The Summer Book Read online

  The

  Summer

  Book

  Tove Jansson

  Translated from the Swedish

  by Thomas Teal

  Foreword by Esther Freud

  Thanks

  Sort Of thanks: Sophia Jansson, Helen Svensson of Schildts, and Esther Freud; Per Olov Jansson, Margareta Strömstedt, Göran Algård and Alf Lidman for photos; Peter Dyer, Henry Iles, Miranda Davies and Tim Chester for production; and Lance Chinnian, Mark Barrow and Rachel Partridge at Penguin. Sort Of gratefully acknowledges Random House Inc (US) for permission to use Thomas Teal’s flawless translation.

  Photos used in the book: Per Olov Jansson (p.1, p.6, p.15, p.176); Göran Algård (p.16); Margareta Strömstedt (p.17).

  Contents

  Title Page

  Thanks

  Foreword by Esther Freud

  The Morning Swim

  Moonlight

  The Magic Forest

  The Scolder

  Berenice

  The Pasture

  Playing Venice

  Dead Calm

  The Cat

  The Cave

  The Road

  Midsummer

  The Tent

  The Neighbour

  The Robe

  The Enormous Plastic Sausage

  The Crooks

  The Visitor

  Of Angleworms and Others

  Sophia’s Storm

  Day of Danger

  August

  Other Tove Janssson titles

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Esther Freud

  The Summer Book is impossible to categorise: a work of fiction, adventure, humour and philosophy, its structure a beautifully observed overlapping of the months of summer. It is a life-affirming story of every flower and delicate moss that manages to survive on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland, and of the understated love between an old woman and her grandchild. Yet scattered through its chapters are Jansson’s thoughts on death.

  It is spring at the start of The Summer Book, and six-year-old Sophia wakes in the night and remembers she has a bed to herself because her mother is dead. Grandmother is nearby, and although old, her legs weak, her head dizzy, she is lively with wisdom and imagination. She is Sophia’s companion through the months ahead. They roam the island together, falling asleep under bushes, musing on religion – “Are there ants in Heaven?”– and discussing the relative pleasures of sleeping in a tent. (Jansson’s own mother campaigned in Sweden to win the right for girls to be allowed to camp outdoors.) They spend hours in the “magic forest” clearing the ground around it, tidying it down to the smallest twig. They find a seal skull and plant it where it gleams with all its teeth. “When are you going to die?” the child asked. And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.”

  Tove Jansson wrote The Summer Book in 1972, the year after her own mother died. At first she went travelling to ease her grief, but after some months came back to her island in the outer archipelago to write. The Summer Book was, by all accounts, a favourite novel, and to create it she drew on the things that were most precious to her. Her beloved mother Signe Hammarsten, a graphic designer and cartoonist, her young niece Sophia, and the island home that she built with her brother Lars, Sophia’s father, and where she spent so many summers of her life. By now she was already famous for her Moomintroll cartoon strips and children’s books, but The Summer Book, hailed in Scandinavia as a modern classic, brought her success among a whole new adult readership.

  It is a clear, warm day on the Pellinge peninsula, when I stand on the jetty waiting for the real-life Sophia to steer me across to the island in her boat. I feel incredibly privileged, invited to enter the world that inspired this book, and with great anticipation I step aboard. The sea looks calm when we set off but the wind is against us, the water rough, and the boat slams down from the tip of each wave, soaking us with spray. Sophia, fully grown now, has returned every summer of her life to this island, and as one would expect shows not the slightest sign of fear. “Does it ever capsize?” I want to ask but there’s only one answer worth hearing so I stay quiet.

  Twenty minutes later we are mooring up, Sophia anchoring the boat skilfully between long ropes, keeping her balance while she makes it safe. We unload the life jackets, newspapers, food and drinking water and splash towards the shore. “Go ahead,” Sophia calls, so I step over soft grey stones, enter the cool of a glade of pines, and come upon the house. It is the house that Tove and Lars Jansson built in 1947, when they discovered this island. It is where The Summer Book is set, and immediately I recognise the woodpile and the steep stone steps that lead to Grandmother’s room, the faded blue of the paint, the window that is too big for the wall, the attic where Papa’s bathrobe was stored and where Sophia crawled to when she was cross. There is the screen door, the stove, so vital to their lives, and beyond it a window opening onto another sweep of sea. I move round to the side of the house, and there is the sea again. It had never occurred to me the island was this small.

  Sophia puts the kettle on. She feeds the cat, and carefully waters her garden of flowers. I leave my bag outside the house and set off to explore. I stick to the very edges, skirting the rocks on its most northerly side, stepping over boulders, climbing through the undergrowth of scrub, past a miniature meadow of flowers, another of dry grass, up into the pinewood and I’m back at the house. I feel a little uneasy. Claustrophobic even. My walk has taken me four-and-a-half minutes!

  To calm myself I think of all the things Sophia and Grandmother do on this tiny island in the long slow months between spring and autumn. They make animal sculptures, and carve boats from bark, they gather berries, driftwood and bones. They draw “awful things”, tell stories, build Venice in the marsh pool, row across to other islands, sleep and swim and talk. Grandmother drops her cane into the water and Sophia climbs down from a channel marker, where her father’s forbidden her to go, to fish it out: “You’re a very good climber,” said Grandmother sternly. “And brave, too, because I could see you were scared. Shall I tell him about it? Or shouldn’t I?” Sophia shrugged one shoulder and looked at her grandmother. “I guess maybe not,” she said. “But you can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn’t go to waste.”

  Sophia has made tea and is sitting on the terrace. She tells me about the island of Klovharun further out on the rim of the archipelago where Tove Jansson moved when their own island became too crowded with relatives and friends. She points, and I squint into the sun. Ahead, almost directly, is a treeless scrap of rock. You could hoist a flag from it and there would be nothing to distract from the sight. I can just make out a small square house. Jansson, with her long-term companion, Tuulikki Pietila, spent five months of each year there from 1964 to 1991, until a storm whipped up the sea so wildly that it wrecked their boat, and, aged seventy-seven, she retired permanently to Helsinki. The house is a kind of museum now, and before they left it the two women arranged their mugs and plates and art work, tidying the two tables where they worked for the last time. They even pinned up helpful notes, such as “don’t close the flue plate it will rust closed,” for anyone who might need to know.

  Sophia weather-proofs furniture, calls her sons on a mobile phone (they are visiting friends on a neighbouring island), and prepares smoked fish for supper. I sit and re-read The Summer Book, marvelling at the use Jansson made of her surroundings, investing so much in the detail of each tiny patch of ground. I identify the landmarks, the skerries, The Cairn, the island where a businessman infuriated Grandmother by building a new house.

  Much later we go for a swim. I’ve been thinking about a swim since we first arrived, but the knowledge that it is never going to get completely dark creates a feeling of such
leisure that we put it off until almost ten o’clock. The air is grainy, the water silky and cold. At midnight I step outside for a last look at the sky. The sun is deep orange on the horizon, the water sparkling, azure blue, and I understand why on Midsummer Night the Finns celebrate with bonfires and fireworks, not wanting to waste a minute of this precious light on sleep.

  The next day we take the boat to Klovharun. Sophia’s island is a virtual paradise of diversity and comfort compared to the sparseness of Tove’s later home. There is a house, really one square room, with stairs down to a sauna that opens onto a creek. Above the house, as if on guard, terns shriek menacingly, their beaks outstretched, threatening to plunge. What kind of person could live here? Someone so fuelled by their imagination, so stimulated by the sea, so richly creative that they could find solace and inspiration in what to others might seem a barren rock. The key to the house is on a hook, and there is a visitors’ book inside. We scan through the names and comments. Hardly a day has gone by when someone hasn’t come to pay their respects.

  The Summer Book has never been out of print in Scandinavia. Its allure is the allure of summer itself for these people who spend so much of the year in the dark. “We are captivated, charmed, dependent,” says Jansson’s Finnish editor. But it is also her mix of humour and psychology, the character of the island, and the protective love she so clearly has for it. Sophia tells me that sometimes Japanese tourists motor into her bay. They want her to sign pebbles, and she has to explain to them that she isn’t Tove Jansson, isn’t really even Sophia, but what worries her most is the depletion of pebbles from the island if too many of them come.

  I have spent two days here now, idling, pottering, swimming, watering the bright imported flowers, inspecting the fish, stroking the cat, and I have finally arrived at island time. I examine the different coloured mosses, heeding Grandmother’s warning that: “Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss… The second time it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back.” Very carefully I walk to the tip of the island. There are flecks of silver, seams of colour welding the rocks together, with small landscapes of mustard yellow lichen clinging to the top. On the far side is a glade of sunken flowers, the seaweed, like soft curls of confetti, washing back and forth. There is a swing hanging from a branch and innumerable camps and dens set out by children.

  I stand on a wide stepping stone and wonder if it would be possible to swim right the way round. My focus has changed now. The island is no longer quite so small. The rocks have become cliffs, the creek a ravine. But Sophia is calling me, it’s time to go, and I realise it would need a whole summer to discover everything there is to do.

  Photographs on following pages:

  Page 15: The summer island. Page 16: Tove Jansson beside the home she and her brother, Lars, built on the island. Page 17: Tove Jansson’s mother, Signe Hammarsten, and niece, Sophia Jansson; they shared many summers on the island and were the inspiration behind the book’s two main characters.

  The

  Summer

  Book

  TOVE JANSSON

  The Morning Swim

  IT WAS AN EARLY, VERY WARM MORNING IN JULY, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.

  “What are you doing?” asked little Sophia.

  “Nothing,” her grandmother answered. “That is to say,” she added angrily, “I’m looking for my false teeth.”

  The child came down from the veranda. “Where did you lose them?” she asked.

  “Here,” said her grandmother. “I was standing right there and they fell somewhere in the peonies.” They looked together.

  “Let me,” Sophia said. “You can hardly walk. Move over.”

  She dived beneath the flowering roof of the garden and crept among green stalks and stems. It was pretty and mysterious down on the soft black earth. And there were the teeth, white and pink, a whole mouthful of old teeth.

  “I’ve got them!” the child cried, and stood up. “Put them in.”

  “But you can’t watch,” Grandmother said. “That’s private.”

  Sophia held the teeth behind her back.

  “I want to watch,” she said.

  So Grandmother put the teeth in, with a smacking noise. They went in very easily. It had really hardly been worth mentioning.

  “When are you going to die?” the child asked.

  And Grandmother answered, “Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.”

  “Why?” her grandchild asked.

  She didn’t answer. She walked out on the rock and on towards the ravine.

  “We’re not allowed out there!” Sophia screamed.

  “I know,” the old woman answered disdainfully. “Your father won’t let either one of us go out to the ravine, but we’re going anyway, because your father is asleep and he won’t know.”

  They walked across the granite. The moss was slippery. The sun had come up a good way now, and everything was steaming. The whole island was covered with a bright haze. It was very pretty.

  “Will they dig a hole?” asked the child amiably.

  “Yes,” she said. “A big hole.” And she added, insidiously, “Big enough for all of us.”

  “How come?” the child asked.

  They walked on towards the point.

  “I’ve never been this far before,” Sophia said. “Have you?”

  “No,” her grandmother said.

  They walked all the way out onto the little promontory, where the rock descended into the water in terraces that became fainter and fainter until there was total darkness. Each step down was edged with a light green seaweed fringe that swayed back and forth with the movement of the sea.

  “I want to go swimming,” the child said. She waited for opposition, but none came. So she took off her clothes, slowly and nervously. She glanced at her grandmother – you can’t depend on people who just let things happen. She put her legs in the water.

  “It’s cold,” she said.

  “Of course it’s cold,” the old woman said, her thoughts somewhere else. “What did you expect?”

  The child slid in up to her waist and waited anxiously.

  “Swim,” her grandmother said. “You can swim.”

  It’s deep, Sophia thought. She forgets I’ve never swum in deep water unless somebody was with me. And she climbed out again and sat down on the rock.

  “It’s going to be a nice day today,” she declared.

  The sun had climbed higher. The whole island, and the sea, were glistening. The air seemed very light.

  “I can dive,” Sophia said. “Do you know what it feels like when you dive?”

  “Of course I do,” her grandmother said. “You let go of everything and get ready and just dive. You can feel the seaweed against your legs. It’s brown, and the water’s clear, lighter towards the top, with lots of bubbles. And you glide. You hold your breath and glide and turn and come up, let yourself rise and breathe out. And then you float. Just float.”

  “And all the time with your eyes open,” Sophia said.

  “Naturally. People don’t dive with their eyes shut.”

  “Do you believe I can dive without me showing you?” the child asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Grandmother said. “Now get dressed. We can get back before he wakes up.”

  The first weariness came closer. When we get home, she thought, when we get back I think I’ll take a little nap. And I must remember to tell him this child is still afraid of deep water.

  Moonlight

  ONE TI ME IN APRIL THERE WAS A FULL MOO
N, and the sea was covered with ice. Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead. The fire was still burning in the stove, and the flames flickered on the ceiling, where the boots were hung up to dry. She climbed down to the floor, which was very cold, and looked out through the window.

  The ice was black, and in the middle of the ice she saw the open stove door and the fire – in fact she saw two stove doors, very close together. In the second window, the two fires were burning underground, and through the third window she saw a double reflection of the whole room, trunks and chests and boxes with gaping lids. They were filled with moss and snow and dry grass, all of them open, with bottoms of coal-black shadow. She saw two children out on the rock, and there was a rowan tree growing right through them. The sky behind them was dark blue.

  She lay down in her bed and looked at the fire dancing on the ceiling, and all the time the island seemed to be coming closer and closer to the house. They were sleeping by a meadow near the shore, with patches of snow on the covers, and under them the ice darkened and began to glide. A channel opened very slowly in the floor, and all their luggage floated out in the river of moonlight. All the suitcases were open and full of darkness and moss, and none of them ever came back.

  Sophia reached out her hand and pulled her grandmother’s plait, very gently. Grandmother woke up instantly.

  “Listen,” Sophia whispered. “I saw two fires in the window. Why are there two fires instead of one?”

  Her grandmother thought for a moment and said, “It’s because we have double windows.”

  After a while Sophia asked, “Are you sure the door is closed?”

  “It’s open,” her grandmother said. “It’s always open; you can sleep quite easy.”