Chapter 6 (Part 2) – Studies at Lund University

Prologue

Ever since my early childhood that was filled with sun and laughter, my world had alternated between clear days and days with thunder clouds.  But there was also happiness, and not just on the surface. And, as my sister Gun said famously at a time when our youth was in the past already, “At least we were never bored.”

My more or less secure adolescence took a sudden end on the sunny day on Östra Vallgatan next to the beautiful Botanical Garden in Lund, when I lost my boyfriend. It had always been my sister he was in love with. Then began a more than a decade-long stint of mild depression, which I only once in a while managed to throw off. 

And yet, the only stability in my life was my sister. My sister who did not really want me. I nevertheless spent quite a lot of time at my sister’s place because I was lonely and I had nowhere else to go. I had always admired my very ambitious and intelligent sister and she had always felt superior to me. She was an achiever. I was not. I just got along fairly well.

Mother was alternately a being of enormous energy and success in one incarnation and apathy and complete inactivity in another. Especially after she became the photographer at Malmö Stadsteater, she loved to be a prima donna. And she was. [1. Theater pictures by Magda Molin] She had always been in the limelight, being the kind of person who stands out in a crowd. However, after the war and the divorce, she became increasingly unstable, and she told us, in order to get some weight off her shoulders, I suppose, that she would see us through studentexamen (baccalauréat), but after that, at the age of 19, we were on our own. And so we were. If it had not been for Arne, whom I have always loved, I would not have known that I had a home of my own. I knew of course that I could go to Nyköping whenever I wanted to and there was a room for me, but it was not really ‘home’.

Mother sank into self-neglect and neglect of all things and people around her. It was a rare thing, when I once came “home” to Nyköping some time in the mid-fifties that I suddenly saw her coming towards me on the main street (Storgatan) with my dearest of all dear dogs, our Sappo who was born in 1947. We got him after our first vacation in Lapland that year. Sappo was wild with happiness, jumping all over me. It was a wonderful surprise meeting.

Nyköping is a small city and you could easily walk from the railroad station to the “mountain” where our apartment building was located. At that time the apartment had a view over nature only, the rocky mountain top, and in the distance you could glimpse the water of the bay between Sweden and Finland.

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Lund University

After my seven months in Luxeuil I just wanted to study French, so instead of Socialinstitutet, it got to be Lund University. I see myself as having been a pretty average student in Lund. The second term of my first year I was living on my own in a studio sublet to me by a friend of my sister’s. That was after Arne and I had spent a wonderful few months playing house, with me in the role of hostess, which I loved. Mother was in a psychiatric clinic.

Most of my years at Lund University were a lackluster series of days and weeks and months, interspersed with occasional exams and, of course, parties. My exams usually went well — except for my first final written French exam where I left out the second accent aigu in ‘énormément’, plus two other possibly more important mistakes. Three mistakes were one too many at the time, but no professor would get away with such strict rules for students of today.

I want to mention my exam in phonetics at the end of my first term in Lund, as one of my very good memories of testing.

All language students had to read a book on phonetics by Professor Bertil Malmberg, a world-renowned Swedish phonetician and linguist. My exam with Bertil Malmberg in his phonetics apparatus room was actually the one I remember the best at Lund University. He looked at my exam book and saw that I was in Smålands Nation. “So where were you born?” he asked me. I said “in Jönköping”. “Aha, and how do you pronounce ängel (spelling the word) then?” was his next question. I said it and he replied “Then you’re not a genuine Jönköpingsbo.” I said “No, I actually grew up in Malmö.” It so happens that in Swedish we have two kinds of the metric foot called trochée. The word “pocket” is a trochée, for instance, the kind of metric term you learn when you study Latin poetry in Gymnasium. In some words the kind of trochée you use depends on what part of Sweden you come from. The difference is tiny and possibly only noticeable to a trained ear. I had an argument with an Austrian friend about the pronunciation of the word ängel in Swedish and Engel in German. My friend claimed that the pronunciation was exactly the same, but it really isn’t. There is that case of a different kind of trochée.

Bertil Malmberg also showed me his machine for registering speech frequencies and I was fascinated. I actually didn’t know before this how that kind of thing, for music and for speech was recorded. ‘I’ in Swedish (that is ‘ee’ in English), [i:] in the international phonetical alphabet, he told me, is the highest frequency vowel, going up to 3,000 Hz, he said. Curiously enough, this is a thing that has always stayed with me, throughout my studies of languages and linguistics.

Professor Malmberg, ‘a phonetician, general linguist and romanist is one of the leading linguists in Sweden’ [1. Bertil Malmberg in memoriam], was actually such a widely competent scholar that when he applied for the chair in phonetics, he had a choice between a chair in phonetics or in Romance languages, as it was called in Lund in those days. He was offered a new chair in General Linguistics in 1969, based on his pioneering work and great competence in the field of Romance languages, which was my first major. It was mainly the French language, but it also included some knowledge of a second Romance language, which got to be Spanish in my case.

In fact, when I started studying linguistics at l’Université 3 de Lyon in 1986, we were asked on the very first day by one of our professors about former linguistics studies. I mentioned ‘Growth and Structure of the English Language’ by Otto Jesperson, which was a kind of linguistic analysis of a language that had quite fascinated me in Lund, and I then mentioned that I had studied phonetics with Professor Bertil Malmberg. Jesperson was pooh-poohed as being ‘old school’, but when I mentioned Bertil Malmberg there was a gleam of recognition in the eyes and the tone of the professor.

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Our Spanish teacher in Lund was a Peruvian who didn’t know a word of Swedish. A foreign teacher had the title of lektor, and we had these native speakers in all the languages taught at the university. The problem in this case was that to be able to use the standard textbook, we had to first translate the Swedish into French for him. It was very old-fashioned teaching and pretty soon, after one term of half-hearted attendance in his classes, which was a minimum requirement. I dropped the classes and decided I could learn Spanish just as well myself by reading three books, whicg was a requirement, and studying the grammar. I passed that test very easily for the Romance languages Professor Lombard — who was said not to know Spanish too well anyway. His French though was definitely excellent and I suppose that, with a name like that, he was most likely part-French. His seminars were boring though, but attendance was more or less compulsory and we did learn from them anyway.

In the oral exam in the 50s you were tested on everything you had been studying during your three or four semesters of French classes and home study. The system has changed entirely and there are now multiple partial tests, which makes a whole lot better sense.

One of the last days before my oral exam in French, I was told by a co-student that I must not forget professor Lombard’s own dissertation, which was a dry book called “The Languages of Europe and the White Race”. Wow, I could never have imagined a more racist title.

So I hurried to the University Library and spent a day there reading his book. It was a very dry collection of facts about Indo-European languages, and, as far as I could see, it really contained no real research. Just as I had been forewarned,  I was asked about several things contained in his book. There must not have been many candidates for the position the year Professor Lombard got the chair.

For some strange reason I don’t remember much of my English studies. Maybe it was all so easy since I had my incredibly efficient English teacher in secondary school. So not much effort was required. I do remember being thoroughly bored by the hundreds of poems in Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury”, and that is certainly the reason why I once said to my very dear friend Norma Jochsberger, a Latin scholar, that I didn’t like poetry. She was shocked and said that some of her friends were poems. It is not true at all anyway . There is a lot of poetry that I do like, but having to read all those romantic poems in Palgrave had caused some kind of mental constipation in me, at the time.

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And of course there were the parties, some soirées with evening gowns in the big hall at the Academic Union. As I remember, the young men just wore dark suits though, no dinner jackets there. I remember one such ball, a masked ball. I wrote to Arne and asked him if he could lend me one of the beautiful dresses the Royal Dramatic Theater had given him, costumes they didn’t use any more. He needed them for plays he set up in his school in Nyköping, and this one was probably for the second act of Marriage of Figaro.

Arne sent me a dress that the great Inga Tidblad had worn as Kate in ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. I have never before or later been dressed in such a stunning outfit. I had a wonderful evening, and I remember somewhat turning the head of the kurator, Lars W, the president of Smålands Nation. He was married, so enough said about that. These big balls were usually arranged by two nations together. One was in unison with Lund Nation, and  I had a little amour with the “kurator” of that nation. But he was married too, so inspite of a very memorable little affair it had to stop before it actually really became an ‘affair’.I was at the time the ‘sex–mistress’ of Smålands Nation. I think I explained that the title is a joke. It concerns parties, not sex.

One evening though Lars W came down to my room. He and his wife had an apartment on the floor above mine. They had an exchange guest from Tübingen University in Germany,, and Lars asked me if I would join the little party. My German was very rusty at that time since we were never made to speak it  in our German classes. I managed so-so however, but what I remember the best was the young man (Dr. Eiselt – who isn’t a doctor in Germany? – and they even use the titl!e) — this young man putting his hand on mine saying “Wann gehen wir tanzen?” Oh well, that got to be a little romance and it later became a friendship since Albrecht already had a girlfriend, a young Italian woman, Angela, from Milano, which the Germans for some strange reason call Mailand. They got married soon after that.

Many years later I did get to know the entire family, in Wilhemshaven on the North Sea in Germany where they lived, two gorgeous children, Michele and Simonetta and Angela was very nice and also beautiful. I stopped by on my way from Paris to Sweden in my little Renault 4L (L for luxe!) in 1971, and I spent a couple of days with them. It was easy to see that Angela was by far the smarter one of the couple. They got a divorce soon after that.

In fact, I had already gotten to know Angela in 1966 when I chaperoned thirteen American young girls on a very long tour of Europe. I met with Albrecht and Angela in Köln where we arrived from Paris by bus. That bus in a meandering way took us all the way through Switzerland and Lago di Como to Rome, Naples and the Isle of Capri and then back to Rome, for further delivery by air to Madrid and Lisbon. I then took a plane to Sweden, which was a condition of mine in accepting this unpaid job. I waved goodbye to the girls at Lisbon Airport who took a TWA flight — TWA finally having ended a strike that worried me a lot.Were the girls going to get back to Kennedy Airport or weren’t they?

Back to Köln, Cologne. As I got off the bus, I remember Albrecht and his beautiful wife Angela waiting for me. (Die kleine Angela to whom we all wrote a postcard from Lund in 1956, or so. We had a nice dinner together. I guess I somehow managed to get out of dining with the girls for once. About ten years later, Albrecht and his son, Michele, now an M.D., even came to see us when John and I lived in Paris. Albrecht was a bit of a bore and his English was much less good than Michele’s, but he had once charmed me and I guess I was in a minor way faithful to that first impression. I had to urge them to go out and look at the city, and they finally did get to see the high points in Paris. Albrecht had a hard time realizing that our little romance began and ended in 1956.

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The one event that stands out from those drab years when I mostly remember my constant feeling of just barely being alive, was the May 1954 Carnival in Lund, a huge event. The brother of a close friend of mine, Lennart Lindberg, came down from Göteborg to participate in the student frenzy that spread all through Lund for about a week.

If that carnival stands out in my mind as a wonderfully rosy time, it was certainly because of Ulf, the brother, whom I had not known until then. It was the first and only real love saga of my youth. My soul was in paradise and who knows what would have become of my life if there had not been a horrible mis-event that same summer. Would I have settled down as Ulf’s wife, become the wife of a successful chemist who worked for a major Swedish pharmaceutical company and who made a fine career?

Be that as it may, the week of Carnival dizziness and my new love saga got to be tied in with the nice little sublet I had that spring semester. I never had such a comfortable living quarters again in Lund, even though later on I managed to get a room in the Smålands Nation building. It was one of the first-generation student dormitories and there were toilets and a shower only at the end of each corridor, but the room I had overlooked the gorgeous botanical gardens and all the rooms had balconies. Also there was a kitchen for each floor, extremely handy when you live on a short budget the way I did. To me it was luxury and that was the end of drab rented rooms — toilet up a staircase, or some such thing. Even though I always had a separate entrance, the rooms I could afford were indeed pretty drab. In newer student dormitories every room has its own toilet. Now, that’s real luxury — which you pay for obviously.

I had to get busy in the preparation of parties in order to get a room in the Nation’s dormitory, since there was a long waiting list. I was told to start by helping out by ‘moving chairs and such’, was the wording. Well, I did help out and the next year I got to be the vice sex-mistress and the year after that I was the sex mistress. This is not a joke. Or rather it is a joke, but we were really called that — the committee for the organization of parties was the sex committee. There is the sex master and the vice, the sex mistress and the vice. Joke or no joke, my new office got me a room in the Nation’s building.

I don’t remember much of what we did during the week that Ulf was there, except that, like thousands of other students and public, we watched the long and hilariously funny Carnival parade with no end of floats, one totally different from the next one and there were walking majorettes and bands. (See  Chapter 9 – Lund – a Love story ) We also of course went to see that year’s new Carnival ‘spex’, 

Djingis Khan, which has since become one of the standard repertory for the Lund ‘spexare’ (actors in a spex), along with the immortal Uarda, the Egyptian princess. Djingis Khan comes back every five years, which was also the case with the hilarious Uarda spex, or at least it used to be the case. These ‘plays’ were parodies on ancient Greek theater and so all the actors are males, which is one thing that makes them so funny, grotesquely funny I guess I should say.

‘We’ were a group of five or sometimes six, Ulf and his brother, Lennart, whom I had known since I was 16. He was the boyfriend of one of my closest friends, Ragnhild, whom I had shared classes with since grade school. There was a very good friend of Ulf’s from Göteborg, Åke, who was a physics student, and who remained a close friend of mine during the years in Lund. And sometimes there was Bo, another friend from Göteborg, the son of the Göteborg ‘kex’ factory, as we used to say. He had a small car, a Fiat 500, which was very nice once in a while for a ride in the countryside, but apart from that he was a bit lackluster, really just a friend of Åke’s, who more or less took care of him.

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My love saga with Ulf ended with a bang, however. Also, I honestly doubt if the role as a soft-spoken wife and mother of several children would have suited me. I do think it was already clear to me at the time that I was never going to settle down and be a mother the way nearly all my friends did, mothers and professional women at the same time. My own youth, sorely lacking in the security young people need more than anything else, had made me feel very unsuited for the conventional role of wife and mother.

Ulf worked in Holland that summer (and learned to speak Dutch, not really difficult, he said, if you already know Swedish, German and English, which we all did). He had formed plans for our hitchhiking together through Europe at the end of the summer and the end of my stay in the pension de famille north of Vichy. I had said yes. It sounded like fun and I was all for it, with Ulf as my company and male protector. Besides, I believe I would have said yes to anything Ulf suggested. I was in love.

But one day a small Fiat stopped in front of the château at Mademoiselle des Chaux’ pension de famille at Varennes-sur-Tèche. What had happened was that I had got to know an air force officer as a Swedish WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), which I had joined after taking a summer course. I had just mindlessly followed in the footsteps of my close friends in my conservative girls’ school. Roland, the officer in question,  had a serious crush on me and he had insisted on coming to pick me up in France at the end of my stay. I had told him NO, I was going to wait for Ulf’s time to finish his job in Holland and hitchhike back to Sweden with him.

But there he was, Roland and his little Fiat. The rest is more or less melodrama, but Ulf would never forgive me. He just would not believe in my having had no part in Roland’s schemes. His pride was hurt and he had the most extraordinary fit of rage that I had ever witnessed when we met again in Lund. I told him it was none of my doing, in fact I’d done everything in my power to keep Roland from coming, and was I going to let him go back to Sweden alone, Mlle des Chaux watching me sending him away? It would have been far too embarrassing. And cruel, even if it would have been Roland’s own fault.

Roland and I didn’t speak during the whole trip back to Malmö, but the harm was done and I had lost my lover who was Ulf, not Roland.

Ulf did not forgive me until about ten years ago when he sent me a little love poem. It was a wonderful little poem that I still treasure and it came inside a book he had written and published with his own money. It was quite a good book and fortunately it was not about me.

Continued: Chapter 7 – England, Cambridge