Asta's Book (2 page)

July 2nd, 1905

I don’t write in this book every day. This is partly to keep it a secret from Hansine—she would try to guess what I was doing and think of something grotesque, letters to a lover perhaps. Imagine it!—and partly because it’s not only a record of what I do but also of what I think. And it’s about people. It’s stories, too, I’ve always liked stories, telling them to myself, true and made up, and now of course I tell them to my boys. I tell them to myself as a way of getting to sleep, for instance, and in the daytime to get away from reality, which isn’t too pleasant to say the least.

When I was a girl and kept a diary I put the stories in but I always had to be a bit careful about what I wrote in case Mother or Father found it. There is no place to hide anything where you can be absolutely sure it’s safe from other people’s eyes. But a foreign language makes things safe because it’s like a code. It seems funny to call Danish a foreign language but that’s what it is to everybody here. Well, not quite everybody. There must be Danes living here, our ambassador and consul and people like that and maybe professors at Oxford, and of course the Queen is Danish, and sometimes I read about Denmark in the papers.

Our Danish prince may become the first King of Norway, for instance, and there’s been more about the
Georg Stage.
They’ve held an inquiry in Copenhagen but they say the President of the Court was biased and forgot to be impartial. The captain of the British ship broke down but still says he wasn’t responsible for the deaths of those twenty-three boys. (Another has died since.) King Edward has sent his sympathies!

A much more important item is about a Russian ship called the
Kniaz Potemkin.
I wish I could understand better but there are so many long words. The people of Odessa, for some reason, wouldn’t let the ship come ashore and take on provisions, or that’s what I think happened, and so the ship turned its guns on the city and started shelling it. Those Russians are savages, worse than the Germans!

I saw a Cook’s tour to Denmark advertised. If only I could go on it! We buy Danish bacon and there’s a Danish firm that makes something to spread on your bread called Butterine. They’re called Mønsted and the very name makes me homesick, so Danish, so
familiar.
But no Dane is likely to come to this house. Hansine can’t read, Mogens and Knud haven’t learned yet and I don’t even know where Rasmus is. I could even put improper stories in only I don’t know any.

If it was just a record of what I do this diary would be nothing but repetition. My days are all the same. I get up early because I wake up early and if I lie there all I do is brood about things and worry that the child inside me is sitting too high up. The boys are awake by the time I’m up and I wash their hands and faces and dress them and we go down to the breakfast Hansine has made. Coffee, of course, and the white bread Mr Spenner the baker brings and the boys love. A Dane needs coffee more than food and I drink three cups. I can be careful with money in almost every way but I can’t give up a single cup of my coffee.

Hansine has begun talking to the boys in English. Mogens is better at it than she is, children of his age seem to pick up a language very fast, and he laughs at her mistakes which she doesn’t mind a bit but laughs with him and clowns about. And then Knud tries to speak it and they all make fools of themselves but seem to think it the best joke in the world. I hate it because I can’t join in. I am jealous and that’s the truth. I’m jealous because she’s a woman and they’re men, after all, aren’t they? Somehow I know that if I had a girl she’d be with me, she’d be on my side.

July 5th, 1905

I’ve thought of forbidding Hansine to speak English in the house and I think she’d obey me. She still respects me and is a bit afraid of me, though not half so afraid as she is of Rasmus. But I won’t forbid it because I know I have to do the best I can for Mogens and Knud. They have to learn English, because they have to live here and do so perhaps for the rest of their lives.

Hansine takes Mogens to the school which is two streets away in Gayhurst Road. He wants to go alone and soon I’ll let him, but not quite yet. She grumbles under her breath because when her visitor is in the house she gets fearful pains in her stomach. I stay at home with Knud and take him on my lap and tell him a story. It used to be H. C. Andersen for both the boys but when I left Denmark I left Andersen behind too. I suddenly realized how cruel some of his stories were. ‘The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf’, about Little Inge who had to spend all her life in the Bogwife’s kitchen underground just because she was proud of her new shoes, that was my mother’s favourite but it revolted me. ‘The Tinderbox’ was horrible too and ‘The Little Match Girl’, so I’ve started telling the boys stories I make up myself. At the moment it’s a serial about a little boy called Jeppe with a magic friend who can do anything. This morning we got to the bit where the magic friend polishes all the green verdigris off the copper roofs in Copenhagen one night and when Jeppe wakes up in the morning they are bright shining red-gold.

When Hansine gets back I go out. I put on my hat and then the smock that covers my great belly and a cape to cover that and hope people can’t see I’m expecting but I know they can. Then I walk. I just walk. I walk all the way down Lavender Grove and Wilman Grove to London Fields and over to Victoria Park, sometimes up to Hackney Downs or down to de Beauvoir Town, all these places whose names I can’t even pronounce. Along the streets mostly, looking at the houses, the churches, the great buildings, but sometimes I walk on the grass of the marshes or by the canal. It’s too hot to wear a cape but if I didn’t I’d feel too ashamed of the shape of me to go out at all.

Hansine makes
smørrebrød
for luncheon but it’s not the same without rye bread. I’d as soon not eat but I force myself for her sake, the baby’s. If I don’t go out walking again in the afternoon, and sometimes I do, I sit in the drawing room by the bay window. Our house in Lavender Grove is one in a row of nine, all joined together. It’s not very pretty, in fact it’s one of the ugliest I’ve ever seen, not as tall as it should be and built of grey bricks with clumsy stonework and wooden windows. There’s a funny little stone face wearing a crown over the front porch and two more faces just the same over each of the upper windows. I wonder who they are or who they were meant to be, those girls with crowns on. But the house does have this bay window and a bit of garden in front with a hedge. I won’t have net curtains, whatever Hansine says, because if I did I couldn’t see out when I sit here and do my sewing.

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.