Karin Nyman remembers summer 1946 with her mother, Astrid, the author of Pippi Longstocking

Karin Nyman remembers summer 1946 with her mother, Astrid Lindgren, the creator of Pippi Longstocking

This photo was taken at my paternal grandparents’ house in the Stockholm archipelago. My family and I would spend every July on the island where they lived, whiling away our days bathing in the sea or going on trips in the rowing boat.

That summer was particularly special because the war was over and there was a great sense of relief. I was free from school, my parents were free from their jobs and my brother, Lars, who was seven years older, would often be there, too. It was a happy time.

In the photo, I’m the blonde-haired girl sitting next to my mother, Astrid Lindgren. I must have been 12 years old at the time and we’re sitting in my grandparents’ garden on a small hill looking out to sea. My family was a tightly knit unit then. I was particularly close to my mother and, on holidays like this, we were almost always together.

Unlike most other mothers of that period, she really liked playing with children – for her, it was a genuine pleasure. When she was free from work and writing, she would play with us, running around and inventing games. Later, as a grandmother, she would do the same for my children – they particularly loved a game where she would pretend to be a witch and chase them around the house.

But most of all, my mother was good at telling stories. She read a lot to my brother and me, not just children’s books but also classics and tales from her childhood. She would also invent stories.

I remember that the idea for her most famous character, Pippi Longstocking, came about when I was seven years old and ill in bed with a fever. I pestered her to entertain

Unlike most other mothers of that period, she really liked playing with children – for her, it was a genuine pleasure

me, until one evening she said: ‘But what more can I possibly tell you?’

So I asked her to tell me the story of Pippi Longstocking. It was a name I had just made up; I was playing with words and names, as children do, but it triggered something in my mother’s mind and she began to tell me a story about Pippi. But it was years before she decided to write them down.

My mother was also very good at her other maternal roles, like keeping the house in order and cooking. Every morning she would wake up early, at five or six, to write, then she would make breakfast, pack us off to school and go back to writing (always from her bed).

She had an amazing ability to be incredibly organised – quick and efficient at work and home – while also possessing this vivid imagination. She really was multitalented. A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren, 1939-45 (Pushkin Press, £18.99), by Astrid Lindgren, is out now