Asta's Book Read online

  Mother taught me to sew long before I went to school and I hated it. I hated the thimble—I remember I specially hated being given a thimble for a birthday present!—but I hated the needle going into my finger worse. Still, now I’m glad I learned. It’s something I’m better at than Hansine who gapes at my tiny stitches and my careful darning of the boys’ clothes.

  Sometimes she fetches Mogens from school and sometimes I do. It was she who went today, on her way back from Mare Street where she got some thread for me from the drapers. She and Mogens came in talking English together. She had quite a tale to tell. An adventure had happened to her. Walking along by London Fields, she saw an old man ahead of her come out of the public house and stagger from side to side of the pavement. All that was important to her was to avoid cannoning into him but as she stepped to one side he crashed into the wall and fell down unconscious.

  It was a great shock for her and she was kneeling there beside him, trying to find his pulse for a sign of life, when a crowd began to gather. Of course there was no policeman or doctor. There never is when you want them. She was sure he was dead. Then a young woman came up and gave a great scream when she saw him. She said she was a servant in the house where he was a lodger. Everyone became very excited, as you’d expect, and some said it was the heat but the young woman said, no, it was the spirits he drank had got to him at last. Hansine said she would stay with her until help came, which she did, making her late getting to the school.

  ‘I hope you didn’t talk about all that to little Mogens,’ I said. ‘Old drunken men falling down in the street.’ ‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘as if I would,’ but I’m not sure I believe her. To women of that class such an incident is the most delightful and exciting in the world and they can’t keep a word of it to themselves.

  I said I didn’t want to hear about it but she went on just the same, coming out with all the details in front of the boys. ‘That’s quite enough,’ I said and I put my hands over my ears. ‘It’ll be in the newspapers,’ she said, playing into my hands. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that wouldn’t be much use to you, would it, even if it was in Danish?’ She went red as a geranium and held her hands over her stomach which is nearly as big as mine, she hates anybody talking about her illiteracy, but I just turned away. I don’t care. I don’t care any more about anyone but myself—oh, and my daughter that’s coming, of course.

  July 6th, 1905

  My birthday. I am twenty-five years old today. Not that anyone knows that. You can’t expect a servant to know and the boys are too young but I confess I did expect my husband to remember. I ought to know him by now but I don’t. Hope is a horrible thing, I don’t know why these church people call it a virtue, it is horrible because it’s so often disappointed. When you get old I’m sure you expect your birthday to be forgotten, you might not even want it remembered, but it’s not like that at twenty-five.

  All day I dreamed about how I’d have liked to celebrate my quarter of a century. I dreamed of a husband who’d give me a present, a fur coat or a diamond ring, and a grand dinner in the evening. Reality, as usual, was rather different. Frikadeller for supper again. Meatballs and potatoes have become our staple diet. We have rødkaal sometimes, done with vinegar and sugar, but Hansine has trouble finding red cabbages in the market. I long for rullepølse but we can’t find the right kind of beef here and no good fish at all. Sausages are only 9d. a pound, so we have those. At least there is milk for the boys at 2d. a pint and I try not to worry about tuberculosis. Stonor’s Dairy invites its customers to come and inspect the lairs where the cows live and Mogens and Knud are dying to go but we haven’t been yet.

  Hansine puts the boys to bed and then I go up and tell some more about Jeppe and the magic friend. Mogens said, ‘English boys aren’t called Jeppe.’ ‘You’re not English,’ was all I could think of to say to him. Then he said he would be if we were going to go on living here and could he call himself by another name? ‘What other name?’ I said. ‘All the children laugh at my name,’ he said. ‘I want to be called Jack.’

  That made me laugh. Or I pretended it did. Really, I wanted to cry, I was so afraid, but I never do cry. I was afraid of everyone becoming English and slipping away from me and I’d be left alone, the only Dane in England. This evening I’ve been more homesick than ever I’ve been since we left Copenhagen. I’ve been sitting at this table in the fading light but not seeing the room or what’s outside the window, only seeing pictures from the past The green roofs of my city and the twisted spire of the Frelsers Kirke, the beech forests of Sjælland, tea on the lawn at Tante Frederikke’s. Why do the English never eat their meals outdoors in their gardens? Their climate is better than ours, a little bit better, yet they shut themselves up indoors while we take every chance we have to be in the sunlight and the open air.

  I wonder tonight if I was wrong in what I said to Rasmus. But we have moved about so much, and always I think when I was in the family way, always in quest of some business advantage for him, some opportunity to make his fortune. From Copenhagen to Stockholm, where Knud was born, from Stockholm back to Copenhagen and the best place, my little white house in Hortensiavej. But I had to leave it and come here, London was the place, London was the centre of the world; only when we had been here a month, just one month, he was all for being off again and trying America. That was when I said no, I put my foot down. ‘The worm has turned,’ I said. ‘You’ve crushed me for the last time.’

  Not that I was ever much of a worm. At least, I’ve always stood up to him wherever I can, I’ve given back as good as I’ve got. Except for the children, of course. He can punish me with many children but I can’t punish him in the same way, can I? I said if he went to America he’d go alone, I was going home, and he could have the boys if he wanted. Instead, it was he who went home, attending he said to some ‘pressing business need’ and I was left here alone. I knew by then I’d fallen for another baby.

  Not a very enjoyable birthday!

  July 12th, 1905

  I hate it here but somehow I know it’s my fate. It will be better when I have my daughter. Not long to wait now, maybe no more than two weeks. I felt a little faint movement tonight, not much but enough to reassure me, though she is still high up and not standing on her head as she should be by this time, ready for escape. I think of it, her escape from me, as a hard swim against great breakers that keep her struggling, pushing her back. And that’s how they come out at last, babies, swimming, thrusting against the tide, and opening their lungs to cry with relief when at last they reach the shore.

  I must press on, I must be strong, come what may. Sometimes I think of Karoline that my father left on the streets of Copenhagen to find her own way to his house. She told me the story herself, for my mother never would, it was too improper for me to hear, and I am sure my father had forgotten all about it. But Karoline herself could never forget, the experience lurked there always in her mind like a goblin and she dreamed of it.

  My father came to Copenhagen from a place near Aarhus in the north of Jutland. He married my mother, who was half-Swedish, and did quite well, owning property and buying and selling furniture, and the time came when he thought my mother should have a maid to help her in the house, so he sent home to the farm for one of his nieces. They were so poor and there were so many children that you can be sure they were delighted to get rid of one of them. Karoline came. She was fifteen and she had to cross the Store Bælt and the Lille Bælt by ferry and take the train and do these things all by herself. She had never been anywhere, she couldn’t read or write. She was like an animal, a farm animal.

  My father met her at the railway station. It was a long walk to our house, several miles, and the poor girl was just an animal. When she needed to relieve herself she did what she had done in the country, moved a little aside—in this case to the gutter—lifted up her skirts, and squatted down and made water in the street. My father was so shocked and so angry he took to his heels and ran away from her. He had forgotten or
made himself forget that this was how they behaved where he came from, he was nearly a gentleman now, so he ran away home, not looking back, running through the twisting streets and by the back alleys.

  Karoline had to get there as best she could. She knew no one. She spoke with a coarse accent many couldn’t even understand, she didn’t know the address, only that the name was Kastrup, and she had never been in a city before, not even Aarhus. But she found her way, she had to. It took her till midnight but she found our house. I’ve never known how. ‘I asked a hundred people,’ she said to me. ‘I asked everyone I saw.’ At least when she got there my father didn’t turn her away.

  She was with us as our maid for many years. When I was sixteen and my mother died, Karoline too died of a monstrous cancer that grew out of her back. She can’t have been more than thirty-two or -three. She was already ill when she told me the story and it’s been an example to me, something to think of and keep me going when I’m close to despair. I say to myself, Karoline made it and so will I. I’ll get through and come out the other side.

  July 14th, 1905

  I have heard from Rasmus and he has sent me money. Hansine was covered in smiles, her fat face all red and nearly split in two, when she brought me the letter this morning. I’ve said she can’t read but she can recognize his handwriting and a Danish stamp.

  ‘Dearest Asta’, he calls me, and, later on, ‘my dear wife’, which is not at all the way he speaks to me, I can tell you. (What do I mean ‘you’? Have I begun talking to the diary?) Never mind. There is money, just when we were beginning to think even frikadeller were beyond our means and we’d be reduced to broken biscuits and Butterine.

  It was a money order for 700 kroner, which comes out at nearly £40, the most you’re allowed to send. I took it to the Post Office in Lansdowne Road and they cashed it, making no trouble, asking no questions and not even smiling at my accent.

  Now, at any rate, I shall be able to buy material to make baby clothes and have indeed done so already, white lawn and nun’s veiling and white wool to knit from Matthew Rose’s big department story in Mare Street. I shall be able to pay the doctor if I have to send for him when the baby comes. But I hope I don’t have to. The others came fast, especially poor little Mads, without difficulties though with much pain. We shall call the doctor if there are problems but Hansine will be here to help me, as she did with Mads. She knows about making the afterbirth come out and how to deal with the cord. (It’s a good thing I’m writing in Danish. Just think of someone reading that!)

  Rasmus is back in Aarhus and has given me an address to write to, though he says he doesn’t expect to be there long. I can’t imagine what he’s doing. He’s an engineer, so-called, and I don’t know what else to call him. The fact is I don’t exactly know what it is he does. He’s been a blacksmith, at any rate he can shoe a horse, and he can do anything with animals. He boasts that the most savage dog is quiet when he speaks to it and the funny thing is it’s true. He makes animals love him. It’s a pity he isn’t as good with a wife.

  Another thing he can do is make things out of wood. He could earn a living as a cabinet-maker but he won’t. He despises that sort of thing. Motors are what he likes. He once told me—he hardly ever tells me things or talks to me much but he did tell me this—that he wanted to ‘bring motor cars to England’. I thought there were motor cars here already, in fact I’ve often seen them, you see a few every day even in this place, but he means motor cars for everyone. Imagine a day when every man has his own motor car! What would happen to the horses, I said, and the trains and omnibuses come to that, but he didn’t answer. He never answers the questions I ask.

  One thing is certain and that’s that there are no motor cars in Aarhus. I wonder if he’s there to try and borrow money? He’s supposed to have a rich uncle in Hjørring at the ends of the earth, though I only half-believe in this man’s existence. I suppose I should be thankful Rasmus isn’t a Mahometan, otherwise I’m sure he’d be finding another wife up there to marry for 5,000 kroner.

  July 18th, 1905

  This evening Hansine came into the drawing room and stood there twisting her apron in her fingers. It must have been the money making me feel good, or better than I have been, for I told her to sit down for a bit and talk to me. When I was a child I read a book translated into Danish from the English about a man stranded on a desert island, I can’t remember what it was called. But this man was very lonely and when another man came along he was so happy to have someone, anyone, to talk to and be with at last that he didn’t mind its being a Negro savage. I feel a bit like that with Hansine. I have no one else to talk to except a seven-year-old child and a five-year-old and even the conversation of an illiterate servant is preferable sometimes to their nonsense and their everlasting questions.

  I had the impression Hansine was trying to tell me something. She kept stuttering and turning her head about to avoid looking at me. Our Karoline was stupid and ignorant but I sometimes think she was a genius compared to this one. At last I said, ‘Come on, out with it, what is it you want to tell me?’ I was thinking by this time that she’d broken something, not that we have anything valuable to break, or else it was about the sweetheart she had in Copenhagen, but it was only this old man that fell down in the street.

  She is now firm friends with the servant from the lodging house that she calls ‘Miss Fisher’. Apparently, she found out where the house is, in Navarino Road, north of London Fields, and went there, if you please, ‘to ask about the poor old gentleman’. It turned out he was dead on arrival at the German Hospital. I suppose she was interested because he was a foreigner too. ‘Like us’, she said, only he was a Pole called Dzerjinski. What’s more likely is that she was just curious.

  The people ‘Miss Fisher’ is in service with are a man and his wife and two children, and an old mother-in-law, but no more lodgers now Dzerjinski is gone. Fisher said her master had given her notice but ‘her mistress, Mrs Hyde’ had ‘taken that back as there was plenty for her to do’, minding the baby, cleaning the house and cooking for all of them.

  I began to wonder what all this was leading up to, if anything, but it turned out just to be her way of asking if she could have this Fisher for tea here in the kitchen on her afternoon off. I couldn’t help thinking how lucky she was to have found a friend while I knew no one, but I said I’d no objection, provided she didn’t neglect her own work and remembered it wouldn’t be long before I’m confined.

  It helps her with her English, having a friend who can’t speak anything else. ‘I’ll soon be chattering away better than you, ma’am,’ says she with a stupid grin and another blush.

  I sent her to bed and then I wrote all this down. The baby sits heavy and unmoving and I have the strange feeling, almost certainly nonsense, that her head is caught up in my ribs. It’s time she turned over. But at least I know what will happen next week or the week after when she begins her escape. I knew nothing when I was expecting Mogens, less than nothing. For one thing, I thought he would come out through my navel. I reasoned—not understanding about the afterbirth and how a baby feeds inside you—that the navel must have some use and what use could it have but to open and let the baby out? It was a great shock, I can tell you, when Mogens started coming out the other way. My mother told me Adam had no navel and, more to the point, neither did Eve. They weren’t born but made by God. But the strange thing was that I never made the connection.

  I’m tired and I’m going to bed.

  July 21st, 1905

  It has been insufferably hot and it’s like this all over Europe and America, according to the papers. (I make myself read the papers every day to help my English.) People are falling down dead from sunstroke in New York and here, which is more to the point, children have been poisoned by ice-cream. I have forbidden Hansine to buy any for the boys.

  A tremendous fuss is going on between England and Germany and Denmark and Sweden, all to do with who’s going to be the King of Norway, Prince Charles of
Denmark or Bernadotte. Or I think so, I could follow it better in Danish. The Emperor William is involved, as might be expected.

  I’ve written a long letter to my husband which is why I haven’t felt like writing this diary for three days. I wrote pages and pages of what I think are called ‘home truths’, how horrible it is living here in this dreary street, how hostile everyone is with their stupid questions, the polar-bear woman Mrs Gibbons, for instance, and about the heat and my fear of war. It would be even worse for foreigners here if there was war with Denmark and Sweden was involved. How could he leave us here alone for months and months in a foreign country?

  I told him something else I read in the paper, that the Princess of Wales has had a son, born on July 13th. I am not so fortunate. I asked him if he’d forgotten I was expecting his child which may be born any day. Am I to bear it alone here? Suppose I die? Hundreds of women die in childbirth every day, though not Princesses of Wales. Hansine came back from fetching Mogens from school and told me of a woman who died this morning after her twins were born. She got it from another friend of hers, a very low class of person, a slum-dweller in those hovels off Wells Street. There are five other children, all under seven, and the father is sick and out of work. I screamed to her to be quiet, not to tell me these things, is she mad, has she no feelings? But I put the story in the letter to Rasmus. Let him hear it. Why should I bear it alone? It’s his child too and his fault it exists.