When I’d explained the plan, my wife had a question. “Who’s going to go mad
first, the kids or us?”
I could see what she meant. On paper, a lake house in Sweden is a terrible
idea for children. There’s nothing to do. But that was exactly why I wanted
to take them there.
Because we’ve gone activity crazy. We do it at home: quiz an average
middle-class child and you’ll find their weekends have become a tightly
timetabled round of play centres, drama classes, swimming lessons and
parties (always with an entertainer, naturally). And we do it on holiday:
every family hotel in the Med now has a kids’ club, with football coaching,
circus skills sessions and unbearably enthusiastic play leaders called Zoe.
It’s a frenzy of overstructured overstimulation, a sort of collective ADHD,
and I’d had enough of it. What would happen, I wondered, if we took Molly,
five, and Conor, three, and plonked them down somewhere with lots of forest,
maybe a meadow or two, and a lake. And nothing else. No clubs, no water
slides, no interactive displays, nothing organised, laid on, planned out,
licensed by Disney or approved by local health-and-safety officials.
“What will happen,” Jaqui said, “is that first they will go out of their tiny
minds, then they’ll drive us out of ours. Let’s at least take some DVDs and
the laptop.”
No way. We were going cold turkey – and I’d found just the place to do it.
LAKE HOUSES are a bit of an institution in Sweden. There are thousands of ’em.
As the rest of Europe decamps en masse to broiling resorts on the Med, the
Swedes while away their surprisingly warm summer months (July temperatures
are similar to those in Paris) in the pristine bosom of mother nature.
Perfect.
I’d gone for Stenebynas, a remote farmstead with four traditional wooden
houses scattered about its 200 acres. It’s a couple of hours’ drive from
Gothenburg, through increasingly dense and depopulated forest. The moment I
turned off the engine, I wondered what on earth I’d done. The silence hits
you immediately, a quiet so intense it sets your ears ringing. This isn’t
the middle of nowhere, it’s at nowhere’s outer limits.
Our house was charming, though, and the location was stunning. From the
veranda, all we could see was lake, thickly wooded rolling hills, and sky.
For an hour or two, the kids ran around excitedly, exploring the meadow, the
lake shore, the jetties. Then came the moment I was dreading. Molly’s face
took on a quizzical look, and she wandered over.
“Dad,” she said, “what are we going to do here?” I didn’t have the answer
prepared. It came to me unbidden, from some deep, dark place in the
collective Dad unconscious.
“You’ll have to make your own entertainment.” It had finally happened: I’d
turned into my parents. No, my grandparents. Soon, I’d be sending them to
bed without supper and putting them up chimneys. Well, it’ll toughen them
up, you know.
There was silence for a moment while she chewed this over. She frowned, then
opened her mouth and said: “Daaaad ...”
“Bedtime!” Jaqui shouted from the veranda. Saved by the bell. We could all
sleep on it. “SHE’S DISAPPEARED,” Jaqui said early the next morning. I
rushed to join her in the children’s bedroom. It was true. Her brother lay
snoring, but Molly wasn’t there. We ran downstairs. Nobody. Out to the
meadow. Empty. As we raced down to the lake shore, I was starting to sweat.
There she was: stark naked in the cool air, chest-deep in tea-coloured water,
talking to herself. Hearing us, she looked up.
“I’m a mermaid,” she said. “Watch my dance.”
Anyone who’s not a parent may be forgiven for throwing up at this point.
Anyone who is might understand why we sat down by that lake and watched our
daughter prance around the reeds in the pale morning light, believing she
was a supernatural being, and couldn’t speak.
Over the next few days, we discovered what kids do when they’ve got nothing to
do. And it’s this: They splash about. Not in a heated indoor wave pool, but
in cold brown water with a bed of reed roots and squelchy mud that oozes
between your toes. It has never been cleaned, and is presumably full of fish
excrement. They don’t care, and neither do you.
They climb mountains. To us, the rocky outcrops that stud the area (their
favourite was no more than 20ft high) might just be convenient lookouts, but
to them they’re a cross between Everest and Narnia.
They make friends. The other three houses at Stenebynas all harboured children
of various ages, and ours were soon disappearing off with them for longer
and longer periods.
They explore. They take risks. They fall over and get stung by nettles and
roll down slopes and tumble out of trees and pick blackberries and make
daisy chains and have arguments and catch frogs and generally assert their
independence. They turn wild, and it’s a joy to watch.
GROWN-UPS turn wild, too, in their way. Like your kids, you have to make your
own entertainment here, and it consists of fishing, walking, gathering
mushrooms and messing about in boats. You slow down fast. After a few days,
I was capable of staring for a full hour, open-mouthed, at the darting
pattern of ripples that the breeze etched over the surface of the lake. I
was approaching my personal nirvana, a sort of zen idleness.
On the final evening, we took the kids for a long row in the sturdy
clinker-built dinghy, then walked slowly back from the jetty across meadows
strewn with wild flowers, chatting all the way. I tried to pay full
attention, to be in the moment, but I couldn’t stop myself thinking: nobody
has a right to be this happy.
We grilled meatballs on the barbecue, got the children to bed, then sat
sipping aquavit on the veranda, watching the purple bruise of sunset slowly
spread over the sky.
“See?” I said. “Nobody went out of their minds.” “Don’t be so sure,” Jaqui
replied. “I heard you mumbling to yourself today. Anyway, what will you
write about this place?”
“How beautiful it is, and how it lets children rediscover themselves. And the
amazing silence. It’s like a present thing. It’s like the voice of the
earth.”
“You sound like an apprentice druid.” “Yes. It’s probably the aquavit talking.”
“Tell it to stop. You’re going disturbingly new age. It has been fantastic for
the kids though, better than anything we’ve tried on the Med. So why don’t
you just say we had a very good holiday?”
We did. The best ever. Your family will too. Go.
THE SMART GUIDE
What’s the strategy? For the real back-to-nature deal, you want a
traditional house, deep in the forest, right by the water. There can be
three or four more houses nearby, for kids who want to make friends, but any
more than that and it’s a holiday camp – not the same thing at all. The best
lake houses: Stenebynas (00 46 531 33168, www.stenebynas.
se), in the pretty, hilly, lakey district of Dalsland, is idyllic.
Prices run from £800 a week for a two-bedroom house sleeping four, to £1,250
for a seven-bedroom place sleeping nine. Otherwise, there’s a confusing
multitude to choose from across the country, so use an expert operator: try
Simply Sweden (0845 890 0300, www.simplysweden.co.uk),
Scandinavian Holidays (0118 931 4196, www.scandinavianholidays.
org.uk), ScanMeridian (020 7554 3530, www.scanmeridian.co.uk)
or Taber (01274 875199, www.
taberhols.co.uk).
Getting there: fly to Gothenburg from Stansted, Prestwick or Dublin
with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com),
from Heathrow with SAS (0871 521 2772, www.flysas.com),
or from Birmingham or Manchester with City Airline (0870 220 6835, www.cityairline.com).
It’s a two-hour drive to Stenebynas: Ebookers (0871 223 5000, www.ebookers.com)
has a week’s car hire from £159.
Getting around: don’t. You came for peace and stillness, so be peaceful
and still. Make sure your house has a boat, though, just for fun.
The best beach: the one right outside your door. ...
and après-beach: your own veranda, with a glass or two of what you
fancy. If you’re expecting nightlife, you haven’t been paying attention.
Smart thinking: talking of booze, bring your own. The government alcohol
shops are miserable, overpriced and never open when you want them to be.
