The Peugeot shot from the quayside like a lion from its cage, as if smelling raw meat on the road ahead, and took me through the town on a well-scaped scenic highway. On the short ferry crossing between Nyborg and Korsør the deck entertainment system played Paul Robeson records, while over a coffee and pastry I checked the route — idly, for I needn’t have done — given by the AA. Petrol pumps, places with hotels, and interesting cultural sites were indicated, though I also had Baedeker’s more or less up-to-date Touring Guide to Scandinavia in the glove box for more detailed information.
At Elsinore by six o’clock, I had crossed Denmark in five hours, but what was the hurry? Don’t bother to tell me, I told myself. There was ample time to do the thousand miles to Leningrad, and meet George Andjaparidze.
The route had been familiar from two years before, when with Ruth and David we had gone through Elsinore on our way to Koli in Karelian Finland. At Hamlet Town we had strolled by the castle shore hoping to find the swan moat where Ophelia perished.
Rain came for a while in Sweden, and every sensible motorist showed headlights. I followed their example. The forest to either side, called skog and pronounced ‘shoe’, was dense and dark. Last time we stopped for a picnic, only to flee from meat-eating flies as big as overripe blackberries, and their fighter escorts of virulent mosquitoes.
By dusk, which would last nearly all night, I staggered mile-drunk into a small hotel at Lagan, glad to find a room. Walking the street before an evening meal I noted the Swedish fondness for flagpoles, each garden flying a proud banner of blue and yellow. Perhaps a national day was coming up, or the poles were thought of as totems or symbolic trees, seasoned to death and stripped of bark and branches, so many billion matches lost to the world. The first Swedish word I learned was tändsticka, the matches to buy in Malaya because all local boxes fell to pieces as soon as you picked them up.
The only other people in the restaurant were a man and a little girl supping at the next table. No word was spoken by either. The girl, ten or eleven years old, had long slightly curled dark hair, and lived in her own silence, yet dominated it by the coolness of her expression. The father — or uncle, or guardian, it was hard to say — wore an open-necked shirt and unpressed jacket, and needed a shave, though was clean. The waitress joked with him, for the child’s sake I thought, but he continued scooping at his soup as if no one else was in the room, unaware of her attractive milkmaid stance. She went away, but tried again to get some spark from him during cheerful deliveries of further courses.
It was hard to imagine the girl was his daughter, with her formed and sensitive features, where his were nondescript in the extreme. His grey-blue eyes looked vacantly around for a moment, then saw nothing but his place and bottle of beer, the spirit behind his fragmented face unwilling to assert itself beyond indicating that he was either overwhelmed with unhappiness or simple fatigue. Perhaps he was divorced, and this was the only time of the week when the girl, being his daughter after all, could be taken out.
I finished my meal, and lit a stubby Danish cigar. He turned as the match caught fire. The one I offered was accepted with a smile, and he lit it with exaggerated gestures: ‘Churchill!’ he cried, blowing out enough smoke to conceal the girl’s eyes. ‘English?’
I admitted it, so he held the cigar as high over the table as his arm could reach. ‘Bomb!’ and brought it down at a tangent, fumes trailing from the end. ‘Berlin!’ he added, treating his plate to the same amount of drifting coverage. When the waitress cleared our places she was rapturous at seeing him drawn at last from his presumed fit of misery.
Wednesday, 14 June
The weather was good, so at two o’clock I snacked by the roadside, set my radio on the bonnet, and played out the aerial to get news loud and clear from London. My weakness for wireless sets of good looks and performance had cost over a hundred pounds in Imhoff’s on Oxford Street, for I didn’t care to be cut off in Russia or the Balkans with only the Daily Worker as my bedside informant. Not that I listened while driving, preferring as much silence as possible. I never find engine noise unpleasant, however, having spent much of my youth in the noise of a factory, and since been little-boyishly fascinated by the machinery of aeroplanes, ships, trains (and cars) or the insides of shortwave radios.
I was going through Sweden as speedily as was safe, turning out miles like nuts and bolts on a capstan lathe during a factory’s bull week before Christmas, yet thinking to come back one day and see the country as properly as it deserved, which I always tell myself while travelling. After 400 kilometres I broke through to the Baltic, and reached Trosa by three o’clock, booking into the same hotel as two years ago and by coincidence being given the room David had slept in.
Trosa was a quiet place off the main road, a collection of neat wooden houses mostly closed and perhaps waiting for the celebrations of Midsummer’s Eve. They backed on to the canal, with a car or sailing dinghy (or both) nearby, and pyramids of logs for winter weekends. I could only hope the pyromaniacs in Sweden were under strict surveillance.
The coastline was indistinct, impossible to tell where land ended because of so many small islands in the way, but high-chested swans floated on their birthright of water, savouring the soft Baltic rain starting to fall.
Paul Robeson’s sonorous and melancholy voice mellowing out ‘Old Man River’ from the hotel speaker suggested that such entertainment had followed me from Denmark, though I supposed I might hear him again in Russia. The world outside seemed a bigger and more mysterious place during rain, and Robeson’s familiar songs brought back childhood, and made me wonder why I was in a hotel hundreds of miles from where I lived. It generally took three full days to get used to being on the road.
I refused to question why I was on earth. I’d never got into the habit, having realised how pointless it was. Let rain fall and gloom gather. I was going to where I would look for what could not be found, before settling for the enjoyment of travelling for its own sake. Paul Robeson sang as an exile who could never go home again, a man whose home is wherever he happens to be.
I stayed at my late meal till the dining room was nearly empty. The waitress all along had given me intense appraisals, even when serving at other tables, as if half recognising me from somewhere, and wanting to talk and find out more. She was thirty or so, wore slacks and an army style jacket over a white shirt. Short fair hair framed a weary prematurely lined face, as if she’d had a long day, or between lunch and dinner had suffered a fraught and exhausting time with her lover. Certainly her grey eyes shone with curiosity as she stood by my table for payment. Her quick smile showed her as fundamentally shy, as if knowing that should we not talk now we never would, and so lose each other for ever. But I was exhausted after so much time at the wheel, and we said not a word — another photograph into the memory box.
Thursday, 15 June
After a bout of heavy rain the sun came out. I stopped in a village to telegraph my publisher in Finland, to say I’d be calling on him the following morning.
I lost my way in the intricate (for me) approaches to Stockholm, though on the former trip there had been no problem. The previous night I’d looked hard at the town plan to check the route but, being exhilarated, I drove too fast and took wrong turnings. In the northern suburbs I got out and walked to a crossroads, read the street signs, and fixed my position. The white ship to Finland was waiting at the landing stage.