Swedish motherhood

Andrew Brown

Stockholm/Helsinki

The Aminoff story had something for everyone who hates Sweden. Many of the details were unclear, but the meaning and the significance of the story were quite plain. Eva Aminoff, a middle-aged Finnish journalist living in a suburb of Stockholm with her son Alexander, had so offended the authorities by her flamboyance, aggres- sion and eccentricity that they determined to take her child away from her at any price. Two previous attempts — in 1972 and 1975 — had been foiled by Eva remov- ing the child from the hospitals where he was held: but in 1979, when Alexander was ten, he was taken from school without any warning — by two policemen and two social workers. Ignoring the boy's cries and struggles, they took him to the child psychiatric department of a large Stockholm hospital and kept him there, without any contact with his mother, for six weeks. The immediate cause of this was a report to the local social workers from a doctor who had seen neither Alexander nor his mother for four years, and who alleged, amongst other things, that Eva Aminoff was continuously drunk — a contention which was later proved quite false.

Two days after Alexander had seen his mother for the first time, he determined to escape, and did so. Alone and without help, he made his way to a hospital in Finland, where he thought he would be safe, and rang his mother to tell her that he was. She told the local social workers: that same afternoon, two of them, accompanied by two male nurses, flew to Helsinki and col- lected the panic-stricken child. He was taken to the country house of a psychiatrist, who announced, without ever meeting Eva, that the boy had been profoundly disturbed by his mother. This psychiatrist had, in- cidentally, hired extra help to make sure that Alexander would not escape again.

From there he was transferred to a secret foster home. His mother was not allowed even to send him birthday presents, let alone to know where he was. The only com- munications she had had from him were a couple of brief telephone calls, almost in- stantly broken off. All that was known of the foster parents was contained in a letter produced in court in which they expressed regret over Eva Aminoff's 'reactionary struggle', which they, however, interpreted as 'an expression of fear and ignorance when confronted with society's way of helping her'.

No one who had met Eva by then could possibly have interpreted her behaviour like that. She considered herself persecuted by the authorities, and she was doing her damnedest to persecute them right back. In

this she has succeeded wonderfully: her case has become a cause célèbre, both in the Swedish and the foreign press. When Alex- ander finally ran away from his foster home on 8 May this year, his handwritten account of how he escaped was splashed all over the front page of Sweden's biggest daily newspaper. It was a dramatic story: he had built a boat in secret in the woods, and without even the help of oars managed to get away — for he knew it would be im- possible by land. After a while he landed, stole a pair of oars, and then rowed five kilometres across Lake Maelaren, risking his life, until he reached the town of Straengnaes, where he sank the boat and rang his mother up. They fled to Finland, and from there, reunited at last, were free to thumb their noses at the Swedish authorities. Motherhood triumphs once again over the heartless state.

The only snag in this heartwarming story is that only the details of it were anything like correct. Alexander was not taken into care because of Eva's undoubted eccen- tricities but because the child care authorities had very good reason to suppose that she was a dangerous lunatic who would, if unchecked, drive her son mad as well, but who could only be checked by superior force. Alexander was not held against his will in the foster home, but seems to have been as happy as he could be there. He cer- tainly did not need to build a boat in secret to escape, nor is there any independent evidence that he did so. Even the dramatic solitary escape to Helsinki in 1979 turns out to have been phony.

Perhaps the most improbable aspect of the whole story — and that is really saying something — is the fact that both versions of the Aminoff case arise from the same documents: the Lidingoe social board's two reports on their dealings with the Aminoff family, completed in 1975 and 1979.

The 1975 report tells an extraordinary story. Eva-Helena Linna was born in 1919 (she says 1929) and married Friherre (Baron) Adolf Aminoff, a successful patent engineer, in 1948. The Aminoffs are a large and for the most part prosperous clan of Finno-Swedish aristocrats, a class whose at- titudes and beliefs would seem to a modern Swede to stem from prehistoric times — say

spectator 2 June 1984 about 1809, when Finland from being 3 Swedish province became a Russian one.. And parts of the dossier.do suggest that II was no one now living but the first Mrsf Rochester who was running the Aminaf household. The Aminoffs' marriage was not toward. s its end a happy one. Their only son, born in 1951, drowned off the Canary Isles in 1968' The following year, the child care authorities in Lidingoe deprived them of a four-year-old girl they had been looking after. This child was the bastarddaugb. ter of one of the Aminoffs' Finnish maids' Miss Rosenquist, who was 21 when t.1,11e child was born in 1965. She was quite 'or ing at first for the Aminoffs to adopt her daughter, but then that is not quite Wlia.1 Eva did. Instead she went to a priest in Helsinki with the newborn babe, and vinced him that she had given birth to tile, child herself on one of the desolate islets oft the coast. Armed with the baptismal cer- tificate, the Aminoffs then returned tn Sweden, where they registered the girl as their own daughter born in Finland. Meanwhile the authorities at ti.'; Stockholm hospital where Miss Rosenquis had given birth were looking for her: s.11he had said she was returning to Finland Wit': the child, yet had not arrived there. Even, tually and despite Eva's determined effnr.L; to hinder them, they found Miss Rose''s in a suburb of Stockholm, but the baby, she explained, was being looked after bY the Aminoffs. Oh dear, oh dear. TheP°11cAe eventually unravelled what had happene",. The next stage was to pretend that Barc)" Adolf was the father. This story was thrown in due course by a court in Helsin./O in 1970, but by that time Miss Ro5enclin5t had got her daughter back. It happened like ,h 11kee this. In April 1969 Eva was abroad, and '.7,,- Rosenquist girl was being looked after I' her absence by a woman identified only a,5 Mrs X (apparently to shield her from E`'? 5, revenge). Mrs X took the child to hospita' for reasons which remain unclear. The clae- tor there found the circumsta1ce,5 'remarkable' and the little girl 'depresse. He kept her in for an examination. Miss Rosenquist, who had been making tentative efforts to get her daughter back, came over from Finland, stayed with a social worker for ten days, and then returned to Finland with her child. The whole business was over in a month. The Aminoffs appealed against this dec.i" d sion to the county court, claiming that MI5 Rosenquist was an unsuitable mother whose habits were not above reproach; fur- ther, that she came of humble stock and would sell the child to Denmark if given a chance. These arguments were dismissed. The one about selling the child to Denmar marks the first appearance of Eva's peculiar style of abuse, which later becomes an portant factor in the case. Alexander Aminoff was privatelY adopted in the Finnish countryside in the summer of 1969 when he was two or three months old. A woman of Eva's age af,d,, history would not of course have been au1`

to adopt any child in Sweden, but Finland is

very different country. Eva's determina- tion and Adolf's barony and character overcame the doubts of the tribunal, and Alexander was officially adopted in Helsinki on 8 April 1971. Shortly thereafter the Aminoffs returned to Lidingoe. The file resumes the story in February .1973, when Alexander contracted a mild ear infection. Eva took him to hospital. When the doctor refused to prescribe penicillin, she .accused him of being a drunken drug addict and threatened to shoot him, before stornn

rig. off to another hospital where her

behaviour so impressed the doctors that they gave Alexander a bed, ostensibly for his infection, in fact to find out if there was

anything really wrong. Eva's final score for that at

-ay was two doctors, an assistant pro- fessor and a professor of medicine all warn- ring the child care authorities that she might De Mad. Two of them did so in writing. When Eva realised why Alexander was being kept in hospital she removed him at once. Nothing had by then been found to suggest there was anything wrong with him. At this state, the leading authorities confer- red, and decided that Eva's psychological quirks were not in themselves sufficient grounds for taking forcible action. When the next crisis came in the summer of 1975, the evidence that forced them to act was different in kind and very much nastier:

It is detailed, circumstantial and horrify- g' and it admits of only two interpreta- "°ns: either Eva Aminoff was in fact mad

and grossly mistreating Alexander, or she was the victim of a monstrous conspiracy, one which involves at the very least four social workers, two neigbours, three au pair girls and the staff at the psychiatric clinic where Alexander was eventually examined. All these people told stories consistent with each other in important and damning details. All of them had actually been in a position to see what they purported to describe. Assuming for the moment that they were all lying, what motives could they have had? Eva's answer is clear. The neighbours, with whose daughters Alex- ander had been playing for the previous 18 months, were thieves; they copulated in front of visiting children who were forced to play sexual games with each other. The social workers were moved by personal spite — one of them had lost a petty lawsuit to Eva. The au pair girls took drugs and slept with negroes and Arabs (two of them were 15 and 16). The staff at the psychiatric clinic had wholly misunderstood the rela- tionship between a loving mother and her

loving son. Well, whoever was lying and for whatever reason the social board decided in the autumn of 1975 that Alexander should be placed in a secret foster home and cut off from all contact with his mother. It was the doctor who recommended that who submit- ted the crucial report against Eva in 1979. But the decision was never carried out: when Eva learned of it she smuggled Alex- ander out of the hospital with the help of her husband and her boyfriend and return- ed with Alexander to Finland. Eva and Alexander stayed out of Sweden until 1977, when the order placing him in care was overthrown on technical grounds by the court of appeal.

Thus the background in 1979 when the whole story started again. The report drawn up then contains much less about Eva and much more about Alexander's problems than the previous one — with the important quirk that the most disgusting and ex- travagant allegation about what was wrong with him had been made by Eva herself (unless the police in both Lidingoe and Stockholm were lying). But no one denies that Alexander was by that time seriously disturbed: he stole, he smoked, he stayed in Stockholm alone late at night, he was gratuitously cruel to animals and in school he was very badly bullied. When this time he was put into hospital, he set fire to the ward repeatedly. It is true that he left the hospital in Stockholm unaided though en- couraged, but he was smuggled to Helsinki in the boot of a car by two of Eva's friends, who then parked him in a hospital there. It was the hospital, not Eva, who told the Swedish authorities where he was.

The story then takes two further remarkable twists. The first concerns Alex- ander. He was sent to a foster home on an island in Lake Maelaren. The foster parents were unqualified professionals: that is to say, they supported themselves by looking after difficult children (they were paid £700 a month for Alexander), but the foster father had no qualifications for the job other than previous experience, a very powerful character, and the fact that he had himself been a criminal in his youth. He is now 48. By all accounts he did a very good job indeed. Though Eva and her supporters imagined Alexander was held there against his will and 'brainwashed' to dislike her, I have looked over the house, talked at great length to the foster father, and examined some of Alexander's diaries and Eva's let- ters to him — I was at the time an ac- credited emissary from the Aminoffs in Helsinki — and I can't believe a word of it. If Alexander stayed there it was because he wanted to. If he failed to write very often to his mother it was because he didn't want to. Had he wanted even to let her know where he was he could have done so with very little trouble.

But he didn't. And it does seem rather odd behaviour to build a boat in secret when I counted ten different boats ranging from a canoe to a two-masted stay-sailed schooner tied up in front of the house, all ready to be stolen at any time. There was even an ice-yacht available in winter.

Meanwhile Alexander was becoming famous. This was largely the doing of three people: Eva Aminoff, Brita Sundberg Weit- man, a judge in the Stockholm court of ap- peal — and Andrew Brown. I wrote the first foreign article on the case for the Daily Mail in May 1981. Sundberg Weitman had been sent the papers in the case by Eva's lawyer, and in the spring of 1981 she used a version of the Aminoff story to illustrate an article for Svenska Dagbladet about the dangers of the then law on child care. Her version started as follows: 'There is a coun- try' (Sweden) 'where the authorities can forcibly separate a child from its parents to prevent them from giving it a privileged up- bringing.' It takes a mind of really remarkable subtlety and power to draw that conclusion from the Aminoff dossier. In fact I still can't quite see how she did it.