It began before i was born

As per usual mum's egg met dad's sperm. I was just one little embryo cell that immediately started dividing over and over. So far nothing was out of the ordinary but at some point a shower of hormones messed things up. I was supposed to be born a girl but somehow the multiplying cells made my body into a boy. And on the evening of January 19 1949 I left the safety of my mother's womb.

Both my parents, Dagmar and Svante, come from a working class background with roots in the north of Sweden. Almost every one of my relatives were socialists - social democrats and communists. And most were/are also relatively open minded and tolerant. That has played a big part in making me what I am.

I don't remember much of my first years, who does? And what I do remember is probably just what I've been told happened.

In September of 1950 my baby brother, Anders, was born. Being so close in age we also were quite close and had the same play mates. When he was about a year and a half he got paratyphoid, well he wasn't really sick but he was contagious and had to be isolated for nine months. He was the only one with that particular kind of paratyphoid so was only allowed contact with the staff at the hospital. Needless to say he became the darling of the nurses. I have no memory of this but have been told that that summer I had an imaginary pet. I used to put my hands together like for scooping up water, holding them up to my face and talking to some one/thing I called "min lilla kvittring". I just realized that it could translate into "my little tweetring". I have never had an imaginary friend after that summer so I guess that shows how much I missed my brother.

Now might be the right time to mention something that is typical of the Nordic countries. We were fairly late in developing industrialism and big city living. Most of our ancestors were farmers or worked as "drängar" or "pigor" - worked for more prosperous farmers. Some worked in the forests as lumberjacks (No not the Monty Python kind. ) or making charcoal out of timber. The point is that most of them had their own house in the country side. And as the families moved to the cities to find work they often kept the old places, or built small cottages somewher close. Hence "hytte" in Norway and "sommarstuga" in Sweden.

My maternal grandparents built such a "sommarstuga" that they shared with their children, my mother and her two brothers and their families. It is rather small and at that time had no water, no electricity and to go to the toilet you went to a temporary outhouse. this temporary building stood for almost twenty years. It consisted of three Masonite walls and a half door. When I grew older I often used a small birch tree to keep the door open so I could sit and look out over lake Graningesjön.

It was many a happy summer we spent there in Löfsta and I will surely return there many times in this blog. The picture at the top of this episode is me in a straw hat in an old, half rotten row boat that we found. I wanted to be alone for a while and rowed out on the lake with some old magazines and a corn cob pipe.

Next time: More about my early childhood.