The celebrated author’s daughter recalls Sweden during wartime, and the night she came up with the name for one of children’s literature’s great heroines

On 1 September 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland, my mother started a diary: “Oh! War broke out today. Nobody could believe it ... God help our poor planet in the grip of this madness!”

She was 32, a mother of two, leading an ordinary family life in a two-room apartment in Stockholm. I was five and my brother 12. My father worked as an office manager, my mother took on part-time jobs as a typist-stenographer, a profession she was trained for. But in my memory, she is always at home with us.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We knew she had a talent for telling stories’ … Astrid Lindgren and Karin Nyman. Photograph: Krause, Johansen/Lindgren Estate

What urged her to take clippings of war news from the morning papers almost daily, to gather them in notebooks and add commentaries of her own, along with details of her family life? And to stick to this task, dutifully, for the rest of the war? She was not a diary keeper by habit. Nor was she at that time an established writer who might consider any of it fit for publication. She did it for herself, and for her family; perhaps to try and piece together a coherent picture of what she felt was an incalculable disaster to come. And it is fascinating, 70 years later, knowing how events unfolded, to follow her apprehensive, sometimes sarcastic, reactions to the news of the day.

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The diaries were kept in a basket in which my mother had received packages of butter and eggs from her farming parents during the war, sent by railway probably. In her old age, when her eyesight grew very bad, we would read passages aloud to her, and she would say: “I am glad I did that.” I suppose she meant that it was a good thing that she had documented it all for us to read. It was only later that it occurred to us to publish her diaries for a wider readership.

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On 9 April 1940, she notes: “So now the Nordic countries are a theatre of war and Sweden is the only one of them not to have experienced foreign troops on its soil. The peaceful corner of Europe, ha ha! We are braced for general mobilisation and it is probably only a matter of time before the Germans decide to ‘defend’ our neutrality, too.”

Sweden was spared in the end. It was the one Nordic country that wasn’t invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany, as Denmark and Norway were, or forced to defend itself against the Soviet Union, like Finland. We had peace. But we lived in fear nevertheless, every week during those first war years, of becoming the next country to be attacked.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Lindgren family go skiing, in a page from Astrid’s wartime notebooks. Photograph: Lindgren Estate

The war years had an effect, even on us children who lived safely in Sweden. We were surrounded by enemy forces at each border and in every country on the other side of the Baltic Sea. But we were told not to worry, that “the war won’t come to Sweden”. And I think I believed that. I had every reason to trust my mother, I always did. It seemed quite reasonable to us that we, for some reason, had escaped the great danger that threatened the world outside.

On 5 September 1942 my mother noted: “The war is three years old and I have not celebrated its birthday. We’ve all found our attitude to the war gradually changing. We used to talk about it all the time; now we see it as a necessary evil, to be thought of and talked about as little as possible.”

My memories of that period of my life are rather faded. I seem to recall an atmosphere of drab colourlessness in the streets of Stockholm. The winters were extremely cold and the pavements encumbered with huge stacks of wood, for heating. There were few people about, and almost no motor traffic.

I was an indoor child, not adventurous and outgoing like my brother. I preferred to stay close to my family at home, reading, writing and drawing. I enjoyed skating, though, on the ice rink in the park nearby. And my mother and I went skiing in a wood not far from where we lived.

The summers were bright and happy, despite the war; always warm and sunny in my memory. We would spend July at my father’s parents’ house in the Stockholm archipelago, bathing in the sea, learning to swim and cycle. In August I would stay with my cousins at the farm that my other grandfather was the tenant of, in my mother’s birthplace, Småland. We helped with harvesting, as much as little children can, weeding beets, driving horse carts across the fields, delivering stakes to the farm workers. To me, my grandparents’ and my uncle’s homes were paradise, and gave me a valuable insight into the countryside of my mother’s childhood – a world I came to recognise when I read her books, years later.

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Her books. At the time there were none published, and none intended. My mother for some years had been supplementing her income by selling children’s tales to Christmas magazines, but there was no author’s ambition linked to it. It is obvious from her wartime diaries that she had a talent for journalism (at 19 she had worked as an assistant reporter for a daily newspaper in her hometown). And we children knew that she had a great talent for telling stories. Bedtime was always connected with her reading aloud, or making up stories. She read us all the well-known children’s books, but also the classics – RL Stevenson, Dickens and Thackeray, as well as modern humorists such as PG Wodehouse.

But who could have known that one day her books would come to be regarded as some of the finest children’s literature ever written, translated into more than 90 languages? That her story about a small red-haired girl with extraordinary physical strength would sell millions of copies was something she could never have foreseen in these days.

I was ill in bed for a long period in 1941, my first school year. I was bored, and kept begging my mother to tell me stories. One evening she said, exhausted: “But what more can I tell you?” An answer came bursting forth, in an attempt to keep her by me: “Tell me about Pippi Longstocking!” It was a name out of the blue, only a child’s play on words. But it did the trick. She started to tell me a completely new story.

• A World Gone Mad: The Diaries of Astrid Lindgren 1939-45 is published by Pushkin Press. To order a copy for £15.57 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..