would get up and walk along the shore. Once she stopped and stood still and waited for me without turning round. I stopped too, because her back took on a dangerous shape. And then she turned round and said something to me. It was the first time she had opened her mouth. At first I didn’t understand. Then she said it again, over and over, ver
y loud and in a shrill voice: “Go home! Go home, go home!” Somebody had taught her to say “Go home!” but it sounded queer.

  I looked down at my feet and waited until she went on, and then I followed again.

  But in the morning she wasn’t there. So I put my present on the steps of the pilot’s hut and hid. I could stay in hiding as long as they liked. Then Jeremiah came out onto the steps and found the present and was surprised. He began to search for me and I was terribly tiny; so tiny that I could have fitted into his pocket.

  But gradually everything changed. I grew and he found me much too quickly. He wasn’t at all surprised. At last the awful thing had happened: we were playing the game because we had started to play it and thought it was something too embarrassing to stop.

  One day Jeremiah came out onto the steps and found his present. He threw his arms into the air as usual and clutched his head. But then he didn’t take his hands away but held his head far too long. Then he came right up to the pine tree where I was hiding and stood in front of me and smiled and I could see he was baring his teeth just like she did and wasn’t at all friendly. It was so awful that I just ran away.

  I was ashamed for both our sakes all day. At three o’clock the sun came out and I went back to the bays.

  They were in the third bay. He sat hammering and she was looking on a little way away. She wasn’t cold any longer and had taken off her woolly cap and undone her hair – masses of it that fell all over the place while she was looking at him. Then she went closer and laughed and bent down to see what he was doing and her hair fell all over, him and he got scared and straightened up and bumped her nose. I think it was her nose. She nearly fell over, so Jeremiah took a firm hold of her and for an instant they looked like paper dolls. Then she began to speak very rapidly and Jeremiah held on to her and listened.