At the Lighthouse

When I think back on my childhood summers, if there’s one thing that’s inseperately linked with the season it’s my brother. The rest of the year was socially dominated by my little friends and classmates, but in childhood when summer came and school closed, it meant spending time with my older brother.

My family would go away on vacation, just the four of us, and my brother, this wonderous creature living under the same roof as me all year; older, wiser, quicker and physically superior to me would suddenly be available to me, to play with, to laugh with, to have petty little fights with, to be an ally against our parents in arguments about bedtimes or between-meal snacks, to sing along with me on children’s songs during those long hours in the warm backseat when we were going away, our car filled with suitcases and stuffed animals and maps and tickets for a ferry that my parents were stressed out about not reaching in time.

“Stress” – back then in the early summer, sitting in that backseat, sandals on my feet, my sunburnt, funny and smart brother next to me, it seemed such a nonsensical word to me. Surely nothing in the big, wide, bright summer needed to be stressed. Massive phenomena such as beaches and sun and dunes lay ahead of us, ancient landscapes that I had heard described in old Danish folk songs, spreading out eternally, waiting for us to take them in. My brother would giggle at me conspiratorially while our parents argued in the front seats about how to read the maps and which highway to go by, and then he and I would pick up our old battery-run tape recorder and listen to one of the audio books we always brought on car trips.

One of those audio books was Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren’s Emil i Lönneberga - “Emil of Maple Hills”. My brother and I absolutely loved the Emil stories, and no doubt this was brought on at least to a certain degree by the identification we felt with two of the main characters; Emil and his little sister Ida. My brother, white-haired and energetic as he was in childhood, reminded me so much of the involuntarily mischievous protagonist, and I easily identified with his mild-tempered, well-behaved and girly little sister, and I was deeply touched by the bond I registered the two characters. In the Emil stories, Emil was always trying to do well by the grown-ups, but his childish attempts at succes always backfired and he was misunderstood by the rational adults as mischief, and one of his only allies was Ida, who always saw past his failures and doted on her older brother. To me, this was the main focus of the story; the bond between a brother and a sister and the childish world they shared, that was invisible to the rational grown-ups in their lives.

Besides from a dramatization of the Emil stories, the audio book contained a number of songs that had originally been written for the 70s Swedish television adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s books. The songs were written by composer Georg Riedel, and he had really managed to capture the atmosphere about a boy in rural Sweden at the beginning of the 20th century. The figurations and arrangements of the songs had a distinct and very appropriate folklore sound to them, and the melodies had all the beauty of a child’s world.

My favourite among them was “Little Ida’s Summer Song”, which I’d like to share with you:

I could only find it in a German version on youtube, but thankfully the song is still in the original Swedish language. The images of Emil and Ida walking through a summer landscape together (they’re bringing a basket of coffee and treats to their family’s field hands) just break my heart; they remind me so much of me and my brother and our childhood summers. The simplistic beauty of the melody, the magic scheme of things expressed in the lyrics and the little girl actor’s sweet and not-quite-perfect way of performing the song: All is such a wonderful tribute to a childhood and early summer. Here are the lyrics, translated into English:

You mustn’t think that it will be summer
unless someone starts it
and makes everything summerly;
then the flowers will be here soon!
I make it so that the flowers bloom,
I make the whole pasture green
And now summer has come
for I have removed all the snow.

I make it so that there’s lots of water in the creek,
so that it jumps and rushes
I make it so there are lots of swallows
and mosquitoes for the swallows to have
I make it so that there are new leaves on the trees
and little birds’ nests here and there
I make the sky beautiful in the evenings
because I make it absolutely clear

And I make wild strawberries for the children
because I like for them to have those
And other fun little things
that children should have when they are young
And I make amusing little places
where children may run about;
then the children will be full of summer
and their legs full of running!

/marie