Björnö is a small island in lake Märlaren near to Västerås where we lived. We'd been told by older kids the name meant the bear and the island looked like a bear on a map. I never believed them because even though I was rubbish at Swedish grammar and björn means bear I knew the bear would have been björnen or possibly björnet. I suspected the former, but I never did get to learn too well my ens and ets, and I looked for it on a map and it definitely didn’t look like a bear. A complication was I found an island called Bjørnø which is a Norwegian spelling pronounced as near as makes no odds the same, but I was sure it was somewhere else. I’ve never bothered to check.

Björnö was a nature reserve, but there were few folk went there when we were kids. As kids we used to go there in gangs and use the bridge. But I preferred to go on my own. I’d cycle five kilometres out from where I lived in Västerås and leave my bike at the lake edge. I’d undress down to my vest and knickers and wade and swim through the shallow, cool, green water. The Mälar and its lakes are famous for the green water. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I’d undressed completely because girls and boys were used to nudity, but I used to keep my vest and knickers on and say I got cold easily if I met anyone.

I did that because I wouldn’t completely look like a girl till I was old enough for the doctors to finish what mother nature had made a bit of a mix up over. Some of the girls’ mothers had said nasty things to Mamma about me where we used to live in Örebro. That’s why we moved and Mamma wanted me to keep it a secret till I finished school. Not even Freja my little sister, never mind my cousin Björn who was in the same class as me at school, knew.

The smell of the pines on the island on a warm day was so overpowering that you could taste it at the back of the throat sort of like a cross between sniffing violin rosin and new book shelves. On your own you could hear the birds from half way across the hundred metres of water, they didn’t bother to fly off as you approached, because they knew they were safe. You finally waded up the island shore where the beach has squishy sandy mud that oozes satisfactorily between your toes. It was a great place to be on your own and just be and think about just being.

By the time I’d started to think about boys as being interesting just because they were boys, I realised Mamma had been right, I didn’t want to stay away from them any more. How could I be kissed by a boy if I avoided them all the time? About then the girls I knew were getting unpredictably silly and crying for no reason sometimes. Mamma explained all that to me, and I became a first rate actress. I could cry and blush at will, and be silly and moody. I carried the appropriate things in my bag and when it was my friend Torill’s time of the month that was my trigger to behave that way too. It was noticed by the other girls and I made sure to be before Torill every now and again. They used to say, “Today Ingrid’s cranky, so tomorrow Torill will be too,” or the other way round.

I used to go to Björnö on my own when things were all getting a bit much, and I’d dream about when I was older and could run about naked playing in the sun like all the other girls. I especially used to dream about running about naked with the boys too. Mamma explained to me what happened when boys were thinking about those sorts of things and asked me had it never happened to me. “No, Mamma,” I’d replied puzzled. “Why would it when I’m a girl? When I think about nice boys I feel kind of fluttery in my tummy, but nothing there!” Mamma said I was an unfortunate girl, but for an unfortunate girl I was a very fortunate one. It was years before I worked that one out.

Decades later, I’ve been happily married for many years, and my husband and I have six children, all adults with children of their own. Though no longer a girl, I do live somewhere where my family and I can enjoy the sun on our naked bodies, and it always takes me back to the days when I could not enjoy that simple pleasure. There is something wonderful about a family, in our case three generations of us, enjoying such a thing, playing and picnicking together. It is a healthy, innocent fun, that I wish Mamma and Pappa were still with us to share, but at least they lived long enough to enjoy being with some of their great grand children naked under the sun.

Now Björnö is a major attraction and loads of people go there, especially people from Stockholm. I read on the internet that a new bridge was planned because the old one is falling apart, I presume it’s still under construction because it started in 2017 and all I could find was it was ‘ongoing’. I haven’t lived anywhere near Björnö, nor indeed anywhere near Sweden, for decades and I’m not going to look up any more details because I don’t wish my memories destroyed by ‘progress’.