Making the Most of It by Bryan Magee

Author:Bryan Magee [Magee, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781980636137
Publisher: CB Creative
Published: 2018-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

13

When I returned to Europe from the USA in September 1956 I told Ingrid that I was going to insist now, and through the courts if necessary, on seeing Gunnela regularly. She went on resisting, but her resistance weakened rapidly – she had been warned professionally, I believe, that she was bound to lose any legal battle we might have. Even so, because of all this, it was not until the summer of 1957 that I saw Gunnela for the first time. By then she was two and a half years old. And of course it was longer than that since I had seen Ingrid. The two of them met me off the boat-train in the Central Station of Copenhagen. We had, at long last, reached the agreement I had always wanted us to have: that I would send regular payments to Ingrid to help support Gunnela, and would see her at least twice a year, once in Sweden and once in England.

The experience of seeing my own two-and-a-half-year-old child running around and talking was the most extraordinary one I have ever had. She was magical. My interest in her was unbounded, and I had to make a conscious effort not to be overwhelming. She was wary of me at first. Then a hint of hostility crept in to her attitude – I think because I was for the time being displacing her as the chief focus of Ingrid’s attention. I had appeared out of the blue, and was now centre stage. But this was something I could not help. It was in the logic of the situation.

We spent a day or two in Copenhagen, much of it in Tivoli. This is the most delightful of all pleasure gardens, cunningly attuned to adults and children alike, amazingly variegated and extensive. It has every sideshow from a lucky dip to a scenic railway; its eating places range from a hot-dog stand to a luxury restaurant, its theatre from pantomime to an international concert hall. Clowns on stilts pick their way along its paths, towering like skyscrapers over the children; toytown bands march across it; miniature trains chug round it. To spend a whole day in it is one of the easiest things in the world to do, and one of the most pleasurable. It is greatly loved, not only in Denmark but across northern Europe, and much imitated in other cities. (Originally, I believe, it was modelled on Vauxhall Gardens in London, which were internationally famous for two hundred years between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.)

From Copenhagen we took a boat to the island of Bornholm, which, though just off the coast of Sweden, belongs to Denmark (as the Channel Islands, off the coast of France, belong to Britain). There we spent a week or ten days. Gunnela’s hostility to me reached its peak on our first day there, when she threw all my belongings out of the hotel window into the street. After that our relationship improved. There were two reasons for this.

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