Читать книгу Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington - Страница 7

Back to My Roots

The intrepid and ever opportunistic Doris had amazingly somehow made contact with some of Grandfather Ahlquist’s distant relatives, friends and former sailing mates in Sweden. None of his immediate family was still alive, but she had tracked down two Swedish sea captains, an old flame, and some second cousins who lived on the island of Götland.

This was no mean feat considering that airmail letters and an expensive, unreliable and scratchy international telephone service were the only communication tools of the day. Nevertheless, with Hercule Poirot sleuthing skills and the steely determination that made sure Rita and I went to a private school and subsequently produced a large dynasty of educated family members, she had arranged for her daughters to spend a summer in Sweden with Grandad’s distant family and friends.

And so it was that Rita, aged seventeen, and I, aged fifteen (feeling very experienced and blasé after my previous summer of French travel), set off to another unknown land, to unknown people, having no idea of the final destination.

These were to be the hallmarks of all my travelling. How often have I taken the roads less travelled, or not known at all, embarking on journeys to far-flung places – Tibet, India, Patagonia, Guatemala – with no firm idea of where I was going or what was on the agenda but always expecting it all to turn out well.

This was how Rita and I, while other girls of our age and background either never left their villages or married the boy next door, or both, went off happily and, as very young brides, respectively, to the wilds of New Guinea and the impenetrable interior of Nigeria.

We had been well trained by Doris.

It also helped to have had a trusting nature, a positive attitude and a sense of wonder.

And, do you know, mostly things have always turned out for the best.

In late July 1948 my sister and I boarded the boat at Tilbury for the infamous crossing from England to Sweden via the Skagerrak, a strait that runs between Norway, Sweden and the Jutland peninsula of Denmark. It leads into the Baltic Sea and is reputedly one of the roughest potential crossings in the world.

It lived up to its reputation. I have never been so desperately ill before or since, and would gladly give birth to another four children rather than relive that awful experience.

We shared a cabin with two Norwegian students who kept open house, so that any time of the day or night, as Rita and I tossed, unkempt, retching and wretched, any number of beautiful blond young men would come up to our bunks, click their heels politely together, wish us good day, and then drink beer with their friends.

Only on the last night of the horrendous three-day trip, when the storm had abated, did we make it up to deck to join a riotous student farewell party. The ship was riding smoothly on the dark sea. Overhead the stars shone brightly and suddenly the world was fine again. We danced the night away until we docked the next morning at Gothenburg, known as the Venice of the North for its small canals spanned by bridges. After wartime Britain, it seemed fresh, clean and bright, as if some giant hand had been busy early in the morning scrubbing all the streets and buildings. We met some of our grandfather’s friends, were fêted and pampered, shown around the city and then, two days later, were put on a train to Stockholm.

Sweden in those days was a land of trees and water, forests and lakes, and as the train clattered along we could see mile after mile of tall pines and firs, green and erect, like sentinels guarding the great expanses of pale water lying at their feet. As the sun rose higher and higher, the lakes clad in silver veils of shimmering mist danced and flirted with their stern guardians. And so it was, trees and lakes, green and silver, an eternal combination of sky, forest and water, until we reached Stockholm.

It is probably hard for anyone who came into the world much later on to imagine what it was like for two young girls, convent raised, cocooned in wartime Britain, where Rita and I tried to darn our nylon stockings and fought over a lipstick, where Doris and Dick scrimped and saved to give us the best possible start in life, to be in a different country: to feel free, full of promise, and confident that no ill could possible befall us.

We took it all calmly in our stride.

Carl and August (whom we secretly called Tweedledum and Tweedledee) were two distant cousins. Carl was a captain, August the chief engineer of a well-known Swedish shipping line. Rita and I were put up in a magnificent modern hotel of glass and steel, situated right in the heart of Stockholm on its main boulevard. But the thing I remember most about that hotel was that, in spite of its elegant modernity, it still employed the old-fashioned device of a speaking tube attached to the main doors. After nine o’clock at night the front doors would be firmly closed and when we arrived late, as we usually did, we had to announce our arrival. Rita’s imperious voice (she could get very imperious if necessary), announcing ‘The Misses Wood’ would be followed by a suspicious silence until at last the doors would reluctantly be opened by some unseen hand and then silently close behind us. It was all a bit surreal.

Stockholm is a city built on an archipelago and bridges criss-cross the sea that flows into the very heart of the city. On our first night we dined with the cousins on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the old harbour. Hundreds of lights danced and glimmered on the dark water, mirroring the glittering stars. Carl and August chattered gaily about their plans for us. Unfortunately, they were sailing to Genoa the next day, so we were to be left for two weeks to our own devices before crossing the Baltic to the island of Götland, home of our Swedish forebears.

Various other hosts were deputised to look after us in the cousins’ absence. We were treated like princesses and shown round castles, museums, pleasure gardens, parks and shops filled with goods we had only read or dreamed about – stylish clothes, soft leather shoes and handbags, and food – so much of it. Our jolly hosts told us that the Swedes ‘live to eat’ and we had full evidence of this: cheeses, pastries, steaks, fish, and breads of every description surrounded us. Our skinny wartime frames quickly filled out.

And it was in Stockholm that I fell in love for the very first time.

Rita and I had been several times to visit an old lady, Miss Lindquist, who had known my grandfather in earlier days. She would speak of him with many sighs and a glint in her faded blue eyes, insisting she had been the one true love of his life. She thought that my grandmother Edith (happily unaware that Edith came from a long line of Yorkshire witches) was one of those scheming Jezebels who lie in wait at ports to trap lonely sailors into marriage.

On one of these visits she introduced us to a young American soldier of Swedish descent called Dale, who had come on leave from Germany to seek, like us, some of his forebears. He was nineteen years old, charming and quiet, completely unlike the boisterous, in-your-face GIs who had come to England during the war and jumped over our garden gate when cousin Joyce brought them to Firwood Avenue.

As I’m sure many of you know (and if you don’t yet you probably will), there is such a thing as love at first sight. (Sometimes, though, it can be mistaken for lust at first sight – I’ve experienced that too, quite a few times.)

When I saw Dale, slight and dark with blue, blue eyes, my heart went ‘twang’.

I know that’s a cliché but that’s exactly what I wrote in my schoolgirl diary at the time: ‘My heart went twang!’ (with the exclamation mark).

After one of Miss Lindquist’s legendary smorgasbord lunches, Dale tentatively asked me if I’d like to go round the city with him. By then I’d already been round Stockholm several times but I never again saw it as I did that day. We wandered hand in hand through the streets like two children in an enchanted forest.

I had never had a boyfriend. Never been kissed. Never even been groped. I was speechlessly happy just at the joy of being with him. We went to the open-air museum of Skansen on the island Djurgården and as darkness began to fall we crowded with hundreds of others into the open-air theatre overlooking the sea and the city. Huge flaming torches were lit all around the auditorium, throwing red shadows onto the listening faces. It was there, with the lights of the city below and with a little gusty breeze causing the giant flambeaux around us to flicker, that Dale and I listened to Marian Anderson, the great African-American contralto, singing ‘Ave Maria’. She wore a simple white dress, and with consummate ease and artistry her rich, mellow voice wafted through the air, over the encircling golden flames, over the dark water and glittering city below, and out to the bright stars.

I don’t think Dale or I had any idea who Marian Anderson was, but it didn’t matter. We were in the moment.

At one point I remember I said that my feet were cold. ‘Put them in my pockets,’ said Dale. ‘All girls in America do it.’ We managed the manoeuvre with sublime ease – Lord knows how, as I have big feet and he had small pockets. But it was all part of the magic. After the concert he told me it was his last night in Sweden and that he was returning to camp next morning. I was heartbroken: the one great love of my life was to go out of it as suddenly as he had come in. He kissed me goodnight, a warm tender kiss (my first ever kiss) and I promised to be at the station the next morning.

Early the next day I made my way to the station. Dale was waiting for me in the early morning mist. We clung to one another for a moment, and then the train pulled out of the station, leaving me crying. We had not thought to exchange addresses and Miss Lindquist couldn’t help.

Sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it all but then I still have the diary, and Dale’s face, pale and sensitive, comes before me. I wonder where he is and if he remembers me. I like to think so, because he was my very first love.

Not only did I fall in love for the first time in Sweden, but it was also there that I had my first encounter with a wild animal.

I’ve had many since. Alone, I’ve come face to whiskers with a lioness in the Okavango – where I also once walked into a feeding pride. I’ve fallen off a camel and off a yak; been blessed by a sacred elephant in India; ridden on two dolphins in Cuba; been growled at by a scavenging black bear in Alaska; encountered (from a canoe) the rare giant otters in the Amazon; and tripped over emperor penguins in Antarctica. I saw the world’s rarest antelope, the huemul, on a mountain peak in Patagonia’s far south. And once, in Peru at Machu Picchu, I watched seven Andean condors, the western hemisphere’s largest flying bird, circling overhead.

But it was in Sweden that I had my first encounter. Before we sailed to Götland, Carl had arranged for us to spend time at his summer house on a little island south of Stockholm. It was a green-and-white cottage tucked into a hillside facing a whole chain of lakes that wound their way to the horizon. A small white-sailed yacht, Birgitte, bobbed at a small landing stage, and the forest was all around. Early one morning I went for a walk. The sun was shining and besides the dawn chorus, which was in full swing, all was peaceful and still. I sat down on a log. Suddenly I heard a rustling and breaking of branches to one side of me. I thought that perhaps Rita was creeping up on me, waiting to pounce and scare the living daylights out of me. So, as the bushes parted, I leapt up, uttering a triumphant ‘Boo!’ that froze before it was halfway out of my mouth.

I was saying boo to a moose.

He stood in front of me, a big ungainly animal about the size of a small horse, with sharply angled antlers and a very surprised look on his face.

I stood petrified. I knew nothing of the habits of mooses. (Well, you wouldn’t, would you, coming from a small rural English village?) Were they carnivorous? Did they attack young maidens? Was there a whole herd waiting to go on the rampage?

I tore back to the house and breathlessly recounted my near-death experience.

‘Oh, he’s quite tame,’ said Carl’s wife. ‘He often comes up to the house for tidbits. We call him Fred.’

My Swedish experiences with the natural world were far from over, however.

There was the matter of Carl and August’s turtles.

Somewhere on their travels the distant cousins had acquired two young turtles (to this day I have no notion of their origin or species), which were confined to a strong cardboard box and given to me and Rita for safekeeping and delivery to Götland. They’d also got hold of a batch of turtle eggs, which they kept in a box of sand with a strong electric light shining on them 24 hours a day. Luckily, the bulb had failed while we were in Stockholm and the eggs had addled so we didn’t have to lug those along too.

But here we were now with Gladys and Gertrude, the size of garden tortoises, with beady little eyes, long sharp claws and a knowing look. We were told to look after them carefully until they got to their new home on the desolate shores of the Baltic.

We came to hate the creatures.

All day they would snooze comfortably in their cardboard box but as soon as night began to fall they would start to scratch their long claws against its sides.

Scratch, scratch. Scratch, scratch.

Our nights were punctuated by the incessant scratching of turtle claws. We tried starving them of lettuce for a day, but hunger only renewed their efforts.

Apparently there had been some difficulties in procuring a boat passage from Sweden’s mainland to Götland for me and Rita because the tourist season was at its height and visitors were flocking to this Island of Roses, but Carl had used his influence and had secured berths for us on an unspecified type of boat, cheerily named The Swedish Girl.

The next evening found my sister and I on the quay at Nynäshamn, south of Stockholm, waiting in the creeping twilight to embark for Visby, Götland’s capital. I was holding our suitcases (those dreadful post-war cardboard ones) and Rita was clutching the box containing Gladys and Gertrude. We stood on the dock, just the two of us, beginning to wonder why there were no other passengers waiting to board The Swedish Girl.

We were not left wondering for long.

A packed train pulled onto the quay filled with men of every size and description – little men, big men, short men, tall men, fat men and thin men – but all sharing two characteristics: one, they were very young, and two, they were all slightly merry, tipsy or downright drunk. As the train stopped they fell out of every door – and some windows – and, like a rushing tide, poured onto the quay and up the just lowered gangplank.

We were literally engulfed. Rita dropped the turtle box. She tried to recover it but it was too late. It was being swept inexorably towards the water. We scrambled after our precious charges just in time to see their box tumble into the water and float gently on the surface with Gladys and Gertrude still persistently scratching inside.

Conscious of her responsibility to Carl and August and the two turtles, Rita turned a white and distraught face to a young man next to her, pointed at the bobbing box and desperately shouted ‘Help!’ Such were her powers of persuasion, and no doubt primed by schnapps, the young man leapt into the water with a loud splash, and secured the box by clutching it firmly to his bosom. The crowd cheered. Some of his more sober mates helped him out of the water, and he restored the box to Rita with a deep bow. Then, standing erect with water streaming down him, he saluted, clicked his heels smartly and fell backwards into the water again.

When we eventually got on board we found out from the anxious captain (who was one of Carl and August’s best mates, and had been searching for us in the throng) that his ship had been temporarily commandeered as a troopship and that night it was taking a thousand new military conscripts, together with a few officers, to a large army camp in Götland. So we were to sail, the only two females on board, in company with a thousand young men enjoying their last night of freedom.

Rita and I were thrilled.

The captain, however, worriedly showed us to our cabin on deck – which was actually the sick berth – telling us we would be safer there because the door had a very strong lock. I admit by then we were beginning to feel just a little anxious ourselves. However, leaving Gladys and Gertrude to their interminable scratching, totally unaware of the ecological disaster they would have caused had they escaped into the Baltic Sea, we locked the door and went to dine with the captain and his officers. Afterwards I clung to the captain’s arm as he led us back to our safe haven on deck amidst strains of shouting and singing from the troops.

As we were getting undressed I noticed an eye glued to a crack over one of the windows. When I made signs for it to go away it winked at me. I stuck an envelope over the crack with a rude word written on it.

That wasn’t the end of it, however.

Knockings on the door and windows started and as the night wore on became louder and more persistent. They even outdid Gladys and Gertrude’s scratching.

After a disturbed night of noise and uneasy dreams, our maidenhoods unscathed, at six o’clock the captain knocked politely on the door and asked if we would like to see the approach to the island, ‘a very beautiful sight’.

It’s still one of the loveliest first sights I’ve ever experienced. Here was a magic island floating on a blue sea still shrouded by wisps of the early morning mist that curled gently about it. Grey turreted walls and towers seemed to rise from the waves as they thrust up against the pearly opalescence of the morning. As the sun rose higher it threw a shimmering path of rose-coloured light from boat to shore. Silhouetted shapes of towers and spires gradually became visible against the dawn sky and the sound of bells floated through the soft breeze. To me it seemed that here King Arthur might have held court as his knights wandered with their ladies on the grassy banks shaded by stone walls. It was here that Sleeping Beauty might have lain for a hundred years, deaf to the murmurings of the waves and calls of the gulls. And it was here that fairies danced in the early morning dew and wove their spells and magic.

As the boat drew nearer the quay and the first breathless hush of wonder was over – even the young soldiers had been temporarily silenced – we could see that Visby was surrounded by thick medieval stone walls and that the spires and towers belonged not to fairy-tale castles but to churches – 93 of them. A former Viking site, Visby became the queen of the Hanseatic League in the Baltic from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Today it is a UNESCO world heritage site, the best-preserved fortified commercial city in northern Europe.

On the quayside we saw a little round woman with a kerchief anxiously scanning the faces of the passengers. This was Hilda, August’s wife, who had come to meet us.

‘Did you have a pleasant trip?’ she asked, as Rita and I disembarked, ahead of the conscripts, who stood back and courteously allowed us to go down the gangplank. Sober reality and the thought of a year’s military service had somewhat dimmed the exuberance of the crossing.

The unwritten laws of hospitality forbade us to say anything but ‘Yes’ as we thrust the turtle box thankfully into Hilda’s arms.

(Later we learnt that she had slipped the two turtles into the Baltic, where they had given her one last beady-eyed stare before swimming away.)

We drove to Slite, a village some 20 miles from Visby, where the whole Hammerström family had been born and still lived. The village was small, sleeping peacefully on the banks of the Baltic. Hilda’s house, called Sjustvan on account of the seven streams that had their source in the forest and bubbled into a lake at the back of the house, stood on a small hill surrounded by forest. I stood on the veranda of a large airy room facing the sea and was reminded of the veranda in the south of France where I had stood the previous year. There the colours had been rich and vivid; here they were paler shades of grey, green and blue.

The Hammerströms were a large family of sisters and brothers, wives, children and a repugnant black pug called Frenchie, who looked like a fat tick and was fed on steak and cream. Rita and I thought wistfully of Peter, our lean but beloved dog at home, who scavenged for bones and hunted rabbits in the wild wood.

But the centre of the family, and its most important member, was Clara the cow, who produced enough milk, butter and cream for everyone. Understandably, she was very spoilt: in summer she had a fine straw hat which protected her from the sun and every day a necklace of daisy-chains was made for her by one of the children. In winter a hand-knitted blanket kept her warm. Hilda would sing to her as she milked her with her face pressed against Clara’s warm silky flank and her supple fingers soothing forth pails of foaming milk.

This was not, however, where our grandfather had been born. One cold day, when the wind was whipping the white horses into furious activity, we piled into the family car and went to visit the small fishing village on the eastern coast of Götland that had been his birthplace. It was a long drive. When we finally reached Ronehamn, we were directed to an ancient weather-beaten man who had known Grandad as a boy. He invited us to lunch in his old wooden house and told us sorrowfully of prosperous times gone by. Then he related how he had helped Johann steal away from his warm bed one winter night and stow away below deck on a cargo boat at anchor in the harbour. We told him how Grandad had since sailed the world before coming to final port in England where he married Edith, became father to five children (including the indomitable Doris) and became a naturalised Englishman but never forgot his island home and often talked to us about it.

As we wandered the creaking floors and hollow rooms of the now derelict wooden house, we began to understand how the urge to see new places and experience more than this village could ever offer our grandfather might have become insatiable, and had led him to take off while still a boy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when he ran away to sea aged twelve, Ronehamn was the second most important harbour on Götland after Visby. Today his old friend told us that fewer than one hundred people lived there. Grandad’s urge to escape had come at just the right time.

Rita and I returned to a cold autumn England and waited for our futures to unfold.

Fifty years on, in 1998, there’s an interesting ‘sequel’ to the story of our visit to the land of our grandfather’s people, but it unfolds on another coastline, on a different continent.

An ancient ritual, one that has survived climate change, the impact of asteroids, human evolution and animal extinction, is about to be played out, by moonlight, on a protected beach in the Maputaland Coastal Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal. It is a ritual much older than humankind, unchanged in 100 million years.

I defy anybody to witness this ancient process and remain spiritually, mentally or physically untouched.

It is night-time. We are a group of four, including the guide, and Gail from San Francisco, who will become one of my dearest friends and travel the globe with me. The iridescent surf booms softly under the blazing full moon. White ghost crabs scuttle across the smooth unmarked sand. Then we see the tread-marks of a small tractor’s tyres heading up towards the high-water mark. But it’s not a tractor that has made these impressions. The marks are those of a giant leatherback turtle who has come ashore to lay her eggs.

Every year, between October and February, loggerhead and leatherback turtles come ashore – from Sodwana Bay to Kosi Bay – to lay their eggs in the same area where they themselves were hatched. If you’re lucky, you may see one of them wave-hopping, instinctively lifting her giant neck above the waves to seek out the exact location of her own birth among the low dunes.

This female leatherback has waited over 20 years to achieve this moment of fruition, a long, lonely journey through the cold, deep blackness of the great oceans of the world. This is the only time she will know land, feel solid earth beneath her massive body. Her pull uphill from surf to beyond the tide lines is long on power, only 20 minutes in time.

We plod up into the soft sand and follow her tracks. And suddenly there she is. We sink to our knees, gasping in awe, wonder and amazement at the huge creature digging in the sand. Nothing – not photographs, not wildlife documentaries – prepares you for the size of these creatures. She’s over two metres long and weighs about 450 kg – all four of us could sit comfortably on her back. She stops, gazes impenetrably into my eyes, then faces away from the sea and purposefully prepares her nest, oblivious to onlookers. Her immense front flippers, twice the size of the back flippers, rest in front of her head. Get in the way of one these and your leg will be snapped like a twig. Their turn to work will come later. It’s the back flippers doing all the work first, each flipper taking turns to carefully scoop out a hole over a metre deep. In the beginning she scoops out great piles of sand, but as the hole becomes deeper and deeper, eventually she can scoop out only teaspoonfuls. At last, satisfied with her work, she rests, breathing heavily. Then, emitting creaky groans, she begins to lay. First one egg, then another one, then two or three together come pulsing out, then half a dozen at a time, until she has laid between 100 and 120 eggs. The eggs are round, gleaming white, bigger than a golf ball, smaller than a tennis ball. It has taken her a long time to achieve this moment, meeting and mating only once every seven years. As she lays, she is in a deep trance, and tears run down her great leathery cheeks. It’s a phenomenon that’s been written about – the crying of the turtle.

These turtles are among the gentlest creatures on earth and among its most endangered.

‘You can touch her,’ says our guide.

And touch her we do, feeling the icy cold of the deep, deep oceans in her great thick shell. She is so huge, so powerful, so harmless, so defenceless, so vulnerable. When she has finished laying we feel drained, exhausted – having undergone a mutual catharsis.

Finally, after a few hours, when she has filled, covered and disguised her nest with her massive front flippers so that the beach-prowling jackals and predatory sea birds can’t find it, she drags her great body back to the sea, orientating herself by the gleam of the surf, exhaling deep sighs as she pauses to rest between each cumbrous heave. She sounds like a ramped-up Darth Vader.

We are exhausted, moved, still.

And then a thought creeps unbidden into my head.

Could she …

Could she … possibly be … Gertrude or Gladys?