All the way through, Jansson builds the tension, then dissipates it with the discovery that the frightening thing is not so frightening after all. The hat works magic that buries the whole of Moominhouse under a jungle of creepers and flowers, but they all have fun playing in it. And after a while, the hat’s magic always wears off. Even the Hobgoblin himself, built up as a monstrous being who flies between the planets on a black panther, turns out to be quite a kind fellow who grants wishes and likes pancakes. I can see how this makes the book both exciting and reassuring for a young reader, and explains how even the Groke didn’t scare me that much.
“All the way through, Jansson builds the tension, then dissipates it with the discovery that the frightening thing is not so frightening after all.”
The characters don’t each hold the same interest to me, and I don’t think they did the first time round either, though maybe for different reasons. I’d completely forgotten about the Hemulen, but I rather like him this time: he’s a ponderous, gloomy creature who always wears a dress and immerses himself in collecting (first stamps, than botanical specimens) and is too busy itemising things to actually enjoy them. Snufkin is a vagabond, a romantic wanderer: ‘Life is not peaceful,’ he says contentedly. He plays the mouth organ and tells stories, and every now and then he goes away alone on a long journey, which makes Moomintroll very sad. There’s never any suggestion Moomintroll should go with Snufkin, however: he’s a kid living with his parents, and that’s where he wants to be.
Moomintroll and the Snork Maiden definitely have a thing going, but it’s an innocent prepubescent thing, part friendship, part romance, where they haven’t yet got around to kissing: they are too busy trying to impress each other. The first time, I remember, I couldn’t stand the Snork Maiden: she was soppy, vain, not worthy of my hero Moomin. Now I like her and feel sorry for her, she is so very insecure. As with so many young girls, her worries focus on her looks. When the Hattifatteners burn her fringe, she’s inconsolable. She wants to do ‘something tremendous’ to impress Moomintroll, and she manages to rescue a stranded figurehead from a ship, a beautiful wooden queen. But when Moomintroll admires it, she gets jealous. The Hobgoblin grants her wish to have eyes like the wooden queen, the eyes that look so disastrous on her little hippo face; and her disgruntled brother has to use up his wish to get her old eyes back again. I want to take her hand and tell her she is beautiful as she is, to stop worrying about whether the boy likes her, just to relax and be herself and enjoy the summer.
This is going so well. This story ticks all four of my hypothetical boxes: adventure; scenes I can fill in (especially with the help of the gorgeous illustrations); animals (well, human-like animals); and kids on their own… uh-oh. They aren’t on their own, are they? This is Finn family. It’s that rarity in children’s literature, a book where the parents are a vital part of the goings-on. So many authors spend so much time dreaming up excuses for their characters to have their adventures away from their parents, but Jansson was a heretic in such matters. And yet it works. Why?
It does more than just work. Of all the creatures in Moomin Valley, there is one in this second reading who fascinates me more than the others, and it’s someone who was mainly a background character the first time round. Maybe it’s because she’s standing on my bookshelf in her striped apron, carrying her handbag, her worried eyes fixed on me, but it strikes me now: where would this lot be without Moominmamma?
“but it strikes me now: where would this lot be without Moominmamma?”
I’d forgotten that the book opens with a letter from Moominmamma to children for the first publication in Britain, written in English in a swooping hand with lots of curlicues and the odd spelling mistake. ‘Dear Child!!!!’ she begins. She wondered if she should pack some supplies for you, but was assured just a letter would do. So she introduces Moomintrolls and explains the differences from the common troll (Moomins are smooth and they like sunlight). She can hardly believe an English child wouldn’t know about Moomins, and wouldn’t hibernate. ‘Are you really awake the whole long black cold winter? Pooor children!’ She explains how to hibernate – first you have to fill your tummy with pine needles and ‘take your woolly knickers on’. She offers respect to the child’s parents, and says it would be ‘awful fun’ to salute the rulers of their country, whom Pappa says live in a Moomin house of gold. And she ends ‘Please excuse my rotten English, you see Moomins go to school only as long as it amuses them.’
This is Moominmamma in a nutshell: she is not very well informed, which is hardly her fault, but she is brimming with good will and advice and respect and empathy. Her role in the Moomin family is entirely traditional, as most mothers’ roles were in the years after the Second World War (Finn Family Moomintroll was first published in 1948) and her home is a mix of the bourgeois and the bohemian. Moominpappa does the odd chore such as watering the tobacco plants, but much of the time he’s busy in his study, writing his memoirs, a heavy volume about his stormy youth. Moominmamma does everything else in the large household. There are no servants, and no chores are farmed out to the youngsters. She’s very generous, taking in all these friends, presumably without any rent (I’ve no idea what they all do for money). When Thingumy and Bob turn up with their weird way of talking, what dismays her is that she might not be able to please her guests: ‘How shall I find out what they want for pudding on their birthday, or how many pillows they like to have?’
Moominmamma is too indulgent and too kind to be a disciplinarian, which means the family has remarkable freedom; but she’s a very zealous housewife and mother, and she mothers everybody. When it’s decided to go on an excursion to the beach, she rushes around packing ‘blankets, saucepans, birch-bark, a coffee-pot, masses of food, suntan-oil, matches, and everything you can eat out of, or with… an umbrella, warm clothes, tummy-ache medicine, an egg-whisk, cushions, a mosquito-net, bathing-drawers and a table cloth.’ All Moominpappa packs are his pipe and a fishing rod. While the family explore and enjoy themselves on the island, Moominmamma makes a fireplace, puts out food and makes coffee. When the Moomins throw a big party, she makes vast numbers of pancakes. When the Snork strikes gold, she doesn’t think of selling it, but putting it to domestic use to decorate the edges of the flower beds, ‘only the big bits, of course, because the little ones look so rubbishy.’
“I find I’m torn between a huge admiration for Moominmamma, the mainstay of the family, and a frustration that she feels she has to do everything herself and never asks anyone to help”
I find I’m torn between a huge admiration for Moominmamma, the mainstay of the family, and a frustration that she feels she has to do everything herself and never asks anyone to help (needless to say, nobody ever offers). The most poignant thing about her is that while everyone in the story pursues an individual dream that involves a bit of adventure and daring, all she ever wants to do with her very small amount of spare time is to rest. Peace and quiet are her rewards. Even on the island, where everyone is exploring, all she does is climb down to a little patch of sand, lie down under the sea-pinks and sea-oats, and go to sleep. And I know how she feels. When my son was little, there were times when I too could have lain down under the sea-pinks and thought myself in heaven. And I didn’t have a whole Moomin House of creatures to look after.
The first time round, I took Moominmamma entirely for granted. Now, she makes me think about growing up in the 1950s with my own mother, who was always there, always doing things for me and my sister, and of course I took her for granted too, a feeling which can coexist quite comfortably with love. But she hadn’t always been nothing but a dedicated housewife and mother. Victoria Cowdroy was an artist, something of a prodigy in her teens, who was expected one day to rival Norman Lindsay. She supported her family while still very young with her graphic art, and after she married her first husband, George Bunting, and had her first child, Diane, she continued to work as a fashion artist and illustrator. She had some belated recognition in 1995 with an entry i
n Heritage: The National Women’s Art Book, edited by Joan Kerr, which features the lives and work of 500 Australian women artists.
After George died, after the war, after she came to live in London and married her second husband, my father Arthur Horner, it was Arthur who was the artist in the family and Vicky who became the housewife and mother. I don’t believe this was Arthur’s doing; he encouraged her to go on working, and that was partly why my sister and I had nannies when we were small. But for whatever reason, after more than forty-five years working as an artist, Vicky just stopped. She sought an outlet for her creativity through domestic tasks such as making curtains, cushions and dresses, knitting and crocheting. Always the loving mother, she never once gave me even the smallest indication that she hadn’t fully embraced her new art-free life.
Even so, I found myself in my teens with the growing determination that I was going to have a career first and be a mother second, if at all. No doubt that was partly the changing mood of the 1960s and ’70s, the advent of women’s liberation. And Vicky changed too, in those years; she became restless, she needed projects. She and Arthur had dabbled in animation. By the time I reached my teens, we were living in a house in Hertfordshire with a huge garden. Arthur was busy with his cartooning, so Vicky set up an animation studio with big tape decks and a colossal rostrum camera in a converted stable in the grounds. There she proceeded to do a series of colour drawings based on The Shoshki, an epic fantasy for children I scribbled in a series of notebooks when I was eleven. She recorded voiceovers and created a forty-five minute film virtually single-handed. The film never found a commercial outlet but it was still a remarkable achievement.
What has all this to do with Moominmamma? She isn’t a thwarted artist or animator: she isn’t a thwarted anything, as far as we know. But then I had no idea when I was young that my mother might have felt thwarted. In those days, mothers tended not to go on about things like that. It appears that Moominmamma is happy in her little realm, and she does have considerable advantages: she rules, she is wise, and she is re-spected as well as loved.
Everywhere in Finn Family Moomintroll there are unobtrusive little signs of this wisdom, and the way it evokes respect for this unassuming and slightly absent-minded mother who frets dreadfully when she loses her handbag, which is full of ‘things we might need in a hurry, like dry socks and sweets and string and tummy-powder.’ She is the one who suggests the excursion to the beach and names their new boat The Adventurer, even though she’s the least adventurous creature. She understands her son better than anyone. When the Hobgoblin grants her a wish, she wishes that Moomintroll will stop missing the absent Snufkin. And Moomintroll in turn trusts her wisdom above all other sources. When Snufkin tells a terrible story about the Hobgoblin, Moomintroll’s first response is ‘We must talk to mother about this.’ When he hides under the Hobgoblin’s hat and is transformed into a creature nobody recognises, he pleads to his mother. She takes a long look at him and says ‘Yes, you are my Moomintroll.’ At once, he changes back to his old form. ‘It’s all right now, my dear,’ she says. ‘You see, I shall always know you whatever happens.’
In the author’s notes, child readers have this respect extended to their own mothers. Orange-peel teeth? ‘Ask your mother how to make them: she will know.’ (I did ask her, and she did know). What happened to the Muskrat’s false teeth when he put them in the Hobgoblin’s hat? ‘You can ask your mama. She is sure to know.’ (I don’t think I did ask her, but I believed she would know.) Mothers are the font of all wisdom and this is immensely reassuring. Moomintroll might have his wistful moments where he steals away at night and keeps secrets with Snufkin, but we know he’s only at home with his mother.
I defy anyone not to love Moominmamma. She is the embodiment of motherhood, but she doesn’t preach. She wouldn’t know a moral if it jumped out of her handbag. But in her modest way, she’s just so right about everything. If Jansson were writing today, I’m thinking, she might give Moominmamma a leisure interest apart from snoozing. She might do something creative, she might even run a little business and get Pappa and the kids to help her out with the chores; but I’m sure Jansson would make her essential character exactly the same. She is just what every child wants, and there is never any need to escape from her to have adventures, because she and Pappa come along too, and it never cramps anyone’s style. And talking of cramps, you never know when you might need some tummy-powder.
“I defy anyone not to love Moominmamma. She is the embodiment of motherhood, but she doesn’t preach. She wouldn’t know a moral if it jumped out of her handbag. But in her modest way, she’s just so right about everything.”
All this makes me curious about the author’s own life, and her own mother. I sift through an enormous amount of information in Swedish writer Boel Westin’s very thorough authorised biography, Tove Jansson, Life, Art, Words, and I’m often sidetracked into reading captivating stories that have very little to do with Moomins. The photographs of Tove Jansson are striking: she has one of those elfin faces that don’t age much. Her mother was both very like and totally unlike Moominmamma. Signe Hammarsten-Jansson (known to the family as Ham) was a Swedish graphic designer and illustrator, and her husband Viktor Jansson was a Finnish sculptor. There is a sweet photograph of the young couple laughing, coated in plaster dust. They had three children: Tove and her younger brothers, Per and Lars. An artistic family, and the impression Westin gives is that they all lived in a constant fever of creation. Tove caught the fever early: like my mother, she was drawing, painting and writing on a professional level at a young age. By fourteen she had written and illustrated her first picture book, and by the next year she had published cartoons and illustrations. Mother and daughter were very close, frequently drawing each other. ‘We lived together very calmly and freely,’ Jansson wrote in her book of charming autobiographical short stories, Sculptor’s Daughter. ‘Pappa worked. Mamma worked. Work was sacred.’ They did take time off on Moomin-like camping excursions to islands in the Finnish archipelago, where Viktor had a Snufkin-like relish for storms.
Possibly some work was more sacred than other work, however. Sculpting didn’t seem to provide a regular income, and often Ham was working as the sole breadwinner. And working very long hours, it seemed, ‘in town where drawing was done at night and made you so tired that you felt sick’ (Sculptor’s Daughter). At thirteen, Tove’s greatest ambition was to help: ‘I long for the time when I’ll be able to help Mamma with drawings. Mamma does so much work on her own.’
Tove Jansson became an extraordinarily prolific artist, producing paintings, murals, illustrations, cartoons, comic strips – whatever would sell. The precursor of the Moomins was a Snork, a nasty narrow-snouted creature that turned up in some of her satirical cartoons. Gradually the creature became more benign, softer, rounder, more cuddly: a troll-child with a mamma and a pappa and a host of friends. The first Moomin books, The Moomins and the Great Flood and Comet in Moominland, made very little impact; but the third, Finn Family Moomintroll (known in Finland as The Hobgoblin’s Hat) became an international success. Jansson wrote six more Moomin books, including The Exploits of Moominpappa (this is where Edward the Booble turns up), five Moomin picture books for younger children, and twelve books for adults, including novels, short-story collections and two well-received semiautobiographical works, The Summer Book and Sculptor’s Daughter. But it was the Moomins who made Tove Jansson famous. The books were translated into forty-five languages and sold in their millions. The comic strip I remember ran in the London News for seven years from 1954: she produced six strips a week with her brother Lars. It ran in 120 newspapers around the world, reaching twelve million readers.
As happened with A. A. Milne, Jansson began to resent the Moomins for overshadowing her other work and demanding too much from her: ‘I could vomit on the Moomins,’ she once famously said. But she turned up dutifully to receive many awards, to read at events where people queued down the street to see her, and debated the Moomi
n philosophy, whatever that was.
I’m still intrigued above all by the relationship between Tove and her mother. So different from the domesticated Moominmamma, this fiercely professional artist whom her daughter emulates; but the love is the same. In Sculptor’s Daughter, Jansson often describes the intimacy between mother and child. She tells a story about a strange house in the snow where the child stays with her mother. At first the snow seems menacing, but then the mother explains that it has covered the house and they have gone into hibernation, so nobody can get in and nobody can get out. This is a huge comfort for the child: ‘We were bears with pine needles in our stomachs and anyone who dared come near our winter lair was torn to pieces… We let the dangerous world outside look after itself, it had died, it had fallen out into space. Only Mummy and I were left.’
Jansson also ascribes to Ham the wisdom that Moominmamma has when she looks at her own child: ‘No-one can understand me as Ham does… Ham can see through every disguise, because she loves me.’ The two stayed very close, although in later life Jansson was troubled by her mother’s clinginess when she wanted to go away to live on an island. When Ham died in 1970, her daughter was devastated.
Did Jansson become a mother herself? No way. She was briefly engaged, but she never married and she didn’t want children – she thought they would interfere with her work. She had both men and women as lovers, but her most significant relationships were with women: she lived on the island of Klovharu with her long-term partner and collaborator, Tuulikki Pietilä. (So much for that Puffin note about her living alone on an island, which apparently was typical of the way the beloved Moomins creator was presented to children.) I’m amazed to discover that Thingumy and Bob, the odd and inseparable little pair with their own special language, are actually disguised portraits of Jansson and her great love at the time of writing, Vivica Bandler. Homosexuality was illegal then. I don’t think I’d even heard of lesbians when I read Finn Family Moomintroll. I always assumed Thingumy and Bob were boys, perhaps brothers, but now I look, there’s no mention of their gender. This adds a new level of meaning to the giant ruby that Thingumy and Bob carry around hidden in their suitcase. The ruby actually belongs to the Groke, but one of the themes of the story is who should own it: the rightful owner, or the person who has the greatest right to it? ‘I believe the immature reader is often spellbound by what is unspoken and disguised,’ wrote Jansson, and how right she was.
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