Before Astrid Lindgren became the JK Rowling of her day – her red-haired, freckled and fearless Pippi Longstocking adored by children the world over – she was a 32-year-old secretary turned wife and mother going about her life in Stockholm when war broke out. Five years later she would win second place in a competition for a children’s book organised by the publisher Rabén & Sjögren, followed a year later, in 1945, by first prize in the same contest for Pippi Longstocking’s first public appearance.
For now, though, Lindgren was occupied with a very different kind of writing: the diary she began with the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, and continued for the duration of the conflict, now translated into English (elegantly so, by Sarah Death) for the first time.
A Swedish Mrs Miniver – Lindgren receives Jan Struther’s book as a Mother’s Day present in 1941, and the year after she mentions that the “delightful” film is showing in Stockholm: “excellent propaganda for the Allies. It would do the Germans good to see it” – Lindgren recounts the commotions of the grand theatres of war alongside the domestic dramas playing out in her life. By and large, the former preoccupies her attention.
She gleans her information from a variety of written sources: daily newspapers (her original diary was full of pasted-in press cuttings), the news of which she reports fastidiously, demonstrating a keen understanding of the complex global political machinations at play; and the private post sent to, and coming from, other countries. She worked as a censor at the postal control division, describing it before she starts as “secret ‘defence work’”, but by the time it finishes in 1945, “my ‘sordid job’”.
Rare personal distractions appear in the form of her daughter Karin’s persistent ill health – it was she for whom Pippi was invented, to entertain the 10-year old while bedridden with measles – and a crisis in Lindgren’s marriage in the summer of 1944: “Blood is spilt, people are maimed, misery and despair are everywhere. And I simply don’t care. I’m only interested in my own problems […] a landslide has engulfed my existence and left me alone and shivering.”
My more prurient side longed for additional similarly intimate titbits, but if Lindgren’s diary tells us anything, it’s how all-encompassing the war was, how deeply it occupied everyone’s hearts and minds, even in neutral Sweden, “the Shangri-La where you can still get food, cakes and chocolate”, where bombs don’t fall and the streets don’t ring with the sound of marching Nazi jackboots.
Lindgren doesn’t experience the same privations as her European neighbours, of course; nevertheless the conflict is hugely formative for her, both psychologically and morally.
She lives these six years on tenterhooks, thankful for the “miracle” of peace at home, but acutely aware of the horrors all around her. Her appreciation of the individual cost of such large-scale suffering is striking, whether the image of a particular PoW’s face in a photograph in the newspaper – “To me, it expresses all the yearning of every soldier around the world” – the empathy she feels for mothers who’ve lost their sons in battle, or when she finds herself face-to-face with death in the course of her work – “As long as you’re only reading about it in the paper you can sort of avoid believing it, but when you read in a letter that ‘both Jacques’s children were killed in the occupation of Luxembourg’ or something like that, it suddenly brings it home, quite terrifyingly.”
A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-45 is published by Pushkin Press (£18.89). Click here to buy it for £15.57
