Asta's Book (3 page)

My father met her at the railway station. It was a long walk to our house, several miles, and the poor girl was just an animal. When she needed to relieve herself she did what she had done in the country, moved a little aside—in this case to the gutter—lifted up her skirts, and squatted down and made water in the street. My father was so shocked and so angry he took to his heels and ran away from her. He had forgotten or made himself forget that this was how they behaved where he came from, he was nearly a gentleman now, so he ran away home, not looking back, running through the twisting streets and by the back alleys.

Karoline had to get there as best she could. She knew no one. She spoke with a coarse accent many couldn’t even understand, she didn’t know the address, only that the name was Kastrup, and she had never been in a city before, not even Aarhus. But she found her way, she had to. It took her till midnight but she found our house. I’ve never known how. ‘I asked a hundred people,’ she said to me. ‘I asked everyone I saw.’ At least when she got there my father didn’t turn her away.

She was with us as our maid for many years. When I was sixteen and my mother died, Karoline too died of a monstrous cancer that grew out of her back. She can’t have been more than thirty-two or -three. She was already ill when she told me the story and it’s been an example to me, something to think of and keep me going when I’m close to despair. I say to myself, Karoline made it and so will I. I’ll get through and come out the other side.

July 14th, 1905

I have heard from Rasmus and he has sent me money. Hansine was covered in smiles, her fat face all red and nearly split in two, when she brought me the letter this morning. I’ve said she can’t read but she can recognize his handwriting and a Danish stamp.

‘Dearest Asta’, he calls me, and, later on, ‘my dear wife’, which is not at all the way he speaks to me, I can tell you. (What do I mean ‘you’? Have I begun talking to the diary?) Never mind. There is money, just when we were beginning to think even
frikadeller
were beyond our means and we’d be reduced to broken biscuits and Butterine.

It was a money order for 700 kroner, which comes out at nearly £40, the most you’re allowed to send. I took it to the Post Office in Lansdowne Road and they cashed it, making no trouble, asking no questions and not even smiling at my accent.

Now, at any rate, I shall be able to buy material to make baby clothes and have indeed done so already, white lawn and nun’s veiling and white wool to knit from Matthew Rose’s big department story in Mare Street. I shall be able to pay the doctor if I have to send for him when the baby comes. But I hope I don’t have to. The others came fast, especially poor little Mads, without difficulties though with much pain. We shall call the doctor if there are problems but Hansine will be here to help me, as she did with Mads. She knows about making the afterbirth come out and how to deal with the cord. (It’s a good thing I’m writing in Danish. Just think of someone reading that!)

Rasmus is back in Aarhus and has given me an address to write to, though he says he doesn’t expect to be there long. I can’t imagine what he’s doing. He’s an engineer, so-called, and I don’t know what else to call him. The fact is I don’t exactly know what it is he does. He’s been a blacksmith, at any rate he can shoe a horse, and he can do anything with animals. He boasts that the most savage dog is quiet when he speaks to it and the funny thing is it’s true. He makes animals love him. It’s a pity he isn’t as good with a wife.

Another thing he can do is make things out of wood. He could earn a living as a cabinet-maker but he won’t. He despises that sort of thing. Motors are what he likes. He once told me—he hardly ever tells me things or talks to me much but he did tell me this—that he wanted to ‘bring motor cars to England’. I thought there were motor cars here already, in fact I’ve often seen them, you see a few every day even in this place, but he means motor cars for everyone. Imagine a day when every man has his own motor car! What would happen to the horses, I said, and the trains and omnibuses come to that, but he didn’t answer. He never answers the questions I ask.

One thing is certain and that’s that there are no motor cars in Aarhus. I wonder if he’s there to try and borrow money? He’s supposed to have a rich uncle in Hjørring at the ends of the earth, though I only half-believe in this man’s existence. I suppose I should be thankful Rasmus isn’t a Mahometan, otherwise I’m sure he’d be finding another wife up there to marry for 5,000 kroner.

July 18th, 1905

This evening Hansine came into the drawing room and stood there twisting her apron in her fingers. It must have been the money making me feel good, or better than I have been, for I told her to sit down for a bit and talk to me. When I was a child I read a book translated into Danish from the English about a man stranded on a desert island, I can’t remember what it was called. But this man was very lonely and when another man came along he was so happy to have someone, anyone, to talk to and be with at last that he didn’t mind its being a Negro savage. I feel a bit like that with Hansine. I have no one else to talk to except a seven-year-old child and a five-year-old and even the conversation of an illiterate servant is preferable sometimes to their nonsense and their everlasting questions.

I had the impression Hansine was trying to tell me something. She kept stuttering and turning her head about to avoid looking at me. Our Karoline was stupid and ignorant but I sometimes think she was a genius compared to this one. At last I said, ‘Come on, out with it, what is it you want to tell me?’ I was thinking by this time that she’d broken something, not that we have anything valuable to break, or else it was about the sweetheart she had in Copenhagen, but it was only this old man that fell down in the street.

She is now firm friends with the servant from the lodging house that she calls ‘Miss Fisher’. Apparently, she found out where the house is, in Navarino Road, north of London Fields, and went there, if you please, ‘to ask about the poor old gentleman’. It turned out he was dead on arrival at the German Hospital. I suppose she was interested because he was a foreigner too. ‘Like us’, she said, only he was a Pole called Dzerjinski. What’s more likely is that she was just curious.

The people ‘Miss Fisher’ is in service with are a man and his wife and two children, and an old mother-in-law, but no more lodgers now Dzerjinski is gone. Fisher said her master had given her notice but ‘her mistress, Mrs Hyde’ had ‘taken that back as there was plenty for her to do’, minding the baby, cleaning the house and cooking for all of them.

I began to wonder what all this was leading up to, if anything, but it turned out just to be her way of asking if she could have this Fisher for tea here in the kitchen on her afternoon off. I couldn’t help thinking how lucky she was to have found a friend while I knew no one, but I said I’d no objection, provided she didn’t neglect her own work and remembered it wouldn’t be long before I’m confined.

It helps her with her English, having a friend who can’t speak anything else. ‘I’ll soon be chattering away better than you, ma’am,’ says she with a stupid grin and another blush.

I sent her to bed and then I wrote all this down. The baby sits heavy and unmoving and I have the strange feeling, almost certainly nonsense, that her head is caught up in my ribs. It’s time she turned over. But at least I know what will happen next week or the week after when she begins her escape. I knew nothing when I was expecting Mogens, less than nothing. For one thing, I thought he would come out through my navel. I reasoned—not understanding about the afterbirth and how a baby feeds inside you—that the navel must have some use and what use could it have but to open and let the baby out? It was a great shock, I can tell you, when Mogens started coming out the other way. My mother told me Adam had no navel and, more to the point, neither did Eve. They weren’t born but made by God. But the strange thing was that I never made the connection.

I’m tired and I’m going to bed.

July 21st, 1905

It has been insufferably hot and it’s like this all over Europe and America, according to the papers. (I make myself read the papers every day to help my English.) People are falling down dead from sunstroke in New York and here, which is more to the point, children have been poisoned by ice-cream. I have forbidden Hansine to buy any for the boys.

A tremendous fuss is going on between England and Germany and Denmark and Sweden, all to do with who’s going to be the King of Norway, Prince Charles of Denmark or Bernadotte. Or I think so, I could follow it better in Danish. The Emperor William is involved, as might be expected.

I’ve written a long letter to my husband which is why I haven’t felt like writing this diary for three days. I wrote pages and pages of what I think are called ‘home truths’, how horrible it is living here in this dreary street, how hostile everyone is with their stupid questions, the polar-bear woman Mrs Gibbons, for instance, and about the heat and my fear of war. It would be even worse for foreigners here if there was war with Denmark and Sweden was involved. How could he leave us here alone for months and months in a foreign country?

I told him something else I read in the paper, that the Princess of Wales has had a son, born on July 13th. I am not so fortunate. I asked him if he’d forgotten I was expecting his child which may be born any day. Am I to bear it alone here? Suppose I die? Hundreds of women die in childbirth every day, though not Princesses of Wales. Hansine came back from fetching Mogens from school and told me of a woman who died this morning after her twins were born. She got it from another friend of hers, a very low class of person, a slum-dweller in those hovels off Wells Street. There are five other children, all under seven, and the father is sick and out of work. I screamed to her to be quiet, not to tell me these things, is she mad, has she no feelings? But I put the story in the letter to Rasmus. Let him hear it. Why should I bear it alone? It’s his child too and his fault it exists.

Of course I don’t suppose the letter will ever reach him. He will have moved on somewhere else in search of money or a loan or something to do with motor cars. Anyway, I didn’t call him ‘my dearest husband’ or anything like that. I believe in honesty. I wrote ‘Dear Rasmus’ and ended it ‘your Asta’ more to be polite than anything else.

July 26th, 1905

Today I went out for a long walk. I took it slowly, carrying my great burden before me, and walked for many miles, returning by way of Ritson Road and Dalston Lane. I wanted to have a look at the Lutheran church, though it is German, not Scandinavian, and then I made a little detour to see the house where Hansine’s friend lives.

If only Rasmus had taken such a house for us! It’s not grand, it couldn’t be in this part of London, but it’s big, on four floors, and you can see it’s seen better days. There are steps up to the front door which has two big pillars holding up a portico, nice railings along the front of a real front garden and lots of trees around. Navarino Road isn’t wide like Lavender Grove but narrow and shady and that always gives a better look to a street.

I was standing there looking at it, thinking the rent couldn’t be more than £10 more than the £36 a year Rasmus pays for Lavender Grove, when a woman came out with a little girl. She was dressed very showily with a big feathery hat, but I had eyes only for the baby. That was all she was, though she could walk. She was so pretty and fair and dainty, like a fairy. I swear my baby moved when I was thinking this, put out a hand perhaps to greet this other child from inside there.

Fanciful nonsense, I know that. But it cheered me up and saw me safely home, like the great awkward ship that I am, rocking and swaying into harbour. Mogens and Knud were outside on the pavement playing with the hoops I bought them out of the money my dear generous husband sent us. If I don’t need to pay a doctor when my daughter comes I shall spend some more and buy little Knud a spinning top. The boy next door has one so why shouldn’t my boy?

As I entered the house a strong pain took hold of me and doubled me up. For a little while I thought, this is it. I didn’t want Hansine fussing, starting to get water boiling and hanging sheets over my bedroom door, so I went upstairs to take my hat off and stayed there in my bedroom, not sitting but standing and holding on to the bedpost. Another pain came but fainter than the first. I stood there, watching the boys and thinking how Knud too would be starting school in September and not knowing whether I was glad or sorry.

Then it came to me that I’d have my daughter by that time. She would be more than a month old and I should be glad to have the boys out of the way. Perhaps she’d be born tonight, I thought. But though I stood there and finally sat down on the bed with my hands pressed to the great heavy lump, there were no more pains and I realized the same thing had happened as when I was expecting Mads. These are false pains some women have hours or even days before a real labour begins. Probably there is a scientific name for them but I don’t know what it is. Last year, in February, I had them on the Wednesday and Mads was born on the Friday. Poor little boy, I didn’t want him and I didn’t know how much I loved him till after he was dead.

Suppose this one, my daughter, suppose she … But no, I won’t write it. I won’t even think it. Or will writing it down be a kind of insurance and make sure it can’t happen? I don’t believe in things like that. I’m not superstitious and I don’t believe in God. I won’t give him a capital letter, I’ll cross that out, it’s ridiculous honouring something you don’t believe in. He’s just god, a god I know doesn’t exist. I think I first knew that when I had a baby coming out of the wrong place that I thought was going to split me into two bits. I shan’t be going to the Lutheran church, German or Danish or any other kind. And I won’t be churched after the birth, as if there was something dirty about having a baby.

I won’t have the doctor unless I must. Hansine can see to things. If there are complications she can run and fetch him. If only there were women doctors! I wouldn’t think twice if it was a woman coming into my bedroom in a trim black dress with a stethoscope hanging round her like a smart necklace. But I shake with disgust at having a man there, seeing me so exposed, so vulnerable, my body open and indecent. And I believe men think it funny, doctors or not. You can see that little half-smile on their faces, the way they cover it with a discreet hand. Women are so absurd, they seem to be saying, so weak and foolish, letting this happen to them! How ugly they look and how stupid!