Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson Page A

when Daddy and I walked through the forest with the storm-lantern to fetch the baskets of mushrooms.
    During the day the family had picked them. Daddy had led us to the right places, his places, where crowds of mushrooms grew. He didn’t pick any himself, hejust lit his pipe and made a gesture which seemed to say, carry on everybody. Food!
    We picked and picked. Not just any old how. Mushrooms were important – hundreds of lunches during the whole winter. Almost as important as fish. Every mushroom has mysterious mycelia under it and the place where they grow must be preserved for ever and ever for future generations and it is a sign of good citizenship to collect food for one’s family in the summer and to show respect for nature.
    At night it’s quite different. Then Daddy and I carry the baskets of mushrooms home that we couldn’t manage during the day. It has to be dark. There was no need to save oil, so we were really extravagant with it. And Daddy always found the place. Sometimes it was windy and the branches made a ghastly sound as they rubbed against each other. Daddy found the right spot. There were the baskets of mushrooms and he said: well I’ll be damned! Look, there they are!
    The most beautiful mushrooms were on top. He arranged them according to their colour and shape because they were his bouquets. He did the same with fish.
    Once Daddy put his baskets of mushrooms down on the ground and went into the house to find the rest of the family. While he was inside Rosa the cow devoured the lot. She knew she could rely on Daddy and that there wasn’t a single poisonous mushroom in the basket.
    Now there’s a steady wind. The fourth bay is a long way away. I am going through a forest drawn by that great artist John Bauer. He knew how to draw forests and since he was drowned nobody has dared to draw them. And Mummy and I think that anybody who does is contemptible.
    To draw a forest so that it’s big enough you don’t include the tops of the trees or any sky. Just very thick tree-trunks growing absolutely straight. The ground consists of soft mounds, getting farther and farther away and smaller and smaller until the forest becomes endless. There are stones but you can’t see them. Moss has grown over them for thousands of years and no one has disturbed it. If you step on the moss once you make a big hole which doesn’t straighten out for a week. If you step on it a second time there will be a hole there for ever and ever. The third time you step on the moss it will die.
    In a proper painting of a forest everything is roughly the same colour, the moss, the tree-trunks and the branches of the fir trees, everything is soft and solemn, half-way between grey and brown and green, but very little green. If you want you can add a princess, for example. She is always white and very tiny and has long yellow hair. She is placed in the middle or in the golden section. After John Bauer’s death princesses became modern and were just any colour. They were just ordinary children dressed up.
    It’s the fourth bay that is the great carcass bay where the pig floated ashore. It was enormous andsmelt terrible. Sometimes I think it was an awful-reddish -blue colour and its eyes rolled as it was dashed against the rocks but I’m not sure and I don’t care to think about it too much.
    You never meet anybody in the great carcass bay and there’s nothing to remember. It’s a place for awful images that rise up out of the sea.
    First come the birds. You can see them on the horizon like a bank of clouds. The cloud gets bigger. Great birds thirty feet long flying so slowly it’s uncanny. Their wings look like tattered palm leaves, straggling and blown to shreds, a thousand enormous birds stretch across the sky casting shadows over the earth. Not one of them says a thing.
    And now …
    If a morning came when the sun didn’t rise. If we were to wake up as usual and