On Bodil Bredsdorff

By : Beth Juncker

Since her breakthrough in the 1970s, Bodil Bredsdorff (b. 1951) has asserted herself as the portrayer of the modern child’s life. In her work, Denmark’s status as a country dominated by agriculture and small provincial towns is a thing of the past. The country with small farms, vegetable gardens and grazing cows, towns with stay-at-home mums, nuclear families living on a single income and children playing freely along streams, near marshes, on stretches of meadows and in areas around newly constructed social housing estates are there like an ambivalent undercurrent of longing beneath her earliest picture book stories. It is, for better or for worse, the lives of children living in towns - in broken families, in a disintegrating pattern of gender roles, in everyday exchanges between lone fathers and lone mothers - that are at the centre of the stories. Always caught in a single, dramatised double grip in which both children and adults stand as hostages to the demands of modern work which neither is able to keep together.
   The daily journeys between home, nursery school and work, when time and tiredness sap energy, the week-end journeys between the two homes resulting from a divorce turn children and parents into opponents in a modern life pattern. The affection they have for each other constantly results in friction when tiredness and trivial accidentsgain the upper hand.
   Typical is the picture book Der hvor Linda bor (Where Linda Lives) (1975), in which Linda is the last to be fetched from nursery school, and where the weary hours between 5 and 7 o’clock go wrong because the tiny messy incidents - the water slopping over from the washbasin, the mug of milk accidentally overturned - become the last straw for the mother and cause Linda’s tears and anger to erupt. Only when her little brother has been put to bed and her mother has had time to recover does a surplus of energy result in an apology, reconciliation and forgiveness:
   “I’m sorry I got so angry,” says Birgit: “but I was so tired.”
   Had the book been written today these words and a hug would have been sufficient. But in the 1970s children’s literature was brimming with explanations. So Linda has to be subjected to a long account of her mother’s working day from 6 o’clock in the morning to the dramatic pre-dinner accident before she can have some water in her plastic tub to splash about in, this time with her mother’s blessing.
   Der hvor Linda bor and its successors turned into a major work of social realism. A piece of congenial team work between Bodil Bredsdorff and her illustrator Lilian Brøgger. A solid document of the time. Seen in retrospect it is also a work in which the narrator’s determination to be loyal to both parties - both the children and the adults - becomes a constant unresolved driving force. The books turn the conflicts into themes at the same time as searching for new syntheses: love, mutual respect, equality of age and sex. They seek to see through the eyes of both children and adults, but nevertheless they inevitably end on the side of the adults and indirectly demonstrate the impossibility of being fair to all parties. In this area where children and adults collide with each other, it is the frustrations and aspirations of the adults that provide the shape and the explanations, while the children’s tears, anger and protests fade into the background.
   So it is in Marias mor bor alene (1977), where Maria is on a weekend visit to her mother. The entire story is about a mother who has broken out of her marriage in order to take a training and thus ensure a better life for herself:
   “Dad and I can’t seem to get on together. We upset each other. He was mad with me when I stopped earning. But I work just as much as he does, so I do. I just don’t get anything for it because I’ve started at college.”
   Behind the entire narrative there is the theme of Maria’s latent sorrow - “Yes, but then you can just come home again” - but the story is nevertheless built up as a mother’s explanation and defence. A female model towers before Maria, a mother who can manage almost anything:
   “Just you watch,” says Maria’s mother, pressing the switch. “We’ve got light here. Isn’t it lovely?” The last time Maria came to visit her, they had to use candles.
   “Did you do it yourself?” asks Maria. “No,” says her mother. “I couldn’t manage that.”
“But I’ve done all the rest myself.”
“First, I painted the ceiling
and then I put some fresh wallpaper on the walls...
and painted the windows...
and the doors...
and the cupboards in the kitchen...
and made some curtains...
and washed the floor...
and cleaned the windows...
and arranged the furniture...
and hung some pictures on the walls...
   We are in the decade of women’s liberation. Women can do things - and they can do things for themselves. In simple but strong terms, the picture book depicts a faith in women’s rights. Maria is given the model, strength, but on the other hand she has to find her own consolatory perspective on life between divorces among her own friends. She is not the only one to have a divided life. Nille in the nursery school has a similar problem - but the other way round:
   “Maria has to go home to her mother and I have to go home to my father. It’s nearly the same thing.”
   As children, they share the same conditions. But within Bodil Bredsdorff’s oeuvre, some years pass before this inner sense of belonging together as children becomes the point of view that turns the world and the writing around. Before this takes place, it is the unresolved meeting between children and adults, between a rural childhood and an urban childhood that determines both form and story. As in Vinnies vindueskarm (Winnie’s Windowsill) (1975), in which the urban child’s lacking experience of nature and animals is compensated through an imaginative play landscape on a windowsill. It is the mother who, for the want of better things, recreates the landscape she experienced in her own childhood by means of seeds, water and pots on a windowsill. But it is Vinnie who by allowing the toy farm animals to conquer the plants reduces them from growth to symbolical play substitutes. The adult childhood, the longings of adult life for harmony, for liberation, for nature and naturalness, constantly make their presence felt off-stage in these stories about town children, in which the children are immediately thematised as victims, but where neither form nor narrator allows the theme to unfold.
   In the children’s literature of the 1970s, faith in the power of planations to create cohesion creates form - also with Bodil Bredsdorff.
   Within the overall oeuvre, two small books stand out as small foretastes of the change that was to occur in the 1990s. One is a book for reading aloud, Johanne (Johanne) (1978). The other is the photo book Sofies Søstre (Sophie’s Sisters) (1981). In the story about the old woman Johanne, who is now in a rest home, the main character’s point of view is retained, and old age becomes a mirror also for modern children:
   A nurse in a white overall comes down through the garden. She goes across to Johanne to take hold of the handles on the wheelchair.
“It’s time for supper now,” she says, pushing Johanne along in front of her.
   Johanne is angry, for she is not hungry and she wants to stay out in the garden. She clenches her fists so tight that tears come to her eyes.
   “I’m not allowed to decide anything for myself,” she thinks. - But she doesn’t say so.
   In Sofies Søstre, where three sisters each embark on a dangerous, crazy course, the actual composition creates freedom and significance - and for once the narrator is silent and allows the composition and the relations between the sisters to tell their own story. In these two works, the artistic breakthrough is about to take place. The adult with a constant need to explain herself is silent, and the child’s own approach to experiences is growing in importance.
   With the series of novels entitled Børnene i Kragevig (The Children in Crow Creek) (1993-95), Bodil Bredsdorff’s writing undergoes a transformation. All modern life’s conflicts between adults and children, between life’s dreams and the real economy, are resolved in a brilliant composition in which children from broken homes dominate both the narrative point of view, the emotions and the dreams. Bodil Bredsdorff’s language unfolds simply and sensitively and plays a central role in creating character.
   The sea was gentle like a breath and blue like a glance. Alex found a flat little stone and skimmed it across the shiny surface.
He went on and found another, and another.
At last, he reached the place where they had found his little horse once so long ago. He was so tiny then that he was still called Dopy and couldn’t stay awake during dark nights.
   There was nothing left. The fierce storms had long ago removed all the bones and washed the shore clean.
   He sat down on a stone close by the place. He was tired and ready to drop and yet wide awake at the same time. His eyes glided across the sea, across the edge of the world, right out into nothingness.
And in a flash he understood what he saw. The waves rise only to settle down again. Ships are built and ships sink. Little horses live and little horses die. People are born and disappear in an unending chain.
And his life on earth was just here, just now, in the bright morning, when his life held the world together in an eternal moment.
   Thus the series closes with an understanding that although life and death, nature and culture are constantly crossing swords, it is the effort made here and now by the single individual that gives the infinite chain of life and death meaning. No life is too small, no effort too meagre. The stories of the children in Crow Creek started with an existential question: Can a child who has lost its family and friends, parents and grandparents, survive alone? This was the Crow Girl’s situation when, after burying her grandmother, she had to move away from the little bay by the sea where she was now all alone in order to find herself and create a new foundation for her life. But the Crow Girl’s departure is the start of a series of explorations into identity and formation of personality, which together provide the answer to the introductory questions: Unna’s, Eidi’s, Tink’s and finally Alek’s. They are all children from broken backgrounds. Alcoholic fathers, dead mothers, grown ups who are petrified and bitter from anguish. They are all between 11 and 12 when they break out. They have all the odds against them. But they manage. Each individually and all together they turn the world around, create a community within the community and thus the answer to the introductory question in the series: Yes, children can survive by their own strength. But only if at some time they meet the love and confidence without which no life can cope.
   The Children in Crow Creek represents - so far - the artistic pinnacle of Bodil Bredsdorff’s work. A simple, but brilliantly sensed and composed series of novels, which constantly reflect the adult and the child in each other. Seen in the context of the oeuvre as a whole, they gather together and release the themes that have been the driving force in Bodil Bredsdorff’s work since the 1970s. A major writer is on the way!

Translated by W. Glyn Jones