Mamma, Pappa and I had recently moved from Örebro to Västerås. Pappa said it was because he had a better job working with Uncle Rolf at ASEA, but I knew it was because of the upsetting things that people were saying to Mamma. We moved to an apartment near to where my cousin Björn lived.
Jan, Gustav, Dmitri, Sven, Sören and Björn were all friends, all their fathers worked at ASEA and they were in the same class at school. I joined them in Fröken Lindström’s Class, and discovered the boys all had a crush on her. They were all crazy, but Björn pulled the craziest stunts of them all. I hung out with the boys because they lived near by and there were no girls of my age where we lived, and my sister Freja was just a baby.
They weren’t bad boys really, just crazy, and Dmitri was nice. His parents came from Moscow, but he was born and grew up in Malmö, County Skåne and he spoke kind of funny. I got teased for liking him by the other girls at school. I over heard Mamma say once that the mothers of all six knew that they had sons not daughters, though my Auntie Elise, her sister, wasn’t sure Björn was actually human, and said Mamma was lucky for having two girls.
In the new year of 1956 we were 7 going on 8. The temperature was -40ºC, below -42ºC your spit cracked like a rifle shot when it hit the air and we weren’t allowed out and didn’t have to go to school. If it were a bit warmer than that it only cracked when it hit the ground and we were free agents.
Björn afterwards admitted to his father it was his idea and they only did it for a laugh. It wasn’t the most intelligent thing he could have said. Just down the road from the flats where most of us lived on Skjutbanegatan, which translates approximately as Rifle Range Road, they parked the eighteen wheelers because it was near the vehicle testing centre.
Björn suggested to the others, that it would be really funny if they weed on the lorry tyres. He said it would freeze the tyres to the road, but I don’t think even Björn thought it would really work or that anything would come of it.
Just after dark I watched from the other side of the road as they lined up round one of the tractor units and weed on the tyres. Björn told me afterwards it was really cold. I told him he was stupid, of course it was cold we hadn’t been to school that day. It was only the warmer wind that arrived in the afternoon that had allowed us out.
He laught and said it was a challenge to wee in the open at -40ºC, and even in the near dark he could see his wee had been virtually colourless. I told him that if he’d listened in class he’d know that every one’s wee is colourless in winter because you don’t loose water by sweating in winter, so you have to lose it in your wee which is then more diluted.
Björn told me he’d been surprised it worked because spit froze so fast. I asked him if he’d expected to wee icicles and said of course it worked. I told him Fröken Lindstöm had said, “Spit cracks in the air because that tiny amount of water cools so fast,” and that probably the much bigger amount of wee would take longer to freeze, so it wouldn’t make any noise.
Björn said his wee had splashed on the road and tyres before freezing, and I was lucky to be a girl because he was really glad when he’d finished to be back in the warmth of his lined trousers.
I told him,“Whether you’re a girl or a boy you have to be crazy to wee outside in the cold. You must have all been dropped on the head when you were babies.”
Then he asked, “How do you remember all that stuff from school, Ingrid? Is it because you’re a girl?”
“Don’t be stupid, Björn, remembering things has nothing to do with being a girl. You have to hear something first before you can remember it, and you never listen. Is that because you’re a boy?”
He grinned and said, “According to you, everything I do is stupid.”
“It’s not my fault is it? If I didn’t look after you you’d never be out of trouble. I don’t know how you managed before I moved here.”
The following day we all watched from a distance as the eighteen wheeler started and then stopped. It wouldn’t move at all. The driver tried it several times before giving up and getting out. As he looked at the tyres he said a lot of bad words. Dimitri was helpless with laughter and choked out “That’s your best idea ever, Björn, but it would be much better if we had some girls to help too.”
He looked at me, and said, “Ingrid—“
I didn’t let him say another word, “Don’t even think about asking me to pull my knickers down, Dmitri, or I’ll never speak to you again.”
Eventually a team of men with things that had a flame coming out of them arrived to free the eighteen wheeler.
The boys got away with it twice, but were caught the third time and Uncle Rolf and the other boys’ fathers were not amused. They decided to discuss the punishment at work so all the boys got the same. They all got a thrashing, and Liv Björn’s wife told me years later he still had the marks to prove it.
After the boys had been caught and the full story had come out, Mamma took me to one side and said, “That was a lucky escape, young lady. I think it’s time for you to stop playing with the boys, and make the effort to find girls to be friends with. Even if it means girls who live on the other side of Lugnagatan, I’ll take you in the car when necessary or take them home, but till you reach the stage of kissing boys I suggest you stay away from them. Unless you really want the boys to find out what you have in your knickers?”
“Nej, Mamma!”
Björnö is a small island in lake Märlaren near to Västerås where we lived. We'd been told by older kids the name meant the bear and the island looked like a bear on a map. I never believed them because even though I was rubbish at Swedish grammar and björn means bear I knew the bear would have been björnen or possibly björnet. I suspected the former, but I never did get to learn too well my ens and ets, and I looked for it on a map and it definitely didn’t look like a bear. A complication was I found an island called Bjørnø which is a Norwegian spelling pronounced as near as makes no odds the same, but I was sure it was somewhere else. I’ve never bothered to check.
Björnö was a nature reserve, but there were few folk went there when we were kids. As kids we used to go there in gangs and use the bridge. But I preferred to go on my own. I’d cycle five kilometres out from where I lived in Västerås and leave my bike at the lake edge. I’d undress down to my vest and knickers and wade and swim through the shallow, cool, green water. The Mälar and its lakes are famous for the green water. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d undressed completely because girls and boys were used to nudity, but I used to keep my vest and knickers on and say I got cold easily if I met anyone.
I did that because I wouldn’t completely look like a girl till I was old enough for the doctors to finish what mother nature had made a bit of a mix up over. Some of the girls’ mothers had said nasty things to Mamma about me where we used to live in Örebro. That’s why we moved and Mamma wanted me to keep it a secret till I finished school. Not even Freja my little sister, never mind my cousin Björn who was in the same class as me at school, knew.
The smell of the pines on the island on a warm day was so overpowering that you could taste it at the back of the throat sort of like a cross between sniffing violin rosin and new book shelves. On your own you could hear the birds from half way across the hundred metres of water, they didn’t bother to fly off as you approached, because they knew they were safe. You finally waded up the island shore where the beach has squishy sandy mud that oozes satisfactorily between your toes. It was a great place to be on your own and just be and think about just being.
By the time I’d started to think about boys as being interesting just because they were boys, I realised Mamma had been right, I didn’t want to stay away from them any more. How could I be kissed by a boy if I avoided them all the time? About then the girls I knew were getting unpredictably silly and crying for no reason sometimes. Mamma explained all that to me, and I became a first rate actress. I could cry and blush at will, and be silly and moody. I carried the appropriate things in my bag and when it was my friend Torill’s time of the month that was my trigger to behave that way too. It was noticed by the other girls and I made sure to be before Torill every now and again. They used to say, “Today Ingrid’s cranky, so tomorrow Torill will be too,” or the other way round.
I used to go to Björnö on my own when things were all getting a bit much, and I’d dream about when I was older and could run about naked playing in the sun like all the other girls. I especially used to dream about running about naked with the boys too. Mamma explained to me what happened when boys were thinking about those sorts of things and asked me had it never happened to me. “No, Mamma,” I’d replied puzzled. “Why would it when I’m a girl? When I think about nice boys I feel kind of fluttery in my tummy, but nothing there!” Mamma said I was an unfortunate girl, but for an unfortunate girl I was a very fortunate one. It was years before I worked that one out.
Decades later, I’ve been happily married for many years, and my husband and I have six children, all adults with children of their own. Though no longer a girl, I do live somewhere where my family and I can enjoy the sun on our naked bodies, and it always takes me back to the days when I could not enjoy that simple pleasure. There is something wonderful about a family, in our case three generations of us, enjoying such a thing, playing and picnicking together. It is a healthy, innocent fun, that I wish Mamma and Pappa were still with us to share, but at least they lived long enough to enjoy being with some of their great grand children naked under the sun.
Now Björnö is a major attraction and loads of people go there, especially people from Stockholm. I read on the internet that a new bridge was planned because the old one is falling apart, I presume it’s still under construction because it started in 2017 and all I could find was it was ‘ongoing’. I haven’t lived anywhere near Björnö, nor indeed anywhere near Sweden, for decades and I’m not going to look up any more details because I don’t wish my memories destroyed by ‘progress’.