Tove Ditlevsen, Copenhagen Trilogy

Tove Ditlevsen's Childhood, part one of The Copenhagen Trilogy, has me from page one.

So my mother was alone, even though I was there, and if I was absolutely still and didn't say a word, the remote calm in her inscrutable heart would last until the morning had grown old and she had to go out to do the shopping in Istedgade like ordinary housewives.

I am sensitive to mother/daughter silence and tension, the forms of defence the daughter learns.

I carried the cups out to the kitchen, and inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane. A song, a poem, something soothing and rhythmic and immensely pensive but never distressing or sad, as I knew the rest of the day would be distressing and sad.

Tove Ditlevsen was born the same year as my mother, so to construe for a moment my mother as daughter adds a peculiar piquancy. You are not supposed to understand your mother's interiority, the childhood she carried about. It's enough, more than enough, to configure your own.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin and you can't get out of it on your own. It's there all the time and everyone can see it just as clearly as Pretty Ludwig's harelip. It's the same with him as with Pretty Lili, who's so ugly you can't imagine she ever had a mother. Everything that is ugly or unfortunate is called beautiful, and no one knows why. You can't get out of childhood, and it clings to you like a bad smell. You notice it in other children —each childhood has its own smell. You don't recognise your own and sometimes you're afraid that it's worse than others'.

By chapter 12 her childhood was thin and flat, paper-like, she couldn't help comparing. 'It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn't look like it would last until I was grown up.'

My childhood was supposed to last until I was fourteen, but what was I going to do if it gave out beforehand? You never got answers to any of the important questions. Full of envy, I stared at Ruth's childhood, which was firm and smooth and without a single crack. It looked as if it would outlive her, so that someone else might inherit it and wear it out.

By chapter 15, when the narrator is 12, 'My tattered childhood flaps around me, and no sooner have I patched one hole than another breaks through.' By the end of volume one, the last remnants of her childhood fall away 'like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult.'

See volume 2, Youth, and volume 3, Dependency.