painting and handicrafts. (There exists in the village to this day
a painted cupboard door signed with her initials.) He found it
was not easy for a retired army captain in his thirtieth year to
embark on higher education; they were penniless, and when she
fell ill he had to pawn her fur coat to pay the doctor’s bill. (Nils
heroically cabled her the money to redeem the coat and buy a
ticket back to Stockholm.) Her mother tried to lure her home
by offering the family’s summer house near Drottningholm; in
her reply, inviting her mama to Munich instead, Carin added
the eloquent assurance: “Mama would not have to see Göring
even at a distance.”
“Bavaria,” she wrote in this letter, of May , , “is a
lovely countryside, so rich, so warm and so intellectual and
strong so unlike the rest of Germany. I am very happy here
and feel very much at home. When I feel homesick for Sweden,
it is really only a longing for Mama, Nils, the little boy, and those
I love. But just that painful, insane longing means that I am
nearly always melancholy. Oh, my own dear Mama, if only one
didn’t have such powerful love within one.”