Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington

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raised, cocooned in wartime Britain, where Rita and I tried to darn our nylon stockings and fought over a lipstick, where Doris and Dick scrimped and saved to give us the best possible start in life, to be in a different country: to feel free, full of promise, and confident that no ill could possible befall us.

      We took it all calmly in our stride.

      Carl and August (whom we secretly called Tweedledum and Tweedledee) were two distant cousins. Carl was a captain, August the chief engineer of a well-known Swedish shipping line. Rita and I were put up in a magnificent modern hotel of glass and steel, situated right in the heart of Stockholm on its main boulevard. But the thing I remember most about that hotel was that, in spite of its elegant modernity, it still employed the old-fashioned device of a speaking tube attached to the main doors. After nine o’clock at night the front doors would be firmly closed and when we arrived late, as we usually did, we had to announce our arrival. Rita’s imperious voice (she could get very imperious if necessary), announcing ‘The Misses Wood’ would be followed by a suspicious silence until at last the doors would reluctantly be opened by some unseen hand and then silently close behind us. It was all a bit surreal.

      Stockholm is a city built on an archipelago and bridges criss-cross the sea that flows into the very heart of the city. On our first night we dined with the cousins on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the old harbour. Hundreds of lights danced and glimmered on the dark water, mirroring the glittering stars. Carl and August chattered gaily about their plans for us. Unfortunately, they were sailing to Genoa the next day, so we were to be left for two weeks to our own devices before crossing the Baltic to the island of Götland, home of our Swedish forebears.

      Various other hosts were deputised to look after us in the cousins’ absence. We were treated like princesses and shown round castles, museums, pleasure gardens, parks and shops filled with goods we had only read or dreamed about – stylish clothes, soft leather shoes and handbags, and food – so much of it. Our jolly hosts told us that the Swedes ‘live to eat’ and we had full evidence of this: cheeses, pastries, steaks, fish, and breads of every description surrounded us. Our skinny wartime frames quickly filled out.

      And it was in Stockholm that I fell in love for the very first time.

      Rita and I had been several times to visit an old lady, Miss Lindquist, who had known my grandfather in earlier days. She would speak of him with many sighs and a glint in her faded blue eyes, insisting she had been the one true love of his life. She thought that my grandmother Edith (happily unaware that Edith came from a long line of Yorkshire witches) was one of those scheming Jezebels who lie in wait at ports to trap lonely sailors into marriage.

      On one of these visits she introduced us to a young American soldier of Swedish descent called Dale, who had come on leave from Germany to seek, like us, some of his forebears. He was nineteen years old, charming and quiet, completely unlike the boisterous, in-your-face GIs who had come to England during the war and jumped over our garden gate when cousin Joyce brought them to Firwood Avenue.

      As I’m sure many of you know (and if you don’t yet you probably will), there is such a thing as love at first sight. (Sometimes, though, it can be mistaken for lust at first sight – I’ve experienced that too, quite a few times.)

      When I saw Dale, slight and dark with blue, blue eyes, my heart went ‘twang’.

      I know that’s a cliché but that’s exactly what I wrote in my schoolgirl diary at the time: ‘My heart went twang!’ (with the exclamation mark).

      After one of Miss Lindquist’s legendary smorgasbord lunches, Dale tentatively asked me if I’d like to go round the city with him. By then I’d already been round Stockholm several times but I never again saw it as I did that day. We wandered hand in hand through the streets like two children in an enchanted forest.

      I had never had a boyfriend. Never been kissed. Never even been groped. I was speechlessly happy just at the joy of being with him. We went to the open-air museum of Skansen on the island Djurgården and as darkness began to fall we crowded with hundreds of others into the open-air theatre overlooking the sea and the city. Huge flaming torches were lit all around the auditorium, throwing red shadows onto the listening faces. It was there, with the lights of the city below and with a little gusty breeze causing the giant flambeaux around us to flicker, that Dale and I listened to Marian Anderson, the great African-American contralto, singing ‘Ave Maria’. She wore a simple white dress, and with consummate ease and artistry her rich, mellow voice wafted through the air, over the encircling golden flames, over the dark water and glittering city below, and out to the bright stars.

      I don’t think Dale or I had any idea who Marian Anderson was, but it didn’t matter. We were in the moment.

      At one point I remember I said that my feet were cold. ‘Put them in my pockets,’ said Dale. ‘All girls in America do it.’ We managed the manoeuvre with sublime ease – Lord knows how, as I have big feet and he had small pockets. But it was all part of the magic. After the concert he told me it was his last night in Sweden and that he was returning to camp next morning. I was heartbroken: the one great love of my life was to go out of it as suddenly as he had come in. He kissed me goodnight, a warm tender kiss (my first ever kiss) and I promised to be at the station the next morning.

      Early the next day I made my way to the station. Dale was waiting for me in the early morning mist. We clung to one another for a moment, and then the train pulled out of the station, leaving me crying. We had not thought to exchange addresses and Miss Lindquist couldn’t help.

      Sometimes I wonder if I dreamt it all but then I still have the diary, and Dale’s face, pale and sensitive, comes before me. I wonder where he is and if he remembers me. I like to think so, because he was my very first love.

      Not only did I fall in love for the first time in Sweden, but it was also there that I had my first encounter with a wild animal.

      I’ve had many since. Alone, I’ve come face to whiskers with a lioness in the Okavango – where I also once walked into a feeding pride. I’ve fallen off a camel and off a yak; been blessed by a sacred elephant in India; ridden on two dolphins in Cuba; been growled at by a scavenging black bear in Alaska; encountered (from a canoe) the rare giant otters in the Amazon; and tripped over emperor penguins in Antarctica. I saw the world’s rarest antelope, the huemul, on a mountain peak in Patagonia’s far south. And once, in Peru at Machu Picchu, I watched seven Andean condors, the western hemisphere’s largest flying bird, circling overhead.

      But it was in Sweden that I had my first encounter. Before we sailed to Götland, Carl had arranged for us to spend time at his summer house on a little island south of Stockholm. It was a green-and-white cottage tucked into a hillside facing a whole chain of lakes that wound their way to the horizon. A small white-sailed yacht, Birgitte, bobbed at a small landing stage, and the forest was all around. Early one morning I went for a walk. The sun was shining and besides the dawn chorus, which was in full swing, all was peaceful and still. I sat down on a log. Suddenly I heard a rustling and breaking of branches to one side of me. I thought that perhaps Rita was creeping up on me, waiting to pounce and scare the living daylights out of me. So, as the bushes parted, I leapt up, uttering a triumphant ‘Boo!’ that froze before it was halfway out of my mouth.

      I was saying boo to a moose.

      He stood in front of me, a big ungainly animal about the size of a small horse, with sharply angled antlers and a very surprised look on his face.

      I stood petrified. I knew nothing of the habits of mooses. (Well, you wouldn’t, would you, coming from a small rural English village?) Were they carnivorous? Did they attack young maidens? Was there a whole herd waiting to go on the rampage?

      I tore back to the house and breathlessly recounted my near-death experience.

      ‘Oh, he’s quite tame,’ said Carl’s wife. ‘He often comes up to the house for tidbits. We call him Fred.’

      My Swedish experiences with the natural world were far from over, however.

      There was the matter of Carl and August’s turtles.

      Somewhere on their travels the distant

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