Astrid Lindgren: The Woman Behind Pippi Longstocking
By 1929 the Lasse situation was once more as good as could be expected, given the circumstances. Astrid’s Eastertime visit to see her son, who was then two and a half and whom she hadn’t seen for nearly six months, was paid for by Reinhold Blomberg, and in a letter to Astrid while she was staying at Håbets Allé he asked her to forgive his behavior the year before. Getting rather sentimental, he recalled the good old days, when they’d both talked about becoming husband and wife. Astrid replied to him on Easter Monday, the day before she was due to leave her son, who had spoken Danish to her every day. In her letter, shot through with all sorts of Danish words and phrases, she thanked Reinhold warmly for the trip, regaled him with funny anecdotes about their lovely, talented son, and counseled him to stop brooding on what was past, exhorting him instead to live in the now:
You say the whole of Easter is going to be a feast of reflection. No, you’ve got to stop that. It only makes matters worse. You mustn’t grieve over what’s lost but make the best of now. . . . You don’t need to ask my forgiveness for anything. It’s not your fault or mine that we couldn’t make it work together. . . . Alas, it’s snowing, and somehow wonderfully mournful and soft. You had a painting over your bed in the old days, a depiction of a fall landscape. The mood of that painting is the same as the one that surrounds me today.
It had always been heartbreaking to part from Lasse, thought Astrid, but never as difficult as it was now. More than ever before, he represented the vital force and source of meaning she lacked in her life in Stockholm. Small but proud, the boy had been trotting confidently through the streets of Copenhagen by Astrid’s side, holding her hand, when he suddenly remarked: “Mamma and Lasse are walking!” And when she hugged the boy so hard he could barely breathe or, grinning, threatened to gobble him up with her next mouthful, he gazed serenely up at her and said: “Are you trying to be cheeky?”
Summer 1929. Two-year-old Lasse pretends to ride a horse at the Stevens family’s allotment on the other side of Frederiksundsvej, near Håbets Allé.
Over the summer of 1929, both Astrid and Reinhold visited Copenhagen—separately—to see Lasse. Blomberg’s trip was a single day, and proved an emotionally charged occasion. Afterward Mrs. Stevens wrote to Astrid and described the flying visit, of which there had been many over the years. As he did in the letters enclosing his monthly payments, he asked after Astrid, and this time he was also unusually pleased to see his boy, observed Auntie Stevens: “‘You’re so much like your mother,’ he said, sitting with little Lasse in his arms and crying. I felt sorry for him.”
Astrid traveled in July 1929 to Copenhagen, where she enjoyed the good weather and spent most of her days in the garden behind Villa Stevns, watching Lasse do somersaults, climb trees, and balance on the roof of the privy. Never before had he talked so much or said such odd things in Danish. One moment he was asking Astrid whether she was five years old, and the next he was shouting to the seventeen-year-old milkman leaving the milk bottles outside the front door, “Say hello to the wife and kids!” Lasse’s proud mother recounted all of this in her letters home to Sture in Stockholm, also conveying the alarming news that she had been taken to the Rigshospital and put under observation for diphtheria: “And I should be home by this evening. But when I go home to Näs I’ll stay there a week anyway. I haven’t been home over the summer for three years. So I suppose I’m allowed? But poor Mother will be scared out of her wits. . . . I daren’t send a kiss because that’s how you get diphtheria, so instead I send lots of greetings.”
Astrid didn’t have diphtheria, but she kept getting pains in her neck and chest due to an enlarged thyroid gland, and in December 1929 she had to have surgery. During her convalescence, which coincided with the Christmas holiday at Näs, she received a letter with upsetting news from Håbets Allé. Auntie Stevens had been taken to hospital with heart trouble, and Carl had been obliged to rush Lasse and Esse to other foster families in the vicinity. It didn’t sound good. In late December, Astrid traveled down to Copenhagen to see Marie Stevens. By then she had been discharged, but had been advised that she had neither the health nor the energy required to run a business as a foster mother.
Lasse’s foster mother had already made a few inquiries, and was convinced the boy should be removed as soon as possible from his temporary foster family in Husum and placed somewhere else until the next steps were decided. The options were clear: he could live with Lassemamma in Stockholm, with Lassemamma’s parents in Vimmerby, or with Marie Stevens, once she felt better. These were the three possibilities Astrid was presented with in Mrs. Stevens’s letter, which concluded with the words: “But dear little Lassemamma, if I die soon, which it doesn’t seem for the moment like I will, take your little lad home so you can care for him yourself. Don’t ever let him be a lonely child in Denmark, because then I’d feel as though my life had been lived in vain.”
Mrs. Stevens was still very much alive when Astrid appeared on December 28, and they went to Husum to fetch Lasse together. The three-year-old’s face lit up at the sight of his foster mother, and he pulled and tugged at Mrs. Stevens while Astrid stood and watched. He wanted them to go home to Håbets Allé as soon as possible. They stayed there only a few hours, however, before continuing on to Mrs. Stevens’s sister, who ran a boardinghouse for single older people on H.C. Ørsteds Vej. There Lassemamma and Lasse would be able to stay the night.
As Astrid Lindgren wrote in her autobiographical notes for Margareta Strömstedt in 1976–77, it was “the most difficult night of my life.” Mrs. Stevens’s sister wasn’t eager to make up a bed for the mother and child, but since one of the elderly ladies at the boardinghouse had just left, it could be managed. The atmosphere was uneasy, and Lasse sensed that his idyllic days at Håbets Allé were numbered:
When we got there, and Lasse understood instinctively that nothing was or would be like he thought, he lay on his stomach on a chair and cried without a sound. Utterly without a sound, as if he realized it wouldn’t do any good, that they’ll do what they want with me anyway! Those tears are crying within me even now, and probably will do for the rest of my days. Maybe it’s because of those tears that I always take the child’s side so strongly in any and all circumstances, and I get so beside myself when petty, self-important pencil pushers muck children around, moving them from place to place—because it’s so easy for children to adapt, they think! It isn’t easy for them to adapt, although it can look like that. They just resign themselves to superior forces.
Astrid Lindgren also recalled that difficult night in a letter to Carl Stevens on February 22, 1978. In that big, dark, strange apartment on the fourth floor of a block in central Copenhagen, she remarked, it was as though Lasse’s life had reached rock bottom. So had Astrid’s. There weren’t enough beds to go around, so two armchairs were pushed together in the living room for the boy, and when he saw where he was supposed to sleep, he said in Danish, “That’s not a bed, that’s just two chairs!” A bed was made up for his mother in the elderly lady’s room, which overlooked the street. “I lay awake brooding in my desperation about what to do with Lasse, and I realized I had to take him back with me to Stockholm, even though I didn’t have a home for him. The next morning, when Lasse saw me, he said in such surprise, ‘Oh, look, there’s mamma!’ He’d been so convinced I’d left him, I think.”
As she lay pondering the future, the streetcars thundered down H.C. Ørsteds Vej. Hours passed, and eventually it felt as if they were driving straight through Astrid’s head. More and more, faster and faster. When morning came she was still awake, but she had made a decision. No matter what it cost, Lasse was coming home to Sweden. It was going to be cramped in the room at St. Eriksplan 5, where she had moved after living with Gun in Atlasgatan. Astrid didn’t know yet whether her landlady, who was usually at home during the day, could be persuaded to look after Lasse while Astrid was at work. In a hasty letter to Sture in Stockholm, dated January 4, 1930, she called the previous few days “a promenade through hell?
?? and quickly brought him up to speed:
Arriving in Stockholm Tuesday morning on the early train. Come and fetch me! If I don’t make it as expected, then wait. The nine o’clock train gets in immediately afterward. Lasse is arriving in Stockholm a few days later. My more detailed plans, which are very sensible, I can’t get into now: Please could you go to the child welfare office and find out how much they consider an appropriate monthly payment for a three-year-old child. Then please be so kind as to send a letter to me immediately, so that I receive it on Monday at the following address: Örstedsvej 70, 3rd floor c/o Kröyer. I’m so longing to come home to you and be cradled.
In February 1929, Astrid described her relationship with Sture in a letter to Anne-Marie Fries: “The boss, married, thirty, has discovered what an incredibly enchanting person I really am, and this manifests itself in the looniest remarks, which—if they’re not put a stop to in time—might have serious consequences for me, including potential unemployment. That’s another alte Geschichte [old story], of course, which I should have been able to foresee with a bit of mental gymnastics. Alas, I wish I were an angel standing among small angels!”
Home to Sweden
On January 10, 1930, Carl Stevens and Lasse boarded the train to Stockholm. Mrs. Stevens had written to let Astrid know in advance that Carl would probably stay a day or two, see a bit of the Swedish capital, and maybe take a trip to Uppsala to visit another Swedish mother who had once lived at Håbets Allé with her young child. She told Astrid about everything that was packed in the suitcases and bags, and finished with the words: “I’m sending my love to you and little Lasse. Take care, perhaps we’ll see each other again, and thank you for the time I had with him. Lasse’s godmother!”
The long train journey went well, although Lasse had a chesty cough and tried to kick his “big brother” out of the bunk at regular intervals. Carl, who had an interest in art, spent a few enjoyable days with Astrid and “the amiable Mr. Lindgren.” He bought books by Strindberg, went to museums, and admired the architecture in Atlas, the area of Stockholm where Sture lived alone in a small apartment. As soon as he got home, he thanked Lassemamma for a few glorious days in Stockholm. They never saw each other again, Carl and Astrid, but they continued to write to each other until his death in 1988, often reminiscing about the old days and the time they’d spent together. A February 1978 letter from Astrid, for instance, recalled the difficult and challenging period after Carl brought Lasse to Stockholm: “Lasse had whooping cough and obviously wasn’t very happy. I stood outside the door and listened to him, hearing him mutter to himself: ‘Mother and Esse and Carl are sleeping now!’ Can you understand that I’m crying again as I write this?’”
It wasn’t just whooping cough that was a problem, but also the fact that Astrid was suddenly taking care of the boy all by herself. In Copenhagen she had always had a capable, experienced “mother” close at hand, but now the responsibility was hers and hers alone. Still, the twenty-two-year-old had learned a lot by watching and listening during her brief stays at Håbets Allé, and she also had her intuition and common sense to rely on. The latter approach was recommended in the preface to the Swedish pediatrician Arthur Fürstenberg’s book A Course in Caring for Children (En kurs i barnavård), which Astrid kept on her bookshelf: “My advice to young mothers is, to cut a long story short, the following: study childcare in practice and theory sooner rather than later, think about what you’re doing, and don’t rely uncritically on everything you hear from friends and relatives, no matter how old and experienced they are. It’s your child you’re looking after, and you’re the one responsible for how you fulfill your duties!”
This was sometimes easier said than done. Astrid was frequently cast into doubt. At Auntie Stevens’s, for example, Lasse and Esse had always worn warm underclothes at night, so naturally Lasse did the same in Stockholm. For a while his mother would lie awake most of the night, ready to tuck the duvet firmly back around her son when he woke up—hot and sweaty—and tried to kick off the suffocating duvet, telling him drowsily, “You have to put this over you so you don’t catch cold!” One morning, as Astrid sat in her underclothes and had her morning wash, Lasse gazed at her thoughtfully before abruptly saying, “Is mamma the only one allowed to catch cold?”
Mother and son in Vasa Park, April 1930. Behind them is St. Eriksplan, the square where Astrid and Lasse had been sharing a small room at no. 5 for four months.
In March 1930, it became clear that mother and son couldn’t continue living together like this. Lasse coughed constantly, and Astrid barely got a wink of sleep before she had to get up and go to work. Rescue came from Småland: Hanna and Samuel August—prompted by Astrid’s sisters—offered to let Lasse live at Näs for as long as necessary. Astrid accordingly took a few weeks’ vacation in April and traveled down to Vimmerby with Lasse. The boy was now about to enter the fourth home of his short life, where he would have to adapt to yet another family. The move did not prove frictionless. As Astrid Lindgren explained to Margareta Strömstedt in 1967–77: “It was a little Danish-speaking grandchild who arrived at Näs in May 1930. Hanna stood at the gate to meet us, but when she went to hug Lasse he clung to me in a panic and said: ‘You mustn’t leave me!’ Because he thought, of course, that something bad was going to happen to him again.”
After a few days’ skepticism and caution, Lasse calmed down and began to feel safe, and on April 21 an optimistic Astrid wrote to Sture: “Lasse thrives when he’s allowed to go where he pleases. The whole house waits on him hand and foot, the whole farm for that matter, and everyone is competing for his favor.”
Mother and son spent a few wonderful weeks together at Näs, where Lasse was taken to all the fantastical places of his mother’s childhood and played all the games she had played with Gunnar, Stina, and Ingegerd. She showed him the elm tree in the rectory garden where Uncle Gunnar had once put a hen’s egg in an owl’s nest. The owls soon hatched a chicken, which Uncle Gunnar sold to Grandma Hanna. Astrid also taught Lasse to make dens and tunnels in the hay in the barn, introducing him to all sorts of animals—small and sweet, big and threatening—including stallions, bulls, and a sow, which Lasse immediately christened Bamsen (Teddy Bear). On other days, mother and son would go on long walks, balancing on stone walls and lying on their backs in the grass to see what shapes the clouds took in the sky, before they both fell asleep and were woken by an insect or a drop of rain. In a letter to Sture dated April 29, 1930, Astrid marveled at how rapidly a young child was able to acclimatize to the countryside: “It’s animal cruelty to keep children in the city, even in small cities. A child should be brought up among hens and pigs and the flowers of the field. It’s spring here, especially in the evening. It’s the same blue spring air that awoke my longing for ‘the wonderful’ in my tender youth.”
The farm, fields and meadows, and animals and people at Näs rapidly became a paradise for four-year-old Lasse, who had only known busy urban life among people in small houses and small spaces. In Småland he could move freely and ramble wherever he chose.
When it rained, Lasse learned some of the old indoor games at Näs. There was the gloriously noisy game of tag played across three or four rooms, in which you shouted “Sicken blås” (what a crash) if you bumped into someone else as you ran. Then there was “Inte stöta golvet” (the equivalent of hot lava), where you had to climb over the furniture to avoid touching the floor.
Those few weeks were lived intensely, and mother and son spent almost every waking hour in each other’s company. Yet it didn’t take much, realized Astrid, for Lasse’s fear of abandonment to resurface, and he missed Auntie Stevens badly. One day, when they were going to a large family birthday celebration, he looked at Astrid with big, frightened eyes and said, “Will I stay there forever?” Another day, at home in Näs, there was a sudden knock on the kitchen door while they were sitting at the table. In came one of the Ericsson aunts, who resembled Lasse’s Copenhagen foster mother in stature and appearance. “Th
at’s Mother!” shouted Lasse, and immediately wanted to go home with her. Astrid had to play along, a lump in her throat, and only when they reached the aunt’s house did Lasse work out that something wasn’t right. Astrid stood and held out her hand: “I asked him if he wanted to come home to Näs. And he did. But in the street he stopped short and threw up—the poor child!”
Astrid recounted all of this in a long letter to Carl Stevens in February 1978, in which she also mentioned other examples of how a child might react who was in danger of losing a parental figure or suddenly had to adapt to a new one. As far as her son was concerned, concluded the older Astrid Lindgren in her letter to Carl, “It took a very, very long time for Lasse to feel reasonably safe.” She expressed deep gratitude for everything Carl’s mother had done for her little boy during the first three years of his life, and what she had meant to him: “It certainly wasn’t her fault that things were difficult for Lasse. She was quite simply his mother, and as long as I live I’ll be grateful for what she did for him.”
In the 1978 letter to Carl, she also commented that Mrs. Stevens probably missed Lasse just as much as he missed her in the years after he left Håbets Allé. Such was indeed the case, as Carl could testify. The family knew how much Marie had struggled with the many losses in her life. She missed not only her daughter, who had died at the age of one, and her husband, who had died in 1921, but many of her foster children, with whom she formed close bonds. One by one, they were taken home by their mothers, or by representatives of the families adopting them. The only one who remained at Villa Stevns year after year was Esse, Lasse’s playmate, who didn’t leave Copenhagen until he turned eighteen and who was convinced for most of his tenure at Håbets Allé that Mrs. Stevens was his real mother and Carl his real big brother.