One of the few places in Sweden in 1926 where a young woman expecting a baby outside marriage could get advice and emergency aid, both medical and legal, was at Tidevarvets Rådgivningsbyrå för Föräldrar (Tidevarvet’s advice bureau for parents). The bureau adjoined the magazine’s editorial offices and Ada Nilsson’s consulting rooms, with a view over the lock and Riddarfjärden Bay. With Eva Andén, Elin Wägner, and other women affiliated with the ambitious magazine, Ada Nilsson had opened the bureau in the winter of 1925, on the model of the Norwegian Katti Anker Møller’s consultation offices in Oslo and the even earlier birth control clinics in New York and London, which also inspired the author Thit Jensen, who fought for “voluntary motherhood” in Denmark. As Ada Nilsson wrote in Tidevarvet, the aim was “to help mothers-to-be in word and deed.” Astrid Lindgren repeated the phrase “in word and deed” fifty years later in Margareta Strömstedt’s biography when she discussed the help and advice she got from the women at Tidevarvet, which may not have been as serendipitous as Astrid made it sound: “I happened to read in a newspaper about a lawyer called Eva Andén, and it turned out she was committed to supporting women who needed help in word and deed.”
Because of Blomberg’s ongoing court case, Astrid was advised to have her baby anonymously at the Maternity Hospital in Copenhagen and give the child to a foster mother in the Danish capital until she and Reinhold were able to bring him home to Sweden. Through the Maternity Hospital, which was affiliated to the Rigshospital, the main hospital in the city, Eva Andén was in contact with a capable and loving foster mother in Brønshoj, who specialized in helping expectant Swedish mothers before and after the birth, assisted by her adolescent son. As Astrid, her mind now made up, wrote to Reinhold in a letter dated October 30: “Think carefully about the Danish suggestion. At first I didn’t like it at all, but now it seems like a really good one. Ms. Andén thinks I was really silly to find a place through an advertisement. She doesn’t seem to have much faith in the midwife—she thinks it would be easy to squeeze quite a lot out of her.”
It happened just as Eva Andén feared. Olivia Blomberg and her brother tracked down Gott Hem and squeezed plenty out of Alva Svahn. When the case resumed on March 10, 1927, and for the first time the parties involved requested the proceedings be in camera, Alva Svahn was ready to testify against Reinhold Blomberg. Moreover, the nurse wasn’t alone in the witness box: the prosecution also presented two witnesses who had recognized Blomberg and Astrid Ericsson among the guests at the Hotel Continental in Nässjö on Saturday and Sunday, November 6–7, when the couple had been staying in the same room.
Alva Svahn recounted Astrid Ericsson’s peculiar conduct when she finally turned up in Vättersnäs on November 3 and announced that she had other plans for the birth itself. She couldn’t stay at the clinic beyond November 20, she said, because she was going to marry her fiancé, an engineer who was in the process of getting divorced from his wife. Miss Ericsson therefore intended to travel down to meet him in Helsingborg, where his family lived, in order to get married and have the baby. Ms. Svahn added that Miss Ericsson had suddenly departed for Nässjö on November 6, ostensibly to meet her fiancé, who was traveling, and had returned to Gott Hem only the next day.
At this point the two other witnesses in the courtroom at Vimmerby Town Hall on March 10, 1927, took over. The proprietor of the Hotel Continental, as well as one of the hotel guests, who visited Vimmerby from time to time, had recognized Reinhold Blomberg on the Saturday and Sunday in question in the company of a young, heavily pregnant woman. The proprietor recalled that the couple had signed the register as “Engineer Axel Gustavsson and wife,” and the hotel guest had observed the couple’s awkward attempts to hide in the restaurant, as well as the ring glinting on the woman’s hand.
When Astrid Ericsson left Vättersnäs on November 20 to meet her fiancé in Helsingborg, Alva Svahn related in court, she had warned the mother-to-be against the arduous train journey, suggesting that the couple be married at the maternity clinic instead. Miss Ericsson had thanked her for the offer but adamantly turned it down. As she left, she promised to phone and tell Svahn how the journey went. A month went by before Alva Svahn heard anything; then a telegram to Gott Hem informed her that Astrid Ericsson had given birth to a son at the hospital in Helsingborg.
When the case was finally settled in the summer of 1927, neither Alva Svahn, Olivia Blomberg, nor the court knew where the former Vimmerby Tidning journalist had really had her baby, or what it would be called. The Sevede Häradsrätt gave the following verdict: “It must be considered confirmed that at the beginning of the year 1926 Reinhold Blomberg offended against his and his wife’s, Olivia Blomberg’s, marriage through adultery.”
The court granted Olivia Blomberg’s application for a divorce, awarding her a large sum of money in damages for pain and suffering, though only a fifth of what she and her brother had requested. Reinhold Blomberg, who thereby avoided monthly alimony to his ex-wife, nonetheless had to dip into his pockets to pay the costs—and they were far from negligible.
FOUR
Hope Avenue
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1926, ONE WEEK after her nineteenth birthday, a heavily pregnant Astrid Ericsson got off the train at Copenhagen’s main station after a long journey through southern Sweden and a ferry across Øresund. In the arrivals hall a young man with dark, wavy hair and small, friendly eyes behind thick horn-rimmed glasses was waiting for her. He introduced himself as Carl Stevens and said he was supposed to accompany Miss Ericsson to Håbets Allé—literally Hope Avenue. The address sounded a note of encouragement amid all the fear and uncertainty of what lay before her.
They took one of the capital’s yellow streetcars down Nørrebrogade while Carl chatted about the places they glimpsed along the way. Once they passed through this densely built-up area, which was teeming with people, cars, horse-drawn carts, and bikes, Copenhagen suddenly opened up into a more countrified area full of fields, soft hills, and small thatched cottages. With a bit of goodwill it could be said to resemble parts of Småland, if it weren’t for the detached three- or four-story buildings in the middle of the landscape, looking at a distance like cairns along the road to an expanding town. Up Bellahøj Hill and along Frederikssundsvej they rode the streetcar, heading for Brønshøj Square. At the penultimate stop, Carl and Astrid got out and walked the rest of the way to Håbets Allé, where redbrick villas lay like a string of beads behind multistory blocks housing businesses that faced Frederikssundsvej.
Carl came to a halt outside number 36. “Villa Stevns” was painted on the façade, and in the back garden, which directly overlooked a flat, open field, were two strollers. One belonged to the family on the ground floor, explained Carl, and the other was the domain of a Swedish boy called Esse, who was being fostered by Carl’s mother on the second floor. Both families in the house had the last name Stevens, and Astrid later learned that they were from the Stevns Peninsula south of Copenhagen. It had lent its name to both the family and the house. Astrid never forgot the Villa Stevns, visiting it several times across the course of her long life. The final time—in 1996—she knocked without knowing who lived there, introduced herself, and explained her errand to the surprised but honored owners, who gave the famous author permission to sit alone for a while in the second-floor room where she had once breast-fed her newborn son. From there she could see the apple tree in the back garden, where three-year-old Lasse had played with Esse, almost the same age, and his “big brother” Carl.
Marie Stevens, Carl’s mother and Esse and Lasse’s foster mother, was one of a group of Copenhagen foster mothers in the 1920s who always had a child or two each in their care and who also arranged accommodation for mothers-to-be during the period before and after the birth. The minimum cost of full-time childcare at Villa Stevns was sixty kronor per month, and it was money well spent: “Auntie Stevens,” as Astrid called her, was such a capable and conscientious foster mother that the Award-Giving Society for Foster Mothers (Præmieselskabet for
Plejemødre) had honored her in 1923 with fifty kronor and a diploma that today hangs at the Workers’ Museum in central Copenhagen. The Award-Giving Society was a philanthropic enterprise that had been working to improve the conditions of children in Danish foster homes since 1861; as such, it was a forerunner of the more systematic social welfare programs for children and single mothers that emerged in Denmark during the interwar years.
During the times of crisis and periods of rising unemployment after the establishment of the Award-Giving Society for Foster Mothers, it wasn’t always possible to tell whether love or cynicism lay behind certain foster mothers’ involvement with children. Some could afford only bottled milk, potentially deadly for infants, while others, known as “angel-makers,” were infamous throughout Scandinavia for letting their foster children die of hunger or thirst, or in some cases using even more brutal methods in order to obtain additional children and additional payments.
Mrs. Stevens, however, boasted such a spotless reputation that her name was known even in Sweden. If you stood all the “Swedish ladies” who had stayed at Villa Stevns over the years side by side on Drottninggatan in Stockholm—wrote a playful Carl to Astrid in 1930—they would reach all the way from Mäster Samuelsgatan to Norrström, two landmarks a half-mile apart. Right up until her death, Mrs. Stevens continued to receive many grateful letters with Swedish postmarks, including some from Astrid Lindgren, who called her “the most splendid woman I have ever met in my life.” In 1931 she wrote a Christmas letter to Lasse’s foster mother in the mixture of Swedish and Danish she had come to adopt in her letters over previous years, telling her that Lasse still dreamt about Mrs. Stevens and occasionally wanted his Swedish mamma to pretend she was his Danish mother at Håbets Allé in Brønshøj. “I was supposed to speak Danish to him, and then he told me he was going to Näs soon and all sorts of other things he thought would be interesting. Then, of course, he wanted us to get on a train and travel down to see Mother. ‘Mother is so sweet,’ he always says. Yes, Mrs. Stevens, you remain in his memory as something very bright and good, and he will never forget you.”
Oxheads on the Road
For nearly sixty years Astrid Lindgren kept in touch with Carl Stevens, who had picked her up at the main railway station in November 1926. The sixteen-year-old high school student, who had dreamt of reading languages and music at university and who ended up becoming a high school teacher in Hellerup, did more than just escort Astrid—barely older than he—home to Brønshøj. In the period leading up to the birth he took her sightseeing in Copenhagen and entertained her with Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude, played on the piano in the drawing room.
When the contractions started, it was Carl who took Astrid to the Rigshospital in a taxi. He held her hand, and to distract her from the pain he came up with the idea to count the bronze oxheads hanging over the doors of every butcher’s shop they passed. Finally, on January 10, 1930, it was the calm and reliable Carl who accompanied three-year-old Lasse on the train to Stockholm to see his “Lassemamma,” as they consistently and discreetly referred to Astrid within the Copenhagen foster family. Lasse coughed most of the way, fidgeting in the dark compartment, shoving Carl and sounding like a little Copenhagener: “Move it!” That, and much more, recalled the eighty-year-old Astrid Lindgren in a letter to Carl in December 1987, in which she thanked him for his birthday card and sent her love to all Carl’s children and grandchildren:
I simply can’t get my head round the idea that you, Carl, are the grandfather of a couple of schoolchildren. I can still see the young high school student playing the piano in the drawing room, taking me for walks and showing me all the sights of Copenhagen. I got so exhausted in my pregnant condition that I fell asleep and slept like a log when we got home. Oh, all the memories I have, oxheads and all sorts of things, and your journey with Lasse, when he said: “Move it!” I also remember the time he was hitting and poking you and then said: “Now we’re good friends!”
The delivery was set to take place at a division of the Rigshospital called the Maternity Hospital, located on Julia Maries Vej. Since its foundation in the 1700s, the institution’s mission had been to offer unmarried mothers a place to stay and a more humane way out of their dilemma than “clandestine childbirth, as so often happens, many times followed by the murder of the infant,” as it was expressed in the centuries-old royal charter. In those days it wasn’t uncommon for unmarried women to hide their pregnancies for the whole nine months, giving birth in secret without the help of a midwife. Hoping to keep the shameful affair quiet and avoid the misery of an illegitimate child, a number of these mothers suffocated their newborns soon after birth.
In the 1920s, the Maternity Hospital remained a bulwark against this kind of tragedy. A mother could give birth there under the care of a doctor and in good conditions without having to give her own name or the father’s. All deliveries were, however, registered in the Rigshospital’s card index, where each “secret mother” was assigned a number. Like the one on Lars Blomberg’s birth certificate, for instance, where “1516 b.” was written on the dotted line where his parents’ names and occupations would normally go. There was no need for the name of the child’s godmother in these abbreviated circumstances either, but one was provided: Marie Stevens.
The boy was born on December 4 around ten o’clock in the morning, and although Astrid had a fever for several days after the birth, she returned relatively quickly to Håbets Allé and Mrs. Stevens, Carl, and Esse. This time she was carrying little Lars Blomberg in her arms, and over the next three weeks no one else was allowed to hold him very long. Those weeks were all the time Astrid was able to spend with her baby before traveling back to Småland on December 23 for Christmas at Näs—an idiotic decision, as the older Astrid Lindgren remarked in an interview with Stina Dabrowski in 1993:
“I should have stayed and breast-fed him, of course, but I didn’t understand how important that was. It was for [Hanna and Samuel August’s] sake, so they didn’t have any unpleasantness about me not coming home, because then everybody would know.”
“But everybody knew anyway, didn’t they, that you’d gone away to have a baby?”
“I don’t know, they probably did. But officially I was in Stockholm to study.”
Later in life, Astrid Lindgren always remembered the intoxicating joy she felt the first time she held little Lasse at her breast, alone and undisturbed. It was the same magical atmosphere she described in the moving ending of the Kati trilogy in 1952, where the young heroine praises the miracles of nature and the symbiosis between mother and child, though she realizes it’s a joy experienced on borrowed time. Loneliness awaits them both:
My son is lying in my arms. He has such tiny hands. One of them has closed around my index finger, and I daren’t move. He might lose his grip, and I couldn’t bear that. A divine miracle, that little hand with five small fingers and five small nails. I knew children had hands, of course, but I hadn’t really understood that my child would too. Because I’m lying here and looking at the little rose petal that is my son’s hand, and I can’t stop marveling. He’s lying with his eyes closed, his nose buried in my chest, he has black, downy hair, and I can hear him breathing. He is a miracle. . . . He was just crying, my son. Like a pitiful, bleating little goat kid he sounds when he cries, and I can hardly bear to listen, my love aches. How defenseless you are, my little goat kid, my fledgling; how will I be able to protect you? My arms tighten around you. They have been waiting for you, my arms, they have always been meant for this, to be a nest for you, my little fledgling. You are mine, you need me now. At this moment you are mine and mine alone. But soon you will begin to grow. Each passing day will lead you a little farther away from me. You will never be as close to me as you are now. Perhaps someday I shall remember this hour with pain.
Starvation in Stockholm
On the day before Christmas Eve in 1926, Astrid bade farewell to her infant, Auntie Stevens, and Carl. None of them knew when she would be back. S
he traveled first to her family at Näs, then north to Stockholm, returning to her sparsely furnished boardinghouse room with its wretched steel-framed bed, which made it “look like a military sick-bay,” as Astrid wrote to Hanna and Samuel August. As a still-untrained office girl, she belonged to a class of young women who were only a few rungs above the urban proletariat on the social ladder. She did, at least, have a steel-framed bed to sleep in, clothes to wear, and—usually—enough food on the table. The latter circumstance was due in no small part to the baskets of food dispatched from home roughly every six weeks, which supplied all sorts of goodies from Hanna’s well-stocked larder at Näs. Astrid thanked her parents for these necessities promptly in her letters, rarely neglecting to mention that the basket would soon be empty: “It’s a truly exclusive pleasure to cut a decent slice of bread, smear it with first-class Vimmerby dairy butter and add a slice of Mother’s cheese, then eat it. This pleasure is repeated every morning for as long as there’s some left in the basket.”