“God help our poor planet in the grip of this madness!” she writes in her very first entry, one of many helpless-sounding prayers. She spends most of it trying to imagine the unimaginable: the pain and fear of people caught up in life-or-death battles. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Beta filmĮven for a diary written in interesting times, Lindgren’s is unusually focused on others, almost to the point of self-erasure. Lindgren itemises all this lavishness to make herself feel lucky and guilty it makes the reader feel hungry.Ī scene from a 1969 film of Pippi Longstocking. Their smörgåsbord overflows with lobster, liver pate, salt beef and goose liver, and at Christmas they feast on roast reindeer and black grouse. But mostly she and her family – husband Sture, managing director of the Swedish motorists’ association, and children Lars and Karin – want for nothing. The war begins with Lindgren hoarding cocoa, tea and soap, and there is some minor grousing about butter rations. “Germany will have to bear the blame in perpetuity,” she writes in December 1939, “for letting the Russian barbarians loose on Europe.” Along with many other Swedes, she feels her country is a minnow trying to evade the jaws of two equally terrifying predators, Nazism and Bolshevism.

Lindgren notes at one point that Sweden is suffering from “unrequited love” for Finland, bombarding its people with everything from knitted woollens to bottled blood and receiving only bitterness in return. She is constantly worried that Sweden will be drawn into the war it stays neutral throughout, but this makes for strained relations with the country’s neighbours. Lindgren writes mostly as a guilt-ridden onlooker.

Astrid lindgren longstocking