Photo by T Buchtele.

I am having lunch with my parents. Sea bass and nursery cauliflower cheese; it’s a poignant combination. We talk about Sweden; my childhood and the childhood of my children. We trace in detail the shortcut between my grandfather’s house and ours; the empty back roads, dirt roads. Grey and solitary roe deer jumping into the woods, slinking foxes and hares. I remember a sunken grassy field, mist hovering mysteriously. There, my father always rehearsed with us the famous poem ‘Näcken’, reminded by the mist of the line about the evening when the elves are dancing on the meadow.

We trace the road together. My father remembers it more vividly than my mother; it is his road. I am overcome with nostalgia at this lunch. My throat is aching with tears; I try not to cry.

As I step back into the Sussex sun, I check my Blackberry and see that Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for literature, an announcement that is perfectly in tune with my mood. No poet expresses better the drift between now, then, and eternity; the sadness at the heart of nostalgia. No poet expresses better the relationship between humans and the natural world. The black and melancholy seas, the drifting seagulls, the oaks and elks, the storms, rowanberries, the moon and stars, the well, salt, and wolves are agents rather than background; they are what the world is, as much as we are. It’s dark, and thoughtful. It is, also, bleakly intelligent.

This year he turned eighty. He can barely speak after a stroke some twenty years ago, but he still writes. We congratulate him. ■

Our current issue, ‘Going Back’, has looked at returns of different kinds. Here, Sigrid Rausing goes back to the summer house of her childhood holidays on the coast of Sweden – and found a curious continuity between memories and the present.

When I was two my parents bought an old cottage on the west coast of Sweden where we would spend two months every summer – wild and happy times. It is now a nature reserve, but then it was only a common, a five-mile strip of juniper and stone fields between the sea and the fields above. Every summer, the farmers let the heifers out to graze, and they wandered back and forth, as they still do. Second World War bunkers, facing the sea and Denmark, punctuate the landscape. The children play on them now, as we did, though they can no longer enter into the mysterious and dank interiors. At the edge of the peninsula there are several stone mounds, Bronze Age graves. The sun sets in the sea beyond, and one can see why, 3,000 years ago, the people would have picked this particular place for their graves – the island is a mile or two away on the left, the high cliffs several miles away on the right. On the low slabs of rocks at the edge of the sea, you look straight into the setting sun. The air shimmers on hot days, and the scent of juniper and wild roses is strong. This is where I spent the summers of my childhood, walking on the rocks, dreaming of space ships. School began on August 20th or thereabouts. Before getting in the car to drive back to town, I threw myself into the sea to keep the taste of salt and seaweed on my skin for as long as possible.

We had a neighbour who was a modestly famous architect. He had designed and built the summer house next to ours. He had a wife, an ex-wife, and a gang of children over for summer visits. My father did all the cooking and shopping in our house, and fed those kids on a regular basis; they were a glamorous unruly lot, wilder than us, just as we were wilder than the well-groomed girls in the house on the other side, whom we refused to play with. We had no TV, so we watched movies with them , glorious no-adult summer seasons of Horror, werewolves and vampires – The Body Snatchers, Them, The Fly . . . We would run back to our house giggling with terror. Sten, the architect, and his then wife, an arch and weathered blonde, often came for drinks with my parents – champagne and dry Martinis, cheese doodles and peanuts.

Sten’s wife eventually divorced him, and my mother, somewhat to my father’s regret, refused to have anything more to do with him. He married again, a genuinely beautiful woman at least thirty years younger than he was, and had another baby. He would walk stiffly past our house, in a burgundy towelling robe, down to the jetty to swim.

When he died, my parents bought Sten’s house from his children; they offered it to us in honour of my father’s cooking. ‘What happened to the last wife?’ I ask my mother. ‘Oh, I know that,’ she said. ‘She became a lesbian and fled to Paris with her lover, an older woman.’

As I write this I am sitting in the office, now a playroom filled with our old toys and books. Sten scribbled hundreds of names and numbers on the bare pine walls. Looking at the wall now I can see the names of my son and nephews and nieces too; they have signed the wall each year we have been here.

On a shelf is the little house my sister made in woodwork, and the car. There is the old wooden marble run my parents’ friends Ingrid and Manchen gave us forty years ago or more. The sound of the marbles running down the six slanted runs, dropping from one level to the next, filled our summers, like the rattle of the car over the cattle-grid, and the patter of running bare feet on the planks of the jetty, the smell of the fish-shop and the green-grocer’s, and the heady smell of petrol for the boat.

This year, for the first time ever, the jetty remained bare in July. Each autumn the sections of planks are dismantled and stacked by the bunker. Each spring it’s re-built, after the winter storms have finished. The skeleton of rusty rails resting on the eroded concrete supports looked forlorn, unprecedented in the height of summer. On the first day, the children ran down to the beach. The boys climbed sideways, like bears, to the end, as I would have done, and was still slightly tempted to do, and threw themselves in the water. ‘It must have been a storm’, I said to Eric, my husband. ‘They’ll get it back up this week. This is Sweden.’

But they didn’t. It turned out that winter ice had cracked and eroded one of the concrete supports, so the jetty was no longer safe. The council’s engineer was on holiday, so Eric and our neighbour Peter laid the planks themselves. We wrote signs about walking carefully, at own risk, and taped them over the sign banning dogs from the beach. I tied the sections of planks to the rails with cautious, feminine knots; the heat was overwhelming. An old lady sat and watched, nodding approvingly. I brought lemonade. Peter turned himself in at the police station; the immigrant Balkan policewoman on duty found his assertion that he had committed a crime by re-building the jetty difficult to understand.

Several evenings later Eric and I walked out to sit and watch the sunset by the rusty steps at the end. The jetty was damp from wet feet, and the sunset was beautiful. I remembered the ash cloud prediction of spectacular sunsets. We sat there for a long time, listening to the sea birds and the cows, looking at the still clear water. There is a tiny patch of sand at the end of the jetty; otherwise it’s all stones and seaweed. Over to the right is the little harbour; to the left, a mile away, are the stone graves. Suddenly we noticed a movement in the still water. It was a Swedish grass snake; black, with two yellow dots like eyes on its head. It swam up to the steps, lifted its head out of the water and looked at us, feeling the steps, rising from the water as though it was about to slither up. Then it turned and swam away towards the shore. I held my breath; I had never seen anything like it before; a strange sign in the ominous heat.

The following night we were in our little rubber dinghy, Eric somewhat against his will. I had rowed it to the harbour with my niece two nights earlier, visiting my sister; now we were taking it back. Eric was rowing, I was watching the sky and setting sun, revelling in the summer feeling of frizzy salty hair and my old dress, when suddenly we saw, against the horizon, what looked like a little sailing boat. We rowed towards it, further out than perhaps we should have, with the particular anarchic freedom of rowing a small rubber dinghy to sea after at least two glasses of wine. There it was, a biggish structure of greying wood nailed together with three sails made from brown paper bags. It sailed, on its own, launched, I imagine, by a father and his children, with a story of the boats’ adventures to come. It now stands on an old chest in our house, and there, presumably, it will stay until it turns to dust. Not much of an adventure, but perhaps better than water-logging and sinking.

The heatwave continued. I took the children to the cliffs; they threw themselves into the sea as I had when I was a child. I dived from a lower ledge, unwisely, forgetting my age. My son kindly checked for stones; I wanted, and failed, to impress him. We cycled to the village on the same coastal dirt road. We looked out for hares and roe deer; the children climbed on the roof at dusk, as we did and jumped down, as we did. I opened all the windows on my parents’ veranda; they sat in the same chairs they always sit in, an old cane rocking chair for my father and a square upright cane seat for my mother. It was hotter than it had ever been.

One day we went down to the jetty, and there, taped to the planks by our feet, was a notice from the council. The water, it said, had been declared unsuitable for bathing; the e-coli levels exceeded the standards set. We kept swimming, but half-heartedly, keeping our heads above water.

Finally, the heatwave broke. The temperature dropped 18⁰ overnight; the sea whipped up to a brown and purple froth, white edged waves hurling themselves to shore. Only the strongest sea gulls sailed on that wind. Where I sat writing, my hands were cold from the draught. It was a comfort, after all, at this point in history when every heatwave points to apocalyptic global warming scenarios.

Sigrid Rausing is the publisher of Granta.

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Front page image © Will Morgan/Millennium Images, UK
Above image © Nordicphotos/Wildcard Images, UK

On the evening of June 26, Granta Books celebrated the publication of two new books: Fishing in Utopia by Andrew Brown and Swimming in a Sea of Death by David Rieff. Sigrid Rausing, the publisher of Granta magazine, spoke on what these books mean to her.

You may well wonder what David Rieff’s book about the death of his mother, Susan Sontag, and Andrew Brown’s book about Sweden have in common, other than the fact that they are both published by Granta.

Susan Sontag, of course, had somewhat of a connection to Sweden, since she wrote and directed two films there, in 1969 and 1971. A few years later, Andrew Brown too went to Sweden and lived there for a decade, immersing himself into Swedish working life. There is probably not a person in this room – other than perhaps Andrew – who understands what the connection between these two books is for me. I grew up – again in the ’70s – immersed in Susan Sontag, Foucault, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the cultural critics of the day. I was unreflectively anti-Social Democrat and concerned about the creeping extension of state power. Rather like in Britain today, that was a common concern between liberals and libertarians.

One of the pivots of that discourse was the idea that the state took excessive numbers of children into care, that at least a part of the state constituted, in effect, a repressive machinery where individual rights were potentially sacrificed to powerful social norms, parallel to the coerced sterilizations of those unfortunate people who were regarded as socially undesirable, which continued into the ’70s.

I still think that point of view is largely true. From this book, however, I learnt that the story of children taken into care was unintentionally internationalized by Andrew himself – his story about one particular case bounced from his piece in the Daily Mail (mothers weeping, soulless bureaucrats), to the Private Eye (jokes about Sweden), to Der Spiegel (‘Swedish children’s Gulag’, based on six cases). Many years later, Andrew did some more research into his original case and came to the conclusion that the state had been right to take this particular boy, ‘child A’, into care, and that the mother, indeed, was a psychopathic fantasist who posed a real danger to the child.

State power is a tricky thing, and the Swedish state was mythologized by right and left alike. We never thought of the state in any terms other than power – it was, to us, the Foucauldian ultimate panopticon, controlling its citizens. When progressive friends in Britain or America eulogized Sweden’s welfare state and freedoms, I quoted sterilization and children taken into care at them. I pointed out that Sweden in the 1980s seriously considered forcible quarantine for its HIV-positive population. Was I right to be so sceptical about Sweden? I don’t know. I think I was. But I now also think – partly because of Andrew’s story of ‘child A’ – that the whirl of myth and rumour surrounded the state much as it surrounds any celebrity – and Sweden in a sense was a celebrity state because it had become globally symbolic of the welfare state, of high taxes, of sexual education and liberation.

Susan Sontag wrote about the pervasiveness of ‘interpretation’ in relation to art: ‘None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.’ In Sweden, ‘interpretation’ became an incessant drive to understand the social system and culture in which we lived – our entanglement with the state, ultimately, was taken for granted.

Now, as I get older, and as close friends and family battle with the potentially fatal illnesses of our day – cancer, autoimmune disorders, addiction – each with its own complex mythology, I am more interested in her ideas in Illness as Metaphor. She wrote, ‘Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance’; a significance which she thought of as irrelevant or as oppressive static around the real and subterranean processes of the body. David’s book, in a sense, completes her refutation of illness as metaphor, as he describes her refusal, and his own collaboration in that refusal, to be confined by the symbolism of progressive and mortal illness, as well as the cost of that refusal: there was no peace or acceptance, seemingly, and farewells came too late to be fully understood and meaningful. It’s a painful book, but it is also an extraordinary testament to the fact that our discourse, our ideologies and our theories, really do inform, or even constitute, our way of being in the world. That is as true for Sweden as it is for Susan Sontag, as Andrew and David have so eloquently shown.