You know how reminders of some episode of your life sometimes pop up everywhere you turn?
The school’s logo against a wall (or is it?)
(This is not about the school itself)
Well, for me, this just happened in relation to my time at boarding school. I recently came across a very well written article quite dramatically titled “Boarding School Survivor.” Soon after that I ran into some old school-friends here in London. Then there was a documentary about boarding schools on TV…

I was packed off to a top boarding school at 13, following a really dramatic time in my life. Here is how it all came together, but please let me say ‘Warning: Do not try this at home!’ It all worked out for the best in the end, but there was plenty of hurt on the way.

Events Leading up to..

Prior to getting sent away, my mother had contacted the local Swedish social services and said that she ‘couldn’t handle’ me, that I was ‘out of control,’ and that they had to take me into care… My ‘crimes’ constituted of some minor shoplifting, not keeping mother up to date on where I went after school and wanting to decided for myself what clothes to wear…

It is not considered quite as dramatic to turn to Social Services for help in Sweden as it would perhaps be in many other countries. It happens even in the ‘best’ families.
The state school that I was yanked out of, just after starting..
Not a bad school actually..
Throughout Swedish society there is a strong belief that the state, represented by Social Services in this case, is able to help out with solving solving troublesome family situations while usually achieving the best possible outcome for all parties. I suppose my mother’s position at the time would be something like “after all the taxes we paid to them, now that we have a problem they’d jolly well better sort it out for us!”

When I realised that my mother was essentially plotting to have me taken into care, I panicked. I had heard about children being taken into care, but it never happened in our super-nice neighbourhood.

Consequently I told nobody about what was going on apart from my “unsuitable” (according to mother) best friend. She said my mother was crazy and encouraged me to run away (which luckily, I didn’t.) However suddenly at 12, going on 13, I felt like my entire future was at stake. Living at home was horrible, particularly being beaten and shouted at all the time. But a foster home seemed even worse! Everybody knew that such children usually ended up criminals…

After hearing my mother’s story, Social Services now called me in after school, alone, in order to hear my take on events. I was mortified. Just before the interview I sought out the most notorious guy in my year at school. He was known for having some experience with Social Services and I wanted his advice after making him promise to keep the details a secret.
This is where I had to go for the interview…
Joakim laughed and said that ‘Soc’ would definitely think me the victim in the situation. I was clearly a ‘nice girl’ and had decent grades to boot.

Anyway, the burden of proof was on the parents, not the child. Another thing that would work to my ‘advantage’ was that I had some fresh bruises on my arms and legs from being slapped around. Beating your children is illegal in Sweden. It’s not at all uncommon though (hence the need for the law), however Social Services take a rather dim view of it.

Well, all this was somewhat encouraging news. I had had expected ‘Soc’ was quite ready to ship me off to a foster home in the remote North of country. That was reputedly where seriously bad kids ended up. A Siberian exile if you want… Definitely not the kind of environment where somebody like me would have wanted to live at the age of 13. My mother had hinted at it - I think it would have been her preferred outcome.

In the interview I was completely honest and just told it as it was. I thought that if they caught me with a single lie, my future reliability would be undermined. Apart from the shoplifting incident, nothing I had done was really that bad.

As I was speaking, I gradually started to get the impression that the social workers were somewhat on my side.. This I had not expected at all! They revealed a few things that my mother had said, some of which they clearly thought was rather nutty. As for me, I don’t know to this date whether I was right, wrong or neither… I did not lie about my own actions but I certainly did not agree to my mother’s claims about my wickedness.
I think this is the youth facility.
There is an annex at the back.
Shortly after the interview with me, Social Services concluded that my family was dysfunctional and had some serious problems.

What exactly these problem were, was never clarly spelled out. Perhaps there is an old report on it filed away somewhere that I could get hold of now, if I insisted. Would I really want to read it though?

Whatever they were, they were serious enough for me to be immediately sent off for a short spell in a youth-facility ran in a different district. Getting there was both incredibly scary and quite a relief at the same time. I wasn’t sure if I was being rescued, punished, neither or both…

At the youth facility I learnt all I ever could have wanted to know about shoplifting from my fellow ‘inmates’. I had some offers on my virginity (which I successfully rejected…) and was evaluated by the teachers there as a top 10% achiever in school! I had never knewn… I had stopped caring about school. In the meantime Social Services were negotiating with my parents to decide my future…

One peculiar thing that they did at the youth facility was to lock away the childrens’ shoes so that we couldn’t run away! Most children kept backup shoes hidden elsewhere though, although personally I had none. The message was clear; “if you run away we will get very angry…”

The combination of my lack of shoes and a fairly pragmatic view of the situation meant I stayed put while several of my new friends ran off (and promptly ended up being reported to the Police as runaways.) I remember praying a lot when I was alone there. I did not pray because I was religious at the time. Just because it helped me to stop worrying. I knew that the stay at the youth facility was a temporary arrangement until something permanent could be worked out. The question was what that something should be.

While at the youth facility I was questioned some more about my family. I tried to keep my distance and stick to the facts without getting emotional. The staff took us on various outings; bowling (which I had never done before) visiting Pizza Hut (not the kind of place my mother would favour visiting) and Nordic skiing at a local track. This wasn’t really wasn’t such a bad place to be. On my names-day (a Swedish tradition) the staff baked a cake and celebrated the event which much enthusiasm.
Kommunist, javisst… but
also nice and well-meaning
(It was really funny how all the staff there were raving Leftists; exactly the type of people that my mother would completely disapprove of. Well, it was her doing that I was there! The men wore beards, leather waistcoats and well worn jeans -the unofficial uniform of a socialist or communist back then. The contrast to the kids in their care could not have been more pronounced.

During the compulsory music evenings they would burst out into the ‘Internationale’ and miscellaneous other socialist songs, accompanied by guitar, harmonica or the accordion. To think of the length that my parents had previously gone to in order to make certain I was not exposed to such ‘propaganda…!’ Oh well!
Very catchy tunes…
One of the staff members was East German, another Hungarian. (From this you can work out that it was still the late eighties…) Us kids thought the blatant socialism / communism was a bit silly and rather showy. However the tunes were catchy, the people idealistic and it was a very rebellious act; sort of like giving your backgroud the finger. I promptly learnt to play a few of the catchier tunes on the piano and was quite happy to participate.

The staff saw several of us as victims of our pretentious materialistic backgrounds where appearances, not real values were what mattered. Undeniably, they had a point. When my fate was finally decided they were rather sceptical. Was more of the same medicine really the cure to what ailed me? They didn’t seem to think so, but they respected the fact that I liked the idea, and wished me luck in the end. I actually learnt a lot from them.)

As I understood it afterwards, the social workers and the youth facility had come to the joint conclusion that I really wasn’t as bad as my mother claimed. It was also clear that the lack of involvement by my father disturbed them. Why didn’t he take more of an interes, they asked me? I had no response.

Here is how the whole matter was resolved: Eventually the local social workers managed to get through to my father and convince him that foster care was not necessary in my case. Boarding school would be a better solution for me, despite the huge expense associated. (They probably checked his income and figured out he could just about afford it.)
Google Maps’ view of my nieghbourhood…
My father then convinced my mother who immediately saw the win-win potential of the situation although she was very upset at the hefty expense and at the fact that I was getting off so lightly. The general niceness and the respectability of the idea were quite guaranteed to win her over though, just as everybody had expected.

For a brief period she was in favour of a (cheaper and farther away) school somewhere like Austria or Switzerland where tuition was half of what it would be in Sweden. I had a few sleepless nights over the prospect of exile to Austria. However it turned out that nobody else was in favour of that idea and she had to retract. Luckily for me there were no boarding schools in the ‘Siberian’ North of the country!

I guess it would be an awful lot easier for her to tell her friends that her daughter was a great boarding school than to have to say that she was taken into care due to being an incorrigible delinquent… (Although I later learnt that my mother had been gearing up for that by reading “Not Like other Daughters” by the mother of Nancy Spungen… )

(Later I learnt that the “official story” had was this: ICordelia was too clever for the local school and needed the ‘additional opportunities’ offered by the boarding school…) Lol, I certainly am not that clever. But top marks for the creativity with this story!

A Decision is Made

Before the school application was sent off, a social worker came to see me at the youth home, to speak about my feelings about boarding school. I too had to admit to him that it was actually the best solution, by far. “That’s settled then” said the social worker and proceeded to have very stern words with me about making an effort to fit in at boarding school, and about leaving shoplifting behind me for good, or else…

After establishing that I was academic and polite enough to cope at the country’s leading boarding school, the case was closed. Since my grades were good and my old school recommended me, the boarding school accepted me without any problems. (I hear they have become a lot more competitive today. Back then the demand for places was lower I guess. Or perhaps I got accepted because a place just became vacant. Who knows - luck was on my side though.)

I had to sit a brief exam and do a quick interview but for a well-read “nice” girl from a “good family” the exam and evaluation was a breeze.

To think how close I came to being taken into care! Only my ‘class’ background saved me. I often thought of this later on. Why should I win a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ ticket while most others don’t? Had my situation been different in any way, my next destination would have been a foster home somewhere in the dreaded North… For many years when I read about something to do with foster care I thought “That kid could have been me!”

What happened after the decision was made is a bit blurry in my mind. My next clear memory is arriving at the school. I am pretty sure I didn’t pack my suitcase myself though, because none of the clothes I would have chosen were there - just some ugly boring clothes that my mother had chosen.

During the drive out to the school my father told me that the circumstances leading up to my dispatch to boarding school were strictly family confidential and must not be discussed with anybody.

So the “Top Secret” stamp was placed on that small and contained section of my life. It never really happened… Believe it or not, we never talked about this in the family again. Ever. I never brought it up with any of my friends or any of my relatives. When it came up a few years back with my younger sister, it turned out that she had forgotten or mixed up most of the details.

Only in the twilight zone that is the capitalist-socialist Kingdom of Sweden can somebody be in care of Social Services one day and on their way to the best private school in the country the next… right? Is it still like that? Not sure, and thank goodness I will never again have to test the system.
The door to a new life…
All parties involved were now reasonably happy that an acceptable middle way had been found. Social Services saves the day again, and another local middle class family is able to keep up appearances, at least for a while longer… Case closed.

Now Fast Forward to a completely new episode in my life…

Arrival at School

My father dropped me off at my new ‘home’ a few months after the official start of the school year. There to greet me were the ‘house-mother’ (Matron) and a few girls my own age. It turned out they were in the same year as me. Some of them had already been at the school for several years. Everybody was welcoming and kind.

The girls quickly told me the basic formal and informal rules of the place. Certain types of clothing were acceptable and other types were not. You had to use the polite (and seldom-used) form of ‘You’ when addressing adults at the school. You had to observe top-notch table manners and not speak back at older girls. Sometimes you had to run errands for them and they always had first choice at everything - no squabble unless you wanted t get into serious trouble. There were prayers before and after eating and you had to stand to attention if an adult came into the room. So far so good.
My new home… (when first erected in the 1950s)
In addition to that, there were a number of fairly predictable rules concerning how and when to do your homework, meal-times, lights-out and so on.

The rules were old-fashioned and they restricted your spare time to a minimum, but they were not not draconian. In fact they were positively light-weight compared to my mother’s standards. The girls explained that there were punishments if you stepped out of line, but nothing that sounded too outrageous to me. I remember thinking “Is this it?!” All and all I was pleasantly surprised.
This picture is from my house.
But it looks like they’ve been shopping at IKEA recently!
I was allocated a bed in a room that I was to share with a girl from another part of the country. Her name was Ebba. The girl who had previously occupied the bed had recently left the school under mysterious circumstances. Nobody quite knew what those circumstances were, or they wouldn’t at first tell me. More on Ebba and Suzanne later. Ebba’s story was so bizarre that it is probably a post of it’s own…

At The Best School in the Country

This school has always been a school for the elite of the country. Despite the best effort of the Social Democratic governments, this little enclave of haute-bourgeoisie had survived. Perhaps it had too many powerful protectors.
The school’s favourite view of itself, including some of the main school buildings.
The present king of Sweden went to this school, likewise a recent prime minister and a very large percentage of the absolute (male, of course..) elite of the country. The school had held out as a boys school for as long as it was legal. When they eventually had to accept girls they were determined to keep the situation contained. Hence us girls were located at the top of a small hill, spread out in four houses built in the early 1950s. Two new houses for girls were built elsewhere on the campus as the hill got fully occupied.

The school’s yearbook read like a ‘Who-is-who’ of aristocratic, celebrity and corporate leadership surnames. Many pupils were the children of expats such as diplomats or NGO staff, corporate employees or so-called “tax-refugees” - people who had to emigrate in order not to have to tax away their fortune.
1950s aerial picture of some of the main school buildings…
I was slightly intimidated, but not much. I knew I was well-brought up, spoke with the right accent and would be able to hold my own. What did concern me though was that I seemed to be the only pupil who was “expelled” from home. Everybody seemed to be talking with fondness about their parents and their homes.

Much later I learnt that for many, just like for me, this was just a facade. If I had paid attention, I would have noticed that many always remained silent during such conversations. I was certainly not the only pupil who had been dispatched to boarding school due to a dysfunctional family situation.

In fact, as I got to know my new school friends better I learnt of vicious step-mothers, dead parents, mental illness, multicultural disasters and multiple divorce families. Nobody ever told their story from beginning to end; it was little comments that gave it away. When you live intimately with people year after year, the pieces of the puzzle eventually start falling into place despite their best efforts to prevent it. By the time you start realising what the real situation is, you don’t care about their family any more. They could be mass-murderers, evil cult-leaders or saint-like Nobel-prize winners. Your friend is your friend regardless.
The school area as it looks today from a satellite.
Some kids genuinely did have absolutely lovely families though: There was the expat dentist family in Germany; the aristocratic owners of a large country estate, the Red Cross employees in Africa, the self-made billionaire and his down-to-earth wife, the missionary couple in South America, the Arctic reindeer keeper and the diplomatic family in Moscow… These parents called regularly and sent presents to their children. They invited their children’s friends to spend holidays with them and turned up unexpectedly to take their children out for a treat. Etc, etc..! I was jealous of course, but kept up the pretense that my parents were busy… that they were travelling a lot… and that I didn’t mind….

Little by little my friends started to notice the cracks in my facade. But they were polite enough not to poke. Once, years later, a very dear friend of mine was very stoned and at a party and rambled on cryptically “Cor, honey, you know, I know your secret… I know everything… all of it… But I love you anyway, so don’t worry about it….. “ I wasn’t sure whether to ask her what she thought she knew, or whether to just leave it. She mentioned it several times though during that evening, so clearly something had come to her attention. But if she didn’t care, why should I?

Starting the New School

The next day was a normal school day. My friendly classmates made sure that I left on time with them. They accompanied me to collect the school books I would need, and buy some stationary in the school tuck-shop.
I picked up the stuff I needed, such as uniform and a school tracksuit

Such expenses were put on an account that was later settled by your parents. My father had warned me not to clock up any unnecessary expenses. I also ‘bought’ the school track suit, a regulation blazer, a grey pleated skirt, and a school scarf to be worn on special occasions.

The class was small and I discovered that it comprised of some girls from other houses as well, and a matching number of boys. The class was not academically ahead of me; not that I would have cared if they were… One of the things that surprised me was the poor standard of spoken Swedish. Normally a good command of ones mother tongue is the hallmark of the well educated… Here it appeared to be quite the opposite. The level of spoken Swedish was a good five years below what it should have been.
Nice small class, nice new faces…
After a while I realised that this was caused by the fact that many of my fellow pupils had grown up in another country. Additionally some kids came from the countryside and were jumping back and forth from local dialect to standard Swedish. My parents had always warned me of the dangers of using incorrect grammar or local vernacular, even the harmless Stockholm slang. Well, here I was at the best school in the country and the pupils could easily have been beaten in a language test by a bunch of first-generation immigrant kids from the ghetto suburbs…

It turned out the my peer group had a peculiar slang language of its own, peppered with foreign words and expressions, occasionally using the wrong preposition or genus. The most important thing seemed to be not to speak ‘perfect’ Swedish (such as that which I spoke!) and never ever use any remotely complex or extracurricular words.

One friend of mine who grew up in Egypt had partly learnt Swedish by reading her mother’s 1960s girls’ books. Occasionally Fatima would say the funniest thing - something straight out of ‘Girls Own Library’, circa 1960. “Oh golly goodness me! I do declare…..” I had to pinch my arm not to laugh out loud at her. Nobody else seemed to notice though.

I immediately vowed to keep my impressive vocabulary and perfect grammar a secret.. I reduced the standard of my spoken Swedish by several notches in order to not stand out. Oh well!
Only older girls got to sit in the sofa….
On the other hand, not being able to speak fluent English was considered very provincial. What’s more, you had to speak it with a native accent, definitely not with a Swedish accent. (Hey, ‘Muppet chef’…) Some pupils resigned and bluntly refused to speak English at all, pretending that they did not understand a word, or that they objected on principle. “We speak SWEDISH in this country, you know!”

Luckily for me, English was a strong subject of mine, so there was definitely hope for me on that front. I quickly decided that improving my English immediately was now my number one academic objective… I tried to do my homework in an area where native speakers were doing their prep; listening to how they spoke and what expressions they used, all while appearing engrossed in maths or biology. I watched subtitled British programs on television whenever there was an opportunity (I had decided that my ‘native’ accent should be British English on the grounds that I had actually spent some time there when I was younger. )

When I finally opened my mouth prepared to speak English it was surprisingly easy. One of the American girls gave me a quick look and said absent-mindedly “Oh, I didn’t realise you were English…” As far as I was concerned that comment was the equivalent of an A+ grade in English. I wasn’t very talkative, so a few correctly pronounced words and expressions seemed to do the trick. In my group of friends, Swedish was the spoken language so I was able to take my time before I got into a conversation with anybody. Gradually I started speaking more and more English. Nobody teased me, so I guess my accent was passable. Very encouraging!
House Dining Hall
The teachers at the new school were better here than in my old school (which had actually been one of the best state schools in the country). They were nicer, friendlier and more more committed. The cared about the pupils and some paid individual attention to me, something I had not experienced previously in school.

Sadly I was very suspicious towards adults though and did not let anybody get too close. I hindsight I realise that this was a terrible mistake. They genuinely wanted to help. But I was happy just to blend into the background and be an average, somewhat mediocre student. Not bad enough to need coaching and not good enough to need extra stimulation.

Occasionally our class of 15 was invited over to the house of a teacher where we’d have a nice dinner, play board games and really enjoy ourselves. For the younger pupils the school actually offered a really nice atmosphere, particularly for us girls.
It was ok to be quite childish!
The biggest contrast to my old school was that my new fellow pupils were more “childish.” I remember my complete surprise on my second day as one of my class mates took my hand and started singing an old folk-song as we walked back from school. The other girls chimed in while swinging their arms and jumping up and down at the refrain. Such behaviour in my old-school would have been considered un-cool and childish beyond belief for a thirteen year old. I thought it was nice and fun though.

Discipline at the school seemed tough on paper. I don’t think that it really was though. We lead a very institutionalised life. As long as you followed the group you were absolutely fine. It was quite easy to see that there was a rationale behind the great majority of rules. They clearly appeared to have been set up mainly with the pupils’ best interests in mind. Some of the rules were set out to sound re-assuring to parents. Fair enough.

It was the un-written and self-regulating rules that changed you into a different person though. This is partly what boarding school is all about. Little by little you turned into the kind of individual that this school took pride in producing. That is a different story though, so enough said about thatt. Most of the time I was not even tempted to break any important rules.

Holidays

All would have been well from now on if there hadn’t been any school holidays… The problem was that there was a two week holiday over Christmas, a week over Easter and close to two months in the summer. My mother had made it very clear that I was not to come home.

In addition there were also ‘long’ weekends, such as Ascension, Pentecost, All Hallows, Walpurgis/1 May and one or two more.

These long weekends were not a serious problem, just an inconvenience. Many other students were also unable to go anywhere, so the school would usually gather all those who needed to stay behind in one or two houses over the long weekend. This was so that the staff in the other houses could take that weekend off.

Sometimes the long weekends were mixed-gender and sometimes they were single-sex. But usually there were mainly older students there. Often it was often those who came from far away with little or no family in Sweden. These weekends gave me my first taste of the forbidden life of the school…
Staying at another house was not too bad.
It was exciting to stay in another house; even more so if it was in a boys’ house, with some boys there. Their dynamics were quite different to say the least. More on that some other time. Suffice to say that if you were a small boy with an attitude, who was unable to take a beating, you were definitely at the wrong school…

During these long weekends the older students usually organised “illegal” nightly parties down at the lake, or sometimes in the (illegally entered) school swimming pool or out in the woods.

Modern ‘Midnight Feasts’

The more illicit the party, the further away from the school it had to be. A few times people who had been openly expelled (i.e. practically always a boy) turned up to meet his old friends for an illicit party. This would usually happen while he was on holiday from his new, very progressive and open-minded school, or wherever he ended up. At any rate, fraternising with somebody who had been expelled was not allowed. There were typically about 2-3 ‘official’ expulsions per year and a maybe a few more inofficial ones..
Naked! At school? You’re expelled!
The type of thing that could get you expelled was getting caught having sex or being naked in bed with another person; anything to do with drugs at the first offence; repeated alcohol offences (’three strikes and you’re out’); Shoplifting in the village; being pregnant; falling seriously behind academically and failing to do anything about it.

The school also did not tolerate pupils who; developed serious anorexia; attempted suicide; ran away; were victims of particularly bad bullying or developed a really bad/slutty reputation… It is fairly obvious that the school got rid of such pupils for the reason that they were potentially a risk to it’s reputation. Media would have jumped at a story relating to any of those problems. The headline practically writes itself. “[fill in the scandal]…. at the King’s old School!” The only thing that the school feared more than bad PR was that a pupil would die or go missing while in their care. Once in the 1950s, a house burnt down, killing six pupils.

A few times the illicit parties took place in the house of a day-student whose parents were away. Younger students such as myself at the time, were invited along as a mascot or a joke.

Sneaking out through the window was absolutely enthralling. Sneaking out of the school area was exciting too, particularly as you could get caught at any time. One of the teachers kept his dog outside. The dog would bark if he noticed something untowards.
Getting out was not always easy….
Wandering the village and the outlying areas at night-time was a real adrenaline kick. Every time a car drove past we’d hide behind a bush or jump in a ditch. Sometimes we’d see a lone wanderer out walking his dog or just out for a midnight stroll. The village was small and it was not at all unlikely that the lone wanderer could be a teacher. We even wore dark clothes for camouflage reasons!

Occasionally the school staff did actually patrol the grounds at night. Quite a few pupils got caught while drunk and careless. Most people got away with it though. The problem that the teachers had was that they had to get close enough to see the face of those that they ‘caught’. What tended to happen was that the pupil recognized the profile of a staff member in the distance and legged it back to his house before the teacher could quite see who it was.

Sometimes the teacher would call the house and wake up the matron saying ‘I think I saw such-and-such down in the village’. But when the matron came to check, the person would be ’sound asleep’ in their bed (after having broken a speed record running back from the village). Unless the teacher was very confident nothing would come of it. I guess things have changed since the adoption of cell phones though!

If somebody was caught out after lights-out there was always a serious punishment. However usually it did not include the dreaded letter home, suspension or expulsion - at least not the first time you got caught. I guess the school wasn’t particularly keen to admit to parents that they were unable to prevent the pupils from sneaking out, or even suggest to parents that such a thing could happen in the first place… The punishment had to be bad though, enough to deter others and make a lasting impression on the offender. Because what if something actually happened to somebody who was out illegally? Then what would they tell the parents? It really wasn’t that hard to see the school’s perspective. Not that this put anybody off.
This uninhabited village a couple of
miles away was the site of some really wild parties.
The nightly parties were nothing special; mainly just about getting drunk or occasionally stoned thanks to the American contingent at the school which had introduced hashish and pot to the rest of us. I had never been much for getting drunk so I enjoyed myself the best I could without getting smashed out of my head.

We’d normally sneak back into school by 5 - 5:30 am. The absolute cut-off was 6:00 since the maids started working at that time. There was no predicting where in the building they’d be working. They were liable to close and lock any open windows or side-doors that they came across, thus preventing us from sneaking back in time for wake-up call at 6:40am. Some of the maids would turn you in to the matron or house master. Others would turn a blind eye. After all, they were only responsible for cooking and cleaning.

Several times I was literally under the duvet fully dressed, panting like a maniac from the running when matron came in with a flashlight to check that my room-mate and I were in our beds… Everybody helped everybody else out to prevent you getting caught. Sometimes my room-mate and I would be innocent but aware that somebody else must be trying to make it back. Some people occupied rooms by a fire escape, near a tree branch or by or a balcony with a convenient way of climbing down. Such people were expected to act as gate-keepers, helping others to get in or out when needed.

In the event of a nightly surprise visit by Matron we’d always try to keep her in the room for as long as possible while chatting and fussing about something unrelated. Alternatively we’d tell her that we definitely heard noises coming from the basement, knowing fully well that somebody was hanging half-way out the window in the room next door…
The best house; used to be ivy-covered
but this was a ‘health and safety’ risk…
If matron mentioned in the morning that she’d heard funny noises or seen figures moving outside during the night, we’d always blame it on the village boys, looking very offended at the cheek of them! We’d usually knew exactly who it really had been though (often somebody’s boyfriend).

There once was a rather funny incident when a boy had jumped out from my best friend’s window just after some new snow had fallen. His foot-prints were in the new snow and gave the story away completely. The tracks could probably have been followed back to a suitable window in his own house. It’s a mystery that he failed to realise this! A maid noticed it when she arrived for work and commented to my friend ‘You’d better hope that it snows some more, pretty quickly, hadn’t you?’
The backside…
For a boy to get caught in a girls house at night would have been an unspeakable scandal. As a result, the boys encouraged us to come visit them, instead of the other way around. Their houses were larger, slightly labyrinth-like and with much better insulation between the floors. There were elaborate warning systems in place, something that the girls’ houses lacked. (A small boy would be on the lookout and trigger the warning signal via a rather funky system of strings and bells.) The warning system, when it worked) gave you plenty of time to hide or get out before the housemaster got anywhere near. Personally I rarely visisted the boys’ houses during the night; I did not have a boyfriend during my time at the school.

Longer Holidays

The longer holidays were a different matter, since the school would close down completely. You HAD to leave. I went all over the place. Occasionally to my cousins, and for a year I stayed with a family friend in Spain (I guess that was a safe enough distance from my mother).

Also to various camps such as wilderness survival and Lutheran confirmation. Once when there was a crisis. Nobody could take me and my mother turned again to social services who sent me off to stay with a crazy old widow who ocassionally took in foster children. That was a low point in my school career. A few times I participated in the holiday school trip to Are, a ski-resort in the north of the country.

The holiday situation was now my dirty secret. At first I told nobody. Who’d want to tell their family-loving friends that they are complete pariah to their parents and not allowed home? I felt I had no choice but to lie about what I did in the holidays. This was really awful. I remember inventing the stories, trying to make them close to reality but without revealing the sad truth of the matter. Lies are awful though; practically impossible to remember, since they never actually happened.

Dad Moves Abroad

My parents got divorced when I was 16 and had three years left at school (you stay in school longer in Sweden that the Anglo-saxon countries). My father moved abroad, to Asia, and things looked brighter from the ‘horrid holiday’ perspective at least.

I was now officially an ‘expat child’ which meant that my reasons for being at boarding school no longer had to be hidden. If somebody asked about it I simply said “My parents are divorced and my father lives abroad.” My subsequent trips to various East Asian capitals underlined the fact. I even ran into school friends once in Singapore and felt that my days of being mysterious may very well be over.

After the divorce my father suddenly decided I was not such a bad person after all, and I was allowed to come visit. He still slapped me around a few times, but somehow I was better equipped to handle it. I got to see some very interesting parts of the world. In the meantime my mother had got very sick but that’s a different story.

I had also developed a good relationship with my father’s much younger brother and his new wife. They let me stay with them in Central Stockholm for some of the shorter holidays and I was grateful beyond belief. For the first time in several years I was able to go somewhere where I had my own little room, where I could play the piano or listen to my own music, where I could pick up what I wanted from the fridge and where they treated me fairly nicely.

I thought they were insanely cool and I practically hero-worshipped my new aunt who was a psychologist and the product of a rather messy upbringing herself. In her example I saw a role model of somebody who survived ‘crazy-family-street’ and turned out great. I kept wondering what their alterior motive for taking me in could have been. But I couldn’t come up with anything. Maybe they genuinely just wanted to be nice. Back then it was hard for me to imagine.

The Last Three Years at School

After close to three years at my original House, the school decided that this house was to be closed down due to some factors which I never quite understood. The inhabitants of the house were to be scattered among the remaining five girls’ houses. We had some say about where we went, although no promises could be made…
The junior house was closing down!
Here things took a surprising turn. At the exact day of making the request about which house to join, I had a big row with a girl who already lived in the house that I had been planning to change to.

As a result of the fight I hanged my mind about joining that house and convinced my then room-mate to go with me to a different house that none of my other friends were going to. She was up for it. This house had a bit of history and was known as an academic and sporty house with good-looking girls. (But I would say that, wouldn’t I!)

At the new house the following autumn a large group of new girls had started. This was the start of what would be described as High School in the US, I think. There were three years left of school. I fell in with one of the new popular party crowds that had formed through the influx of new blood. Quite surprising really since I am neither naturally popular, nor a party girl! But being part of this group suited me well. I am naturally quite introverted and was insecure about myself. As part of this group I started to feel quite confident.
In hindsight, I should have spent some more time here!
My^grades weren’t that great but on the other hand the school was allround top-notch academically and, (as I found out at university), my education was a lot better than that of pupils from other schools with much higher grades. (The grades were relative to your school, not to any national exams, thanks to the rather socialist educational system in Sweden at the time.)

The rest of school was a breeze. I played basketball and football a lot, and partied in Stockholm during the long weekends. My friends and I made a sport of getting into the coolest and most trendy places in town. My ‘aunt and uncle’ were young enough not to be particularly shocked. As long as there were no drugs, sex or excessive drinking involved, they didn’t care much what I did.
Entrance to Tant Brun’s local cafe
I spent SO much time there during my last years
By the time I was eighteen I was well on top of Stockholm’s social scene and it was actually beginning to bore me. Me and my friends would slide past the security staff at some of the coolest places in town. Lord know how we managed that with no cash worth mentioning and dressed in borrowed fashion..

At the back of my head was the knowledge that I absolutely could not risk/afford being expelled. As a result I was very cautious about the naughty things that I did whereas some others took quite outrageous risks.
Competition in the Village! Gourmet cafe Blå opened but
banned smoking to get rid of the bored school pupils…
The worst thing that I ever got caught for was having a bottle of wine in my possession during the last term of my last year. The experience of getting caught coined a new phrase; “Lift up your skirt, immediately!” (That was what matron shouted out when she realised I had stashed the wine bottle under my hippie skirt!)

Since I had been fairly immaculately behaved (as far as the Principal knew…) during my school career to that point, I got away very lightly. No suspension or letter home, just three weeks grounded and doing the washing up after tea if I remember correctly. I missed out on some social events but that was all.

The Sad Memories

One of the sad moments from my time at school was when I was teased by my first room-mate, Ebba. She really had it in for me for some reason. Her previous room-mate (this was a very shameful secret of the school) had attempted suicide by taking a whole bottle of caffeine pills and Aspirin…
Feeling lonely and teased…
She got hospitalised for a month at a psychiatric ward but apparently Ebba had hoped that she’d come back. They school would not, of course, take back a suicidal pupil. My arrival sealed this fact and Ebba was furious about it. She kept referring to “Suzanne’s bed”, “Suzanne’s closet” etc long after all of Suzanne’s things had been removed.

One time she even used some duct tape on the linoleum floor to draw a “lborder” in the room, which she said I was not allowed to cross. However the mirror and the wash-basin was on “her” side of the room and we had an angry argument about it. Another time she convinced another girl to tease me for “Albino” since my skin is very white. Still to this day I cringe when I hear that word.

Luckily Ebba was decent enough not to tease me about my real handicap which is something different, which she knew about. She hinted at it a few times, but never came straight out about it. If she had done that, I think I might have flipped and started my own campaign against her. But as it was, I managed to remain dignified and cool. At the end of the year Ebba had got herself into all manner of trouble and was underperforming at school. Her parents were told that she could not come back in the autumn. A huge relief for me.
The ubiquitous school bag….
Look out for it when flying into Stockholm…
Another memory relates to all the long and lonely trips back to school after a holiday. These memories are symbolised by the school canvas bag that I was always carrying.

Returning to school felt like returning to prison sometimes. After I had experienced the love and care of my aunts and uncles, the emotianally sterile environment of school was off-putting and quite gut-wrenching. But I was not really their daughter and I did not belong with them permanently. I had to force myself to get back to school and put on a brave face.

There was a hard-to-define melancholy attached to journey back from school after I had discovered the joys of staying with my aunt and uncle. Previously I hadn’t cared. The melancholy went away after a few days at at school though. Boarding school has that effect on you; it numbs you and you learn to keep your feelings hidden away far from public sight.

Apparently this is something that a lot of people who went to boarding school remember; the mental change from ‘home’ to ’school’ personality.

Second Year and Naughty Helene..

In my second year I made friends with a girl called Helene. She also came from a rather dysfunctional home. She was a rather naughty girl in that she was prepared to be quite horrible towards others. I never liked that side of her, but she was also very clever and funny, something I really did like.
Main street in the Village….
Helene and I were on a vendetta against the “jolly-happy” families of the local village. We convinced ourselves that they were the pinnacle of hippocracy and pretentiousness. Everything about them was phoney… We particularly disliked the Christian contingent which was rather large in this village.

Using just a dash of amateur psychology it is not difficult to work out where our dislike came from; unacknowledged jealousy. Our rsasons for disliking these good people were mainly that they had something that we badly wanted but wouldn’t admit to wanting, i.e; Comfort, faith, family, stability.
Beaming village family….

When you walked past their picturesque houses you’d smell freshly baked bread, a meal on the stove or a barbecue in the garden. When we saw them in the village there would be a carings and considerate interaction between the family members…Helene and I had “turned off” our emotions when it came to family life and did not wish to be reminded.

One time we sat for an hour in a pine tree, hidden by the branches, throwing pebbles and cones at the families out on their Sunday stroll by the lake! We thought it was hilarious when we hit them but they couldn’t see who did it.

I also remember illegal night-sessions with Helene reading books about psychology that she took from her mother’s library. (The mother was a psychotherapist.) The books were about Jung, Freud, techniques for hypnosis and so on. Classical works for psychology students perhaps, but probably not suitable for 14-year-old ‘problem children’ such as ourselves.

We read about people who were hypnotised and revealed things from “previous lives” or just their childhoods. We read about the symbolism of Jung and his work. We read Freud and his sexualisation of everything that moved. I suspect Helene’s mother was also into some kind of old-religion, paganism or Wicca because she also had books about that too.

One time we were upset about the housemaster who had unfairly given us a hard time about something. (In addition he walked in on me when I was naked despite my hollering “Don’t come in!” Instead of leaving immediately and apologising, he took a long good look and said “Don’t you think I have seen naked girls before?”) Helene was outraged, I felt humiliated and she suggested that we perform black magic against him, which we did, with a rather scary outcome. (That’s a different story, but interesting…)
Oops, hide under the bed!
One time during revision period, the director of the girls’ boarding houses came to our house, apparently to have an important conversation with Helene about something. This was not an everyday occurrence at all. The fact that she came in person meant that whatever it was was completely out of the ordinary. The minute we heard steps and familar adult voices in the corridor, I dived in under Helene’s bed to hide and save myself a punishment. I could see the feet of the two women and hear them tell Helene’s room-mate to go study in the libary. The matron then left and a very serious conversation commenced. As I laid very still under the bed, trying not to move or sneeze I learnt that Helene’s story was only marginally better than mine…

The boarding director had come to tell Helene that she would not be allowed home for a while… In the polite, middle-class way of speaking she never quite spelled out what the problem was just alluding to ‘episodes’ here and there…

Listening to the conversation, it was clear that there was a big problem though and they both knew what it was. Something to do with Helene’s mother, the way she lived her life and the relationship between the two of them. After the director left, Helene started crying and I leapt out from under the bed. Helene looked shocked. She had apparently forgotten that I was hiding there and was now really upset that I had heard all the messy details of her family life. I assured her that nothing important had really had been said, and I promised not to tell any of what I did hear. Frankly I had enough with my own secrets.

Some Nice Boarding School Memories;

• Coffee, snacks, gossip and endless fags at ‘Tant Brun’ (Madam Brown’s) in the village. This cafe is located in a ramshackle wooden building from the 1600s.

Landmark cafe; Tant Brun’s….

• My solitary moments of escape to The Foundation, next door from the school. It had an impressive religious and secular library, a pretty and rarely visited rose garden with a fountain and many more rather fascinating features.
• Discovering that one of the church ruins in the village had a pre-recorded track of medieval chanting which worked night-time as well as daytime.

One of the local church ruins….

• We’d drag some unsuspecting new girl there in the middle of the night, speak vaguely of medieval ghosts, leave her alone in the ruin and trigger the recording. The recording started off with the sound of medieval bells and spooky chanting for about 30-60 seconds before they voice of the tour-guide started. (If you didn’t know about the hidden loudspeakers and it was the middle of the night with nobody around, the experience was pretty scary!) By the time the guide’s voice took over, the girl would have convinced herself that she was about to be abducted by the ghosts of the medieval monks…. The rest of us would rush back keen to start making fun of her!

Stiftelsens rosenträdgård….

• Long walks in the countryside on lonely weekends. Finding chanterelles in the forest
• Becoming famous for my brownie recipe which is used to this very day at my old house! The recipe was really my aunt’s.
• Learning the delights during my last year of having breakfast and reading the Sunday paper at the same time.
• Pleasant tasty dinners with village families and teachers.
• Rowing, skating and playing by the lake.
• Nice traditions in the village such as the Christmas fair, and the competition for guessing the breakup of the ice.
• Swimming in the school swimming pool with my friends.
• The two initiation rites that I went through; I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you aftewards, haha…. One of them really was particularly good and it will be a fond memory for the rest of my life.

Was my time at boarding school nice? Yes, I have to say that it was.. I don’t regret the experience. Sometimes I dream about that time, with my current friends and dilemmas being placed and acted out in the familiar school environment with it’s rules and predictability. It was a time of stability and security (apart from the holidays). Things got worse and worse in my family-home but due to the fact that I was not allowed home I was spared. This too was a good thing.

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I don’t know if the “Little Mermaid” sculpture in the harbour of Copenhagen is well known outside Scandinavia?
. Lille Havsfrue on a normal day
Within Scandinavia this cool and pretty sculpture is a well-known landmark though. Everybody knows of her and she is a bit of a national symbol of Denmark. I have seen her in the distance, but never up front. You can’t help but like her! In Danish she is called “Lille Havsfrue”.

Apparently a prank was played on the Little Mermaid the other day, as she was dressed up in full moslem female dress. Well, she isn’t exactly the most modest girl, posing naked in the harbour for almost a hundred years!

The prank was played by unknown person(s) who wanted to draw attention to Turkey’s potential entry into the EU. He put a sign saying “70 million Turks in the EU?”

Turkey has been wanting in (to the EU) for at least 20 years and now finds itself overtaken by countries like Romania (known for corruption and poverty since the fall of communism there) and Bulgaria.
. Lille Havsfrue as a modest muslima…
Another interesting question is, will Moslem extremists get upset with Denmark again, like they did about the Mohammed cartoons… Or will they let this one pass?

TURKEY’S EU QUEST

As I understand it, the main reasons sited for the delay / refusal in accepting Turkey into the EU are:

• The fact that the great majority of Turkey’s land-mass is not in fact located in Europe at all, but in Asia/Middle East.
• The widespread perception that Turkey is oppressing it’s Kurdish minority, sometimes persecuting and torturing Kurds.
• The fact that Turkey is almost completely moslem and additionally does not “share the European heritage” that the rest of the EU countries do.
• The EU would find itself a neighbour of Iran, Iraq and Syria which all border Turkey…
• The Cyprus situation. Because of it, Greece does not like Turkey at all and Greece is already a member state with full voting powers..r

Turkeys population is approx. 70 million which would make it the second largest (and most influential) country in the EU after Germany. Germany has, for historical reasons, been very careful not to abuse this situation, being the mild and gentle giant of the EU after its national re-unification. It is far from certain that Turkey would behave in the same way; in fact most evidence would point to the opposite.
Future Europeans in the EU… or Middle Eastern Turks?
Btw, where are the girlies?
Personally I agree with this. I do not feel that Turkey belongs in the EU right now. The recent expansion of the EU has happened very fast. The idea with Eastern Europe has been that it is better that certain new member states are taken in before they are quite ready financially and politically (i.e. decent state finances and solid western-style democracy), as the alternative is even worse.

The alternative would have been for their economies and finances to develop much slower, in the shadows of the Western European countries. Being second-tier economies, they’d remain corrupt and with high criminality. Sooner or later they would inevitably join the EU anyway, as they undisputably European. The days of waiting in the outskirts are now over as Poles and Estonians members on almost equal standing to France, Germany and the UK. And enthusiastic members they are too, at least the Poles!

I suppose it could be said that it is hippocrisy to let some of the new Eastern member states in, but not Turkey. After all, the largest Turkish city, Istanbul is located in Europe. And Turkey had wanted membership in the EU ‘club’ ong before even the fall of the iron curtain! So is it just Islamophobia and European cultural snobbery that is keeping Turkey out?
The tiny North West peninsula where Istanbul is, is in Europe.
Capital Ankara is in Asia.
I am not sure that I know the answer to that! I am not categorically against Turkish membership but I really don’t want it right now. I do not feel as if I share a common culture and heritage with the Turks, and the stories that you hear from there underlines this. Bride-snatching, honour-killings, torturing of political prisoners and the bizarre relationship between the state and its main religion, Islam, makes me feel as if Turkey does not (yet) belong in the EU.

Whereas I feel that I could live in any other member-state if there was a good reason to do so, I can’t imagine living in Turkey. Certainly not as a single woman at any rate. (In all honesty that goes for Romania and Bulgaria too right now).

There have been some pretty bad clashes of culture between Turkish economical migrants and local populations in Germany and Scandinavia. Whether integration has worked or not is highly debatable. Migration of Italians and Greek to Northern Europe has not been a problem though. This too shows that the cultural differences are pretty big, even between Turkey and Greece, one if its neighbours.

In a longer perspective, Turkey will probably become a formidable country-bridge between East and West again. Just imagine how things would change for Turkey if the Middle East became democratic and peaceful. Turkey is large enough to play an independent role both politically and geograpically… It occupies some of the strategically most important real estate on the planet. But can Turkey ever become an integrated part of the European Union and a potential future “United States of Europe”?

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Sorry about the lack of updates for a week or so. I was tired and busy with work. Also; I realised that I had spent too much time on the blog, been a bit asocial and just overdone it a bit.

Blog posts should come naturarlly, not forced for the purpose of blogging (which I felt as if I had been doing). At least for a personal blog this should be the case. Perhaps if I was blogging commercially things would be different.

Anyway, now I feel on top of things again and more posts are forthcoming!

After having watched three episodes of “Jericho” a doomsday/survivalist soap, the “what if” questions have popped into my head and won’t go away.
Nuclear attack on London…
Do you ever think about all of civilisation just breaking down? If a war, terrorist attacks or some natural or man-made disaster just destroys all of society as we know it… ?

How would people react? What would it be like to live without any mod-cons.. ? People who are dependant on medicines such as insuline, asthma inhalers etc would have it tough and may not even survive.

You’d be quite pleased if you’d been keeping tinned food, powdered milk and such things at home. Personally I’d be in dire straits as I do not keep such things at all

Growing up during the Cold War, we did thing about these things once in a while. I remember a talk at my school about nuclear war. Somebody from ther Army said that there was enough nuclear weapons to blow the entire planet up 18 times over.

There were also descriptions of false alerts that almost triggered nuclear responses. Admittedly, Sweden would not have been at any immediate risk though.. It probably would have been a fairly safe place to be, bearing in mind how sparsely populated it is, particularly in the North of the country. I imagine people in Washington, New York and Moscow would have thought about nuclear hits on their cities from time to time.
A survivalist’s kit
But we knew that there was a good reason there was conscription. That did not take place solely to disrupt the lives of young men even though it certainly did. There was a threat and that’s why conscription was necessary.

The threat did not keep me awake at night, but in the mid-eighties (when I was too young to have a perspective on it) people got really spooked by the mysterious Soviet submarine infringements on Swedish waters. People started wondering what the USSR was planning. There were stories of mysterious frog-men being spotted on the shores of islands near some of Sweden’s Baltic Sea navy posts. I think that happened just before Perestroika started.

A book by Gudrun Pausewang that I read when I was about 12 really scared me; it was about a group of German children who survived a nuclear war in Europe. The book was gruesome enough to make you a pacifist for life!

Now we are scared of terrorist attacks instead. Here in London it is a fact of life. I used to work at Piccadilly Circus in Central London. The tube station there is probably pretty high on a terrrorists hit list. Passing there at rush hour, this did enter my mind from time to time. After the 7/7 attacks you saw a lot of policemen around in the underground, but all the extra security appears to have subsided now. There is no noticeable security at Piccadilly Circus or Bank at all, other than CCTV.
They say it’s not a question of if…. but when…
People are fairly seasoned to false bomb-alerts and tend to get irritable and frustrated rather than scared.

Now I commute via Waterloo Station, another potential target. I get off the tube at Bank - a good spot to hit if you have a problem with Western capitalism. With the crowded conditions there, there’d be a veritable mayhem if somebody hit at rush hour. Liverpool Street which I sometimes travel to is the same. All it takes is a few guys with a grudge or a fanatical conviction doing some meticulous planning and they could kill an awful lot of people. Particularly if they are prepared to die themselves. For that, I genuinely don’t believe the underground system can be protected.

It is sickening to think that people who actually grew up in England can be prepared to kill there own countrymen! Yet we read of serious plots that were stopped by Scotland Yard every 2-4 months. Media keeps repeating “It is not a question of if, but when”. But we can’t think of that, or we’d all leave London right away. We can just hope that we won’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suddenly there seem to be clever men all around me. On Friday I was at a telecommunications course. It was to do with the details of how various digital networks are put together. I was able to follow it up until about lunch time. In the afternoon it got really complicated. In order to work something like that out, you probably need about twice my IQ…:-)

Several of my colleagues seemed to be able to follow the lecture - I wasn’t to be honest, but don’t tell my boss!

I also have some incredibly sharp guys working on my project. They always ‘get’ things the first time they hear them, whereas I have to read and re-read before I finally understand how something technical works. Luckily I am the project manager which means that I can usually get away with not understanding the finer details.

Recently happened to stumble across a few Swedish websites that are run by some conservative guys in their early twenties. I am so impressed by how well read and eloquent they are, being able to verbally crush their opponents using their education, wit and intellect. Impressive! Brains is a real turn on for me. It is a real turn-off when you know you are tons smarter than some guy.

I am not stupid, but I am also not particularly clever… I have lots of other talents though, and I am not sure it would really make me happier if I was smarter.. However occasionally I think it would be fun to be an intellectual or scientific power-brain! Imagine being miles ahead of everybody else, constantly waiting for them to understand what you are talking about!

I couldn’t go running today after all. In my current state I actually can’t leave the house. I’d have an embarrassing accident within 15-30 minutes. Besides, my head feels light and spinning. Lord knows how much blood I am losing, but it is at least a pint since this morning. I have been losing blood at this rate since yesterday, and there are a few days to go until it’s over.

Apart from the practicalities - well let’s not go there - the whole thing is very depressing and upsetting. People reading this probably find it gross, but it is the foremost thing on my mind right now and I simply have to mention it. Basically, I am not able to function in any way normally for about four days a month. Today is one of them. Another four or five days are a challenge, but bearable.

This period should have been better - it’s been long enough since the fibroid surgery. Yet, it has actually got worse. Where is this going to end? Am I going to simply bleed to death? Of course, I know that won’t happen, but in my current state I feel as if it is a possibility.

What am I going to do if I don’t get better? I can’t take 6 weeks off and have a myomectomy! That’s not even a very good solution anyway.

Tomorrow I am going to have to go to work and pretend that everything is fine. It’s a REALLY difficult tricky to pull off, since I will be weak and will have to visit the powder room every 30 minutes.

I feel really wretched about the whole thing. I just feel like crying.

I don’t want to eat meat, but I’d better have a steak or something like that, together with spinach and more of the iron-fortified energy drink. Ugh.

I have downloaded an America drama called Jericho (cool!) and am watching it while feeling pretty sorry for myself.