First semester of high school. Five subjects: mechanical workshop, welding and gas cutting, Swedish, English and sport.
On with the overalls and knuckle down. For two years we would have to put up with each other, those of us who had failed in different primary schools around Lerum municipality.
My father had taken the same path. In his time it was called the vocational school, and after undergoing two years it almost guaranteed you a job in the shipbuilding industry, which in my father’s time, before the shipbuilding crisis in the late 1960s, was a secure job where you could stay until retirement.
Of course, Dad thought it was a good idea to start on the engineering line, my friends who grew up with me on “the swamp” chose between Vehicle Building and Workshop, and my grades made clear which it would be for me. It would be workshop for Carlsson.
Damn how I hated it. Mortally dangerous classmates. None of us knew when we would next get a hammer in the back, our heads pounded with an anvil or a welding flame in the backside. It was everyone against everyone else and some kind of competition as to who could be the worst. As luck would have it, I had a foul temperament, which resulted in setting some physical boundaries that meant I was soon left in peace from these anarchist penal games.
On Fridays, Swedish was in the schedule. Initially my classmates hated it. Swedish? So damn stupid. Why?
I remember that we sat in the hall before Carsten — as the teacher was called — came in. “Carsten — what a fuckin gay name!” Carsten was tall and lanky,had an incredibly well-groomed hairstyle and velvety skin, so smooth and freshly shaved that we suspected he was shaving and moisturising right before each lesson. He walked like a woman and spoke in a fine deep voice. I remember my first thought was: “He will be lynched and eaten alive in the first lesson.”
Carsten brings out the thickest book I have ever seen and begins to read aloud. The class falls silent and we all start listening intensely. The following lessons continue in the same way — a kind of storytelling session for teenagers. And we longed to hear Carsten read. Everyone sat quietly and listened. After the lessons we pretended that nothing had happened, we were ashamed of our pleasure in listening to Carsten’s fine deep voice.
A few weeks into the semester, after reading aloud for half the lesson, Carsten announces that now it is Mikael’s turn to read. Of all of us, Mikael is probably the one with the best self-esteem and self-confidence. Mikael reads one or two pages then it’s the next person’s turn and so it continues. I remember that Fredrik, who came somewhere in the middle of the reading circle, could not speak clearly. He had not yet mastered the sound of the letter R; we were surprised, Fredrik had never spoken before and now we knew why.
When Fredrik began to stumble in the text, Carsten’s presence grew, he em- braced us spiritually in some strange way. No one ever harassed Fredrik for his speech deviation, either during class or outside of it. Now we each had to borrow a copy of the book we read Utvandrarna, invandrarna, nybyggarna och det sista brevet till Sverige (The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers and The Last Letter Home).
The topics of conversation during breaktimes ranged from the easiest way to steal a car and where to buy the cheapest hashish to how far through the book you had read and what would actually happen to Karl Oskar Nilsson.
The swamp was Lerum’s high-rise area built in 1964, sandwiched between the villa houses. And when the swamp’s first litter grew old enough to start school, so began an intense debate in the municipality about where these children should go to school. The obvious choice for the parents of the swamp was the school located 500 metres away, which meant only crossing one street. This would mean that the “swamp children” would mix with the Aspenäs villa children. Aspenäs housing association was strongly opposed to this and informed the municipality that this would be bad for both parties, and that Knappekulla school 3 km away on the other side of the town centre might well be better for us — at that school there would be more like-minded children for the swamp children to play with. After a year of strikes and a visit by Västnytt from the TV channel TV2, the municipality of Lerum had to bow to the pressure and apply the proximity principle, which was a nationally accepted standard.
Back home in the swamp, it was not possible to talk about Karl Oskar Nilsson. There were no bookworms living on the swamp. We were fully occupied with the task of managing ourselves. A sort of navigation around tricky adults: today we can’t go over to Dennis’ as his mother’s ex had trashed the apartment for the third time, Johny’s father had just begun a new period of drinking and Magnus’ mother had slept with no-arse-Gert five doors down, so there wouldn’t work either. We mostly spent our time outdoors because it was calmer. And what happened in Carsten’s lessons and the intense desire to read became something to keep to yourself. But when in Carsten’s lessons, those who wanted to, were able to blossom in full.
I loved the language, the sound, the rhythm and somewhere, the idea grew that it was possible to do something other than turn something on a lathe, weld, drink and sleep with your neighbour. I didn’t have a clue what that was going to be, but really, it was all the same shit.
Thank you Carsten.
(Translation: Jasmine Hinks)