Seacrow Island

by Astrid Lindgren

  Uncle Jansson was so out of breath when he reached the jetty that he could scarcely speak.

  “You poor children,” he said, “here you are, still waiting for me! I am sorry—but I had to mend a fence first, you see, and then it began to rain and then I went in to see the Östermans and stayed there for a chat. You poor little children. Have you been waiting long?”

  “Oh no, not very,” said Tjorven. “But it doesn’t matter!”

  After four hours’ work Melker put the cover on the typewriter contentedly and arranged the manuscript on the table. Then Pelle suddenly arrived outside the window.

  “Why, here’s our Pelle with the milk!” said Melker. “You’ve been quick.”

  But Melker was wrong. It wasn’t “our Pelle with the milk,” it was “our Pelle” without the milk. The milk bottles were still outside Farmer Jansson’s back door. But Pelle had something else with him, something which was hidden below the window sill.

  “Dad, you did say I could have an animal soon, didn’t you?”

  Melker nodded. “Yes, we really must think about that.”

  Then Pelle put his rabbit on the table in front of him and Yoka, terrified, sent the manuscript pages flying all over the place.

  “What do you think of this one?” asked Pelle.

  Malin had a good deal to say when Pelle and Tjorven came into the kitchen and showed her Yoka.

  “Darling Pelle, we are going back to town in a week. What are we going to do with Yoka then?”

  But she had no need to be anxious about that. Uncle Jansson had promised that Yoka could live on his farm until it was summer again and Pelle came back.

  This was a great moment in Pelle’s life. He was proud of his rabbit, so proud that he seemed to send out a glow all around him. And it was even more fun when Johan and Niklas, Teddy and Freddy came rushing into the kitchen and wanted to look at it. Even Tjorven grew a little jealous.

  “I should like to have a rabbit too,” she said.

  “You can have a bit of him,” said Pelle. “One hind leg!”

  “Where did you get him?” said Johan eagerly. He thought he would like to have a rabbit.

  “Oh, some place—where I went,” said Pelle.

  No one except Knut and Rollo knew anything about their boat expedition, and Pelle and Tjorven had wisely decided to keep it a secret from the rest of mankind. It was a difficult decision. For it meant that Tjorven would not be able to talk about the secret hut with Teddy and Freddy, and she had looked forward to it so much.

  Now she sat on top of the woodbin in the kitchen of Carpenter’s Cottage and saw how the secret four were crowding around Pelle’s rabbit. Pelle was fully occupied, showing off his rabbit; otherwise he would have seen the dangerous glint in Tjorven’s eyes.

  “Ho, yes,” said Tjorven suddenly. “Keep everything secret!”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Freddy.

  Tjorven smiled a wicked smile. “Don’t you ever go to your secret hut nowadays?”

  The secret four looked at each other—they had almost forgotten the hut. Just at that moment they were very busy with the wreck out at Crow Point and they had no time to think about huts. They explained this to Tjorven.

  “Then you might as well tell me where it is,” said Tjorven.

  But Freddy repeated that the hut was to be a secret forever and no one who was not twelve years old and therefore included in the secret club could possibly know where it was.

  Tjorven nodded her agreement. “That’s right! Keep everything secret!”

  Then she stared out the window, looking as if she saw something very, very far away.

  “There are lots of strawberries this year,” she said. “I wonder if there are any on Knorken.”

  The secret four looked hastily at each other and there was anxiety in their eyes, though they tried to keep it a secret, of course. But Tjorven saw it clearly enough and it made her feel completely satisfied with her day.

  Pelle saw nothing but his rabbit. She could not expect anything from him and anyhow it was time for her to go home.

  But down near Söderman’s cottage she saw Stina. She was out pushing her new doll carriage. Only people whose mothers were waitresses in Stockholm had lovely things like that. Tjorven rushed over to her.

  “Are you out for a walk with Lovisabet?” she said. “Shall I help you?”

  Stina beamed at her. “Yes, of course.”

  Tjorven pushed the doll carriage backward and forward along the jetty as far as she could go and then she lifted out the doll.

  “Dear little Lovisabet, I suppose you would like to come out and have a look around,” she said, and sat Lovisabet comfortably with her back against a post.

  “No, Lovisabet,” said Stina anxiously, and took a firm hold of the doll. “Children aren’t allowed out on jetties, surely you know that.”

  But Tjorven calmed her. “Yes, she is, when her mother is with her and Aunt Tjorven too—then she is.”

  The Odd Thing About Summers

  “THE ODD thing about summers,” wrote Malin in her diary, “is that they are over so quickly.”

  Before the Melkersons really felt they were settled in, their first summer on Seacrow Island had come to an end, and it was time to go back to town.

  “I can’t think of anything more crazy,” said Niklas. “Why do the schools have to begin again in the middle of the summer holidays? Can’t you write to the school supervisors, Daddy, and tell them to change such a stupid habit?”

  Melker shook his head. “The school supervisors are as hard as nails. It’s you who must just adapt yourself,” he said.

  “It feels as if we got here only a moment ago,” wrote Malin in her diary, “and now we have to leave everything. It seems very hard. Pelle must leave his rabbit and his strawberry patches, Johan and Niklas their huts and fishing rods, their swimming and their sunken wrecks, Daddy his bay in the dawn light and his Carpenter’s Cottage. As for me, what have I to leave? My summer meadows, my apple trees, my mushroom patches, my woodland paths and the silent evenings. No more sitting on the steps of Carpenter’s Cottage watching the path of moonlight across the dark bay. No more swims beneath a night sky bright with stars. No more nights in my attic room lulled to sleep with the cradle song of the waves in my ears. It will be hard. And the people here who have been our friends, we must leave them too. How I shall miss them!

  “But we are going to have a farewell party, Daddy decided that, and I have been spending my days thinking out the menu. We will have a mushroom omelette and delicious little rissoles, and a cream cake with our coffee.”

  Melker was delighted with his party; he wanted to finish with fireworks, which he said would be the high spot of the summer, but Malin would not have it for she remembered the time when Melker had set off all the firecrackers at the same moment.

  “Yes, the high spot of the summer, I can well believe that,” said Malin, “but there are going to be no fireworks here until the last ones have been completely forgotten.”

  She said that cream cake was a much more soothing finish, and they ate it out in the garden on a warm August evening with the bay as bright and smooth as a mirror. “Everything more summery than ever!” said Niklas.

  Pelle, Tjorven, and Stina sat on the steps of Carpenter’s Cottage and Malin allowed them as much cream cake as they could possibly eat. Pelle enjoyed himself, but he, like Melker, considered that fireworks would have been more fun.

  “Yes, but what if you had seen Daddy explode and go sailing away over the bay with his hair on fire?” said Malin. “And, anyway, wasn’t the cake good?”

  “Malin, do you know what?” said Tjorven. “It’s so fantastically good that you have to smack your lips when you eat it.”

  “Goodness!” said Malin. “I would have been quite happy just to hear that it was good.”

  “But that would have sounded as if we were talking about ordinary bread!” objected Tjorven.

  Söderman drank three cups of coffee, although
he knew it was not good for his stomach, but he needed something to comfort him, he said, now that Malin was going away for a bit.

  “Yes, if it would help I would have a whole bathtubful,” said Björn, holding out his cup to Malin. His eyes were gloomy and she tried not to look at him.

  “With most summer visitors,” said Nisse, “it’s generally fun when they come and when they go, particularly when they go. But Carpenter’s Cottage without the Melkersons will really seem empty!”

  “I know you will be coming back next summer,” said Marta.

  It was then that Melker had his bright idea. “Why couldn’t we come to Carpenter’s Cottage for Christmas? Ha, ha! Who is the world’s greatest idea man? Melker Melkerson! I’ve taken the cottage for the whole year for safety’s sake.”

  There was a shout of joy from the children and Malin turned eagerly to Marta and Nisse.

  “Would that be possible? Could we live in Carpenter’s Cottage in the middle of the cold winter?”

  “If we begin to light the fires in the middle of October, it will be all right,” said Nisse.

  Melker declared that he could not have the whole of Carpenter’s Cottage, for which he had paid rent, standing empty for the rest of the year. One must have value for money and must spend Christmas here even if one’s ears are frozen stiff.

  He took hold of Tjorven and danced around and around with her. “With a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no, we’ll have a happy Christmas Eve together-o!” he shouted. “And not only at Christmas but now, this very evening,” said Melker, “because we are going to meet again in a couple of months. I want to see happy faces around me—did you hear what I said, Bosun?” he asked sternly, because Bosun lay looking sadder than ever. “Malin, give him a piece of the cake and see if that helps,” said Melker.

  Bosun ate the cream cake, but it had no effect on his sad face.

  “Although he thinks it’s fantastically good anyhow, I know that,” said Tjorven.

  Pelle sat on the steps with his head in his hands. He felt as gloomy as Bosun looked. Everything came to an end, cream cakes and summers and perhaps life itself for all he knew.

  But strangely enough a little bit of cream cake had been left over and when the party came to an end the plate stood there as a treat for all the wasps. Lucky wasps! They could stay in Carpenter’s Cottage, for little wasps had no need to go back to town and go to school.

  However, they did not get their cake. Tjorven had discovered it and she immediately shooed away the wasps. She had eaten three pieces of cake already but this one looked better than any of the others, with its little pink marzipan rose on the top, and Tjorven wanted it. She looked around to see if Malin was there because she was not used to taking things without permission, but Malin had disappeared with Björn, and Uncle Melker was nowhere to be seen either.

  In fact there was absolutely no one to ask, and at any moment someone else might come and see the cake and want it too, so she must act fast. And Tjorven put her hands together and prayed.

  “Dear God, may I take the piece of cake?” And she answered herself with the deepest bass voice she could muster, “Yes, you may!”

  And then the cake was finished and the party was over. The summer was over too . . . wasn’t it?

  No, the summer was not over just because the Melkersons had left the island. Warm September days came with the humming of wasps and the fluttering of butterflies. Quiet October days came, as clear as crystal. The boathouses down on the jetties mirrored themselves in water so still that it was almost impossible to know what was the actual thing and what was the mirror picture. But Tjorven knew and she explained it to Bosun.

  “What you see upside down are boathouses too, but they belong to mermaids, you see. And they swim in and out, playing together, the whole day.” Tjorven played hide-and-seek with Bosun in the boathouses that were not upside down. She would have been very lonely without him, with Teddy and Freddy at school every day, and with Pelle and Stina far away in distant Stockholm, where she herself had never been and which she knew nothing about. But she had Bosun and she filled her days with the solitary child’s strange, wonderful games. She did not feel lonely.

  And slowly the autumn darkness sank down over Seacrow Island and the people who lived there. The lights shone out of the windows in the evening, small, solitary lights in the midst of the coal-black darkness. So few people lived out here on the island, and when the darkness came and the autumn storms whipped around their houses and the sea lashed furiously against their jetties and boathouses, there were one or two among them who wondered why they lived in the uttermost part of the sea; but they knew they could not live anywhere else.

  The boat from the town came only once a week. There were no summer visitors on board; nobody except the crew, but Nisse went down to fetch his goods and stood waiting without fail, for the boat to arrive. And Tjorven waited too with Bosun beside her in all weathers—even though sometimes it was pitch-black when the boat eventually arrived and even though there was no Pelle on it.

  But Pelle wrote letters, because he was back in school and he could write with capital letters. He did not write to Tjorven but to Yoka, although it was Tjorven who had to go to Yoka on Uncle Jansson’s farm and tell him what was in the letter after Freddy had read it to her.

  “DEAR LITTLE YOKA,” wrote Pelle, “HOLD OUT, HOLD OUT—I’M COMING SOON.”

  One morning when Tjorven woke there was ice on all the puddles in which she had paddled the day before. For a long time she had great fun, crushing the ice to pieces under her boots. But the following day there was still more ice and it grew colder and colder until one night even the bay was frozen.

  “I have never seen ice so early,” said Marta.

  The icebreaker had to come and make a channel for the boat and it still took ten hours to work its way through the ice to the outlying islands.

  And then at last it was Christmas. The Grankvists’ shop was full of Father Christmas advertisements and all the people from all the islands around crowded in to buy Christmas fare. Teddy and Freddy had Christmas holidays and helped in the shop. Tjorven was in the way everywhere.

  “Only a few days now to Christmas Eve,” she said, “and I can’t waggle my ears yet!”

  She saw a lot of Söderman at this time and he had told her that Father Christmas particularly liked people who could waggle their ears—because it looked friendly, so Söderman claimed.

  He was able to do it, but he was going to Stockholm to spend Christmas with Stina and who would be left to waggle their ears in a friendly manner at Father Christmas out here on Seacrow Island?

  “It will have to be you, Tjorven,” said Söderman, and Tjorven practiced patiently and perseveringly.

  Three days before Christmas the steamer Seacrow I came through the ice channel with the Melkerson family on board. They all stood at the rail, staring at their summer island, which now lay white and silent, engulfed in snow and surrounded by ice, strangely beautiful and unfamiliar with white roofs on all the boathouses and empty jetties where no boats were moored. It was their summer island but they did not recognize it.

  But they could see Carpenter’s Cottage among the snowy apple trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney and Melker had tears in his eyes. “It feels like coming home, at any rate,” he said.

  And there stood Nisse Grankvist on the ice beside the channel, and now Teddy and Freddy were rushing down and there was Jansson arriving in his sledge with Söderman and Tjorven. A thin little clang of bells reached their ears and Pelle responded with his whole body. It was Christmas now and he would soon see Yoka again. And Bosun—there he was! Pelle’s eyes lit up when they caught sight of him. Tjorven waved and shrieked but he did not notice it. He saw no one but Bosun.

  “Everything is quite different from summer,” Johan and Niklas decided. Not Teddy and Freddy, of course; they shouted and yelled and squawked like cormorants and were, thank goodness, the same as ever. But otherwise it was like coming to a different world.
Neither Johan nor Niklas gave a thought to what it would be like to live in this world in the midst of snow and ice, alone and cut off from civilization. They regarded all this wintry difference as something exciting and adventurous, arranged more or less for their pleasure.

  The boat at last came to a stop. It could not get right in to the jetty and they had to climb down onto the ice by a ladder.

  “At last we’ve reached the North Pole,” said Johan. “All members of the expedition disembark!”

  He climbed down the ladder first and the others followed. Then they saw Björn coming across another ladder which had been laid right across the steamer channel. It was a shaky and rather precarious bridge, but it was the sort of bridge one had to use if one lived at Norrsund and wanted to get over to Sea-crow Island, and Björn had obviously wanted to get to Sea-crow Island today.

  “Why have you come? Something special?” Söderman asked disagreeably.

  But Björn did not answer, for now he saw Malin. “With a hey and a ho and a hey-nonny-no! We’ll have a happy Christmas together-o!” shouted Melker and grabbed hold of Tjorven, but she dragged herself loose because she wanted to go with Pelle and so she must hurry.

  Pelle had no time to say hello to anyone but Bosun. Then he ran across the ice to the jetty as fast as his legs could carry him, and as quickly he ran down the whole of the village street. Tjorven could not keep up with him. She shouted angrily to him but he did not stop and she saw him disappearing in the dusk far in front of her. But she knew where she would find him.

  “Yoka, little Yoka, here I am. I’ve come back to you!” Pelle was sitting with his rabbit in his arms when Tjorven walked into Jansson’s cowshed. It was so dark that she could hardly see him, but she heard him prattling to his rabbit, almost as if Yoka had been a human being.

  “Pelle, guess what I can do,” said Tjorven eagerly. “I can waggle my ears now.”

  But Pelle did not listen to her. He went on talking to Yoka and she had to say it three times before he bothered to answer her.