My mother, kindly soul that she was, somehow agreed to take in two Swedish students for a fortnight before they joined some of their friends who were to camp in the Lake District in August. My elder sister had recently left home so there was a room vacant, into which she put twin beds; and as I had passed my driving test she reckoned I would be able to look after them, as they were eighteen and I was the great age of 19. The idea was that they should learn English for a fortnight as it is spoken in an English home and that they should then go on to the camp to act as interpreters for their friends. On top of that it transpired that their parents were taking the opportunity of their sons' stay in England to take a month's holiday in Tahiti and Hawaii.
I remember well their arrival at my home. Their English was already pretty good and they were brought to the house by Berndt's uncle, who lived in London and spoke better English than most of us English! He was serving as the contact for both of them, just in case anything went wrong, so before leaving he gave my mother his telephone number and London address.
They were very polite, giving my mother presents from Sweden and expressing pleasure in being allowed to stay with us. They spoke their own language only in the privacy of their bedroom, which impressed us all. Hans was taller than Berndt and more communicative. He joined in wholeheartedly with everything we did to amuse them whereas Berndt was small, slim, dark-haired and less talkative. My young sister, who was 16 at the time, thought Hans was wonderful and very quickly a romance blossomed between them which my mother had not anticipated. I think she was quite relieved when the time to go to Cumberland came round. And then something drastic happened. A day before they were due to go north, Berndt complained of pains in his abdomen. It so happened that only a few months earlier I had had what was left of my appendix surgically removed. The doctor had come to the house, pulled a face when he saw me writhing in agony, tapped me with deft fingers on my abdomen and then pronounced to my mother that I was suffering from gastro-enteritis and that I might seem a bit delirious during the night but that I would start to recover in the morning. He left some medicine to be taken every four hours, but nothing seemed to work and the pain got worse and worse. In the morning I was limp with exhaustion and my mother sent for the doctor again who immediately realized I was a hospital case and ordered up an ambulance to take me to a hospital fifteen miles away where he would no longer have any responsibility for me. Some doctoring! On the way to hospital my appendix burst and I felt warm, easy and drowsy before slipping into unconsciousness. The next I knew was that I was in a hospital bed, fixed up with a drip attached to a needle sticking into my arm and curtains drawn all round my bed. It took a further operation and a month in hospital to repair me and I therefore considered myself something of an expert on appendicitis. So when Berndt complained of pain in the abdomen I was able to ask him his symptoms and to relate them to mine. They were identical! My mother therefore called the same doctor, who took one look, recalled what had happened to me, and had Berndt carted away to hospital forthwith while my mother phoned his uncle in London to tell him of the need for an operation.
Meanwhile it was judged best for Hans to leave for his camp and it became my duty to visit Berndt in hospital. I can't say that I warmed to him. He was too reserved for that and anyway he came to some crazy notion that the doctor had not actually taken out his appendix because it was still hurting in just the same way as it had done before the operation. Looking back on it now, I can see that being all alone in a foreign hospital, with just me and sometimes my sister and mum to visit him, was an unnerving experience. Also, so I'm informed by medical opinion, those who have been operated on sometimes continue to feel the symptoms which have pained them, even when the source of those symptoms has been cured. Whatever, even when he came out of hospital five days after the op, Berndt continued to complain about the pain in his abdomen. The nurse who came to our house to dress his wound assured him he really had had his appendix removed, but he wouldn't believe her. The doctor was called in and said just the same, and yet the pain he was suffering was obvious. My mother phoned his uncle who said the best thing for him would be to take himself out of himself (as he put it) by an activity which he could manage while the wound continued to heal, so it was agreed that though it would be too strenuous for him to join the last week of the camp in the Lake District, it might compensate him for what he was missing if I took him camping on his own for three days to North Wales. Then his uncle would come from London to collect him and he could rejoin Hans for the return to Stockholm.