It’s possible but I don’t think so. The oldfolk johansson died in the seventies. It was a long time before I found the way back. Nobody has ever come with me. Not even maria.

Anyway you ended up in father’s family. 232

That is so he said slurping coffee from a saucer.

We were sharing a tin of baked beans to have something to eat with the dried meat.

And you were just little.

But I remember he said. My problem is that I never forget. When I arrived I was a child who had never been in a real house. Never seen other children. I stood in the kitchen looking. Surely with wide open eyes.

Didn’t you have any brothers or sisters I asked.

Yes two older brothers but they were grownups when I was born. I was a latecomer.

He was silent for a while. Fed another log into the stove.

Your gran came to look me over. Put her hand under my chin and scrutinised me as if to check for disease. Her hands were wet from peeling tatties.

You’re an ugly bairn she said. Harelipped little miseryguts as well.

What do we want with our lad then your granddad asked from where he sat at the table scraping up the last of the collops with gravy.

You even remember what they were eating I said.

I remember especially what I didn’t eat he said. Your gran asked for my name and I told her.

That’s better. It’s a swedish name in any case she said. We’ll have to find some use for you. She asked me if I was baptised but I didn’t know what that meant. But I probably was. My real mother was said to have been deeply religious.

It was summertime. The entire family moved into the bakery where they squashed themselves into one room and a kitchen. The big house was to be cleaned for the autumn. A store room had 233been built onto the bakery, just a leanto with a plank wall. Once it might have been used as labourer’s hut or similar because it was next door to the privy. It’s been torn down by now I think. That’s where our erik and I were to sleep. He was among the youngest. Thirteen fourteen at a guess. The bedstead was homemade. A plain frame and a mattress stuffed with straw. Straws worked their way through the material and scratched you.

I know that’s what people did in the old days I said. Moved into the bakery for the summer. But this must have been in the nineteenseventies.