Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson

Finland is the home of the Moomins.

The Moomins are the peace-loving,

philosophical family of Moominpappa,

Moominmamma,

and their son Moomintroll.

Conceived in the 1940s as a series of children's books,

the Moomins are now a global phenomenon...

..making their creator, Tove Jansson,

one of the most successful children's authors of all time.

And yet she remains eclipsed by the success of her work.

She is known, if at all, for her supposed

hermit-like existence on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland

and not for the lyrical adult fiction she wrote there,

nor the career as a painter she pursued so ardently

throughout her life.

Like her work, Tove Jansson's own story has many other sides

and transformations.

From her birth in 1914 to her death in 2001,

her life was as colourful, complex

and as stormy as her greatest creations.

# Don't know why

# There's no sun up in the sky

# Stormy weather

# Since my man and I ain't together

# Keeps raining all the time

# Life is bare

# Gloom and misery everywhere

# Stormy weather

# Keeps raining all the time... #

Well, she was quite small and very gracious.

Thin and little, like a ballet dancer.

Even when she was really old.

She had an amazing ability

to acknowledge every person's presence

and be interested.

She was very friendly,

but she could also hold back when she didn't want to answer.

Inspired by her love of animals, nature

and the changing seasons, Tove Jansson charted

the adventures of the tightly-knit Moomin family

and their eclectic collection of friends

across a series of eight books.

The Moomins live in Finland, somewhere where

it's so cold in the winter they have to hibernate.

The Moomin family consists of Moominpappa, with his top hat,

with his love of sailing.

Moomintroll is very eager, very curious

and he's very attached to his mother.

Moominmamma has this big handbag, like Mrs Thatcher,

and the handbag's got everything in it.

I mean, everything is in that handbag.

I think that this concept of family really is very crucial

for the success of the books.

But it's not really just this three Moomin unit,

because it's an extended family.

We have Snufkin.

And he's the character that you want to be when you're a kid, I think.

You want to be Snufkin.

I definitely wanted to be Snufkin and then woke up one day

and found myself Moominpappa.

Hemulens generally wear dresses, which is why they curtsy, not bow.

They're generally obsessed with collecting things,

whether it be stamps or plants or butterflies.

And then there's Little My, who's this very ferocious little creature,

very tiny, lives in the cutlery drawer.

And she's disgraceful, she has no respect for anything

and she'll kick and she'll be incredibly rude

and say all those things you wish you could say yourself.

There are characters in those books who kind of set your teeth on edge,

Fillyjonk and loud Hemulens and stuff,

but you learn that they have their reasons.

And you learn that they have their uses as well.

That's even more important, really.

I would say that if she had one big theme, it would be tolerance.

While the Moomins lived together in easy harmony,

Tove Jansson's family dynamic was more complicated.

They were close as a family,

yet they all were active separately

and they gave each other space

to be themselves.

Tove Jansson and her two younger brothers, Per Olov and Lars,

grew up in a crowded artist's studio in the country's capital, Helsinki.

The city provided an eclectic mix of architectural styles,

cultures and languages.

Her own family were part of a minority of Swedish-speaking Finns

who lived alongside the majority of Finnish speakers.

Her father, Viktor,

worked as a sculptor in the classical tradition.

My father was a sculptor.

His main theme for many years

was the female form.

And Tove was his favourite model.

Father loved big storms

and he loved fires.

If there was a fire somewhere in Helsinki

and Father saw smoke rolling above the ceilings,

then he gathered his children and went fire-hunting.

Moominpappa, of course, was Father,

loving storms and adventures.

The family could not always rely on their father's commissions

to put food on the table.

To ensure a steady income, their mother, Signe Hammarsten,

otherwise known as Ham,

worked as a graphic artist for hire.

Mother sat working at her table,

Tove beside her.

And Tove had pen and paper

and Tove looked at what Mother was doing

and then she made her own drawing.

Tove Jansson showed artistic promise

almost as soon as she could hold a pen.

Tove developed her drawing technique

when she saw Mother creating

postage stamps with narrow black lines on white paper.

She has described

that the safest place in the world

is inside your mother's tummy.

So there's sort of a little world of their own

where no-one else can come in.

Mother was the typical Moominmamma,

staying at home and preparing a good meal for her family.

Serene at all times.

Nothing could shake her.

Not only were Viktor Jansson's commissions unreliable,

but also his moods, which his family attributed to trauma

he'd suffered as a soldier during the Finnish civil war of 1918.

Tove Jansson would reflect on this in her writing decades later.

"Dad became gloomier and gloomier

"until he finally stopped talking altogether.

"One morning, he didn't even go out fishing.

"He simply lay in bed, staring at the ceiling with his lips clenched."

Father started drinking too much,

then he became unfaithful.

Mother never showed anything.

Tove, naturally, knew much more

about the trouble between Mother and Father...

..and she sided with Mother.

She sublimated her own difficulties

by transferring them to the Moomin figures.

She was unable to show anger,

but Little My did.

And Snufkin could just walk away from it

and Tove couldn't.

Like many Finns, the Janssons would leave

their cramped city dwelling each summer

and head for the open sea.

The Nordic landscape in the Gulf of Finland,

which Tove Jansson explored as a child,

would later seep into her fiction,

appearing as the lush valleys and unexplored coastlines of Moominland.

They liked it so much there that then they came back every summer,

to the extent that now everybody else in the family

has also spent their summers in this same spot.

It becomes a really important place

and it is a really important place for us.

It's still quite a long way,

but it's obviously much easier than it used to be.

Today, what we do is we drive

to a town about 50 kilometres to the east of Helsinki

called Borga, or Porvoo in Finnish.

Like the Jansson family, the people of Porvoo

were traditionally Swedish-speaking Finns.

It used to be predominately Swedish-speaking,

but today...

hardly any cities in Finland are Swedish-speaking anymore.

And then from there you go on to a place called Tirmo...

..and when you get to Tirmo there's a ferry and you have to wait.

And then the ferry ferries you over to a set of islands.

They go by the name of Pellinge.

The road continues over bridges

and eventually you get to where the Gustafssons live.

The Gustafssons rented their house to the Janssons most summers

throughout Tove's childhood.

The two families have remained friends for over four generations.

Hey, hey!

When the Jansson family started coming here, they had to make

the whole journey from Helsinki to these islands by boat.

Once at the Gustafssons' house,

the Janssons would sleep together in one room throughout the summer.

Ja, ja.

It was here that the young Tove,

already an accomplished cartoonist, amused her little brothers

by scribbling her first Moomin on the wall of the outside loo.

It was not long before Moomin was out of the water closet

and onto the pages of the Swedish language press.

Tove's formidable talent for caricature had caught

the eye of Garm, a satirical magazine which commissioned

drawings from her before she'd even left school.

The early version of Moomin she drew in Garm

was known as the Snork.

And this is the first picture where

you can see the actual Snork.

But it doesn't very much resemble

the Moomin we know today,

which is very round and soft and wonderful and kind.

This is more like a nightmare Moomin.

And the picture is depicting the person's nightmares

when he's very drunk and coming home very late.

And the joke in this picture is that the gentleman is saying,

"Well, it must have been a very cold night

"because all the ground is frozen."

And he's stepping on glass on the way to his home.

Although Tove Jansson had been a recognised

graphic artist from as young as 14,

she knew that her passion lay with painting and fine art.

In 1933, she enrolled in the fine art course

at Helsinki's Ateneum.

When Tove was born,

the father said that he hoped

their daughter would be an artist.

And that was a very important thing for Tove, for all her life.

Almost immediately,

she would encounter the first barriers to her ambition.

She thought that the teaching

and teachers were boring, and they were.

I think they were very old-fashioned and conservative.

Very many men thought that

women's place is in the kitchen.

Really, they think so. They believed in that.

Tove Jansson would eventually abandon

the formal training of art school.

Instead, she continued her studies with a private tutor,

the charismatic and respected painter Sam Vanni.

Seeing something special in his pupil,

Sam Vanni asked her to sit for a portrait.

She has a pen and a paper

and, actually, I'm sure that she is drawing his picture.

"When it begins to get dark, Samuel gathers his brushes together

"and with a joy that hurts I look at his picture

"and tell myself it couldn't be so beautiful

"if he didn't love me."

She's so eager, she's eager to see even more.

She's not like a passive woman.

Sam saw, in Tove, the intelligent woman.

Tove had very many men,

so I think Sam wasn't the only one all the time.

While Tove Jansson's romantic life had found the light,

dark clouds would form across her country

with great consequences for her family and friends.

In the winter of 1939,

the Soviet Union conducted a partially successful invasion of Finland,

casting a shadow across the small country's future.

As Finland contemplated how to expel the Soviets,

Nazi Germany's war machine spread across Western Europe and into Scandinavia.

My father wanted me to enlist

and my mother cried.

I'd never seen her cry so much.

It was a difficult time for me.

Should I obey Father or obey Mother?

I decided to wait.

Caught between these two expanding empires,

Finland agreed to co-operate with the Nazi invasion

of the Soviet Union.

"..starten zum Angriff im Rahmen von..."

Within days of the Nazi-led assault,

the Soviets had begun their bombing campaign of Finland.

Still working for Garm, Tove Jansson began

a series of illustrations which reflect the plight of her country.

There is the angel of peace

and here you can see the demolished earth

with ruins and aeroplanes bombing.

The message is very, very clear.

Tove Jansson was very...

upset over war

and she was feeling it very deeply.

She wasn't a political person at all,

but she sensed it in a human way.

She didn't like the Germans,

she didn't like the Soviet Union.

She hated the war.

"Finnische Truppen im Stoss auf..."

By now, Tove's brother,

Per Olov, had been drafted into the Finnish army.

The war affected my family deeply.

And I've always...

..thought that it affected my family

more than it did me...

because I was in the middle of it...

..and they could only guess and be afraid.

Tove Jansson attempted to capture

this fear in a family portrait.

It's a picture of a family in trouble.

It's also a picture of Finland.

It's an extraordinary painting.

She was working with it for several years.

And it was very difficult for her to paint it.

The picture of Tove in the middle,

dressed in black, was like

she's watching all over the family.

And Father is on one side

and the mother is on the other side.

Tove is some kind of dividing point in the picture.

And then there is the two brothers,

Per Olov who was in the war,

and the little brother, Lars, who was not yet in the war.

War would also separate Tove from many of her friends,

including the Jewish photographer Eva Konikoff,

who fled Finland for America in 1941.

Tove poured out her feelings to Eva in a series of illustrated letters,

which reveal that, far from being solely a visual artist,

she also had a talent for writing.

It became a kind of diary.

Yes, a kind of diary to write these letters.

There are several pages in them. They could be seven, eight, nine pages.

"Sometimes it feels as if something of the collected agony

"of the whole world has been weighing heavily in me

"like a lump and threatening to burst apart."

Everything is just very depressing, she thinks, during the war.

There is no inspiration at last, even to work,

-which is, for her, a very...

-Mmm.

..very sad thing.

In her letters to Eva, Tove indicates

her growing resistance to a conventional family life.

"It's a man's war.

"I can see what will happen to my work if I get married.

"I will become either a bad painter or a bad wife.

"And I don't want to give birth to children only for them

"to be killed in some future war."

You have a feeling that she's quite a feminist here,

but it's her feminism, I would say.

She could see that she was an artist.

She would never have had time for family and children.

Her art was more important than anything else.

She was ready to...

..to live without a family.

As Tove Jansson came to the realisation

that she would never have a family of her own, she began to invent one.

The Moomins would bring together her gifts as an artist

with her fluency as a writer.

Her fictional family,

and the magical landscape in which she painted them,

would draw on the bleak realities of the day.

In the opening months of war,

Tove Jansson had started writing her first novel for children,

Moomin And The Great Flood,

in which a torrential deluge surges through Moominvalley,

separating Moomintroll

and Moominmamma from Moominpappa.

I think you could say that she wrote her first two books

in the shadow of the war.

Because they are refugees, and for Moomintroll,

the family's splitting up.

Moomintroll is trying to find his father

and a new home with his mother.

There are very many dangerous things

before they get to the happy ending.

That first book set the tone

that this was a family with all these catastrophes happening to them,

but through being who they were

they would make it and the ending would be a good ending.

The book was followed by Comet In Moominland,

in which the hero Moomin faces another catastrophe.

"Look," whispered Sniff in terror.

The sky was no longer blue, it was pale red.

"Perhaps it's the sunset," said Snufkin, doubtfully.

But Moomintroll looked very grave and said, "No.

"This time, it's the comet. It's on its way to Earth."

There's a flood in the first one

and then there's the comet in the second one.

She was truly fascinated by the comet.

She returned to it several times

as a symbol or as a metaphor

for the fear of the bombs,

the fear of the annihilation.

But that's quite unique, I think, for a children's book.

By the end of 1944,

another disaster had fallen on Finland.

Following its Armistice with the Soviets in September,

the country had turned its attention to driving out the Nazis,

who left a trail of devastation in their wake.

Tove Jansson's response in satirical magazine Garm

was immediate and direct.

She's very clearly showing that the Nazi symbol is drowning, and people,

very different persons here,

they are anxious to get away from it, so that they won't drown themselves.

I think that this is much more brave

than we could imagine today.

Another conflict, one between Tove and her father Viktor,

was coming to a head within the Jansson household.

It was time for her to choose a home of her own.

In 1944, she found one in the centre of Helsinki.

It was an artist's studio, really.

Some of the walls were broken, the windows were broken

but that didn't matter, it was her studio

and I think it was love at first sight.

She could work here, she could live here and she could love here.

In her new studio, Tove celebrated the end of the war

and welcomed in an exciting period

of experimentation and self-discovery.

SHE SPEAKS IN HER OWN LANGUAGE

-Of course.

-Of course. Tove danced all the time!

Still heady with post-war optimism,

Tove encountered a new lover who would change her life for ever -

actress and aspiring theatre director Vivica Bandler.

Tove fell passionately in love with her.

Not only were same-sex relationships outlawed in Finland at that time,

but Vivica was married.

Tove wanted to speak of her love,

she was so happy and Vivica said to her, "We must be very, very careful."

She didn't want to speak of it as openly as Tove wanted.

The affair was intense but brief and ended within weeks

when Vivica went abroad to work.

She had had her love story, a love story with a woman,

and she was very sad, very disappointed

and she tried to raise herself again.

Tove threw herself into a commission to paint

two society scenes for a restaurant.

The twin frescoes are now conserved in a public building in Helsinki.

I think that Tove has put everything in this one.

As with the Moomin books, Tove Jansson wove the recent events

of her own life into one of the frescoes.

The end of her affair with Vivica is there for all to see.

The name of the fresco is Autumn Party.

The summer is over and the autumn is coming

and she is not happy in that picture. It's a bad day.

She portrays herself alone

while Vivica dances with a different partner.

"I know the whole of my painting

"is going through a process of change just now,

"becoming stronger and more live and this is thanks to you.

"Lines and colours aren't enough

"if there is no expression and zap and intensity in them -

"even if it's the intensity of despair."

If you take a good look, you find every time something new.

Beside Tove sits Moomintroll,

by now her constant companion, along with her cigarettes.

I think Moomin is sitting at the table near Jansson,

drinking champagne and smoking. HE LAUGHS

Tove also recorded her secret love for Vivica in her third

and most successful Moomin book - Finn Family Moomintroll.

In Finn Family Moomintroll, there are two creatures, Thingumy and Bob,

and they come into Moomin Valley,

they have their own language, no-one else can understand it

and they're carrying a suitcase with a secret content.

Eventually it's revealed that it is a ruby,

a red ruby with a very, very fantastic light.

Also they are chased by the Groke, she is dark,

symbolising a sort of fear.

The Groke wants to get hold of this content too

because she claims it is hers. So the ruby is a symbol of love.

They had to hide their love away for the society.

There you can see the story between Tove and Vivica

and their secret love.

Tove's personal transformation

was also reflected in the bigger themes of the book.

In the Finn Family Moomintroll, the Hobgoblin loses his hat

and the problem with the Hobgoblin's hat,

or the plus side, depending on your luck,

is if something falls into the hat it will become something else.

And Moomin unwittingly hides in the Hobgoblin's hat

and he emerges completely changed,

but he doesn't know that he's changed because he thinks he's Moomin,

and all his playmates, the Snork,

the Snork Maiden, they don't recognise him.

He becomes very, very upset.

And then Moominmamma comes in and he says, "You recognise me, don't you?

"I'm Moomintroll," and she just goes, "Yeah, you're Moomintroll."

She doesn't blink for a second, she knows it's her son. No matter

how much he's changed, she knows it's her son and it's just...

Even as a kid, I just found that really...

And it just came out of...not an emotional story,

it was a funny story about hiding in a Hobgoblin's hat and then suddenly

this punch of love comes through and knocks you sideways.

The book reflects the acceptance by Tove's own family

of her romances with women, but in the wider society of Finland,

same-sex relationships would remain illegal until 1971.

While the first two Moomin books went largely unnoticed,

Finn Family Moomintroll became Tove Jansson's breakthrough.

Its translation into English in 1950 inspired a London agent

called Charles Sutton to come to Helsinki to meet the author.

Their auspicious meeting

would take place in suitably impressive surroundings.

The Hotel Kamp was the most wonderful luxury hotel

and luxury restaurant, the most famous hotel in Finland.

Charles Sutton offered Tove Jansson a lucrative deal to create

a comic strip for a British daily newspaper.

Tove was still a relatively poor artist,

exchanging her paintings for heating fuel.

Tove was quite excited about learning this new thing,

this new art of making comics

but she was an artist, and at first,

instead of speech balloons she wanted to have the text beneath the panels

and they said, "No, you have to follow those rules, of course."

Tove quickly adapted her skills to the comic strip form

while also making it her own.

Within a very short time, only by the third panel,

Tove Jansson's already doing one of her big innovations,

something I was not aware anybody else

has done before in newspaper strips,

which is to use different graphic elements of the story

to divide the panels.

Here's a wonderful example where Moomin is using a hosepipe,

which creates the actual surround of the first panel

and then it is trailered as a kind of flow through to guide the reader.

Here, for example, it's a ghostly story, so one of the ghosties

is actually a dividing form.

And here, very cleverly, she uses a door opening

as the panel border to allow the characters to rush through.

Sutton pulled off a deal with London's Evening News

who would carry the Moomin cartoon strip to over 1.5 million readers.

In 1954, they launched a massive campaign to herald

the arrival of Moomin.

They took quite a long time to build up anticipation for this strip

because this was a big, big thing.

They're putting teaser images, they put this very cryptic image.

You opened the newspaper and see a huge bottom with a tail.

Of course, you start to wonder,

"What on earth is this and what's going on?"

So I think the campaign was genius.

Moomin was a hit.

120 newspapers ran the strip worldwide,

reaching 12 million readers.

It brought an end to Tove's money worries

and led to further requests for Moomin-related projects.

One offer she did accept was to stage the Moomins in the theatre,

an experience she would share in her next Moomin book.

In Moominsummer Madness, there's a flood

and this strange vessel floats by,

but they actually tie it up, they tether it up to the house.

What a beautiful image. But they don't know what it is.

"After a while, Moominpappa pushed back his hat

"and looked sharply out over the sea.

"Something strange was on its way, carried by the inward current.

"It was quite clearly a kind of house.

"Two golden faces were painted on its roof, one was crying

"and the other one laughing at the Moomins."

I think she was quite fascinated by, you know, these tricks

and how you can transform yourself

and that everyone gets up on the stage and they are someone else.

That is a mix between people that are satisfied with being themselves

and people that want to be someone else.

Tove Jansson's own identity was being transformed by the demands

of countless public engagements,

including appearances on television.

I don't think that she could possibly have envisaged

becoming quite so famous.

People asked her over and over again, for ever, to,

"Please, can you draw me Moomin? Can you do this?"

She was now attracting over 2,000 fan letters a year.

She answered the letters all her life.

She wanted to do it for herself,

not having an assistant or secretary.

On top of this, her newspaper contract committed her

to producing six strips a week for seven years.

This constant creation of new stories for Moomin

was taking its toll, as well as eclipsing her ambitions in painting.

In her notes at this time,

she's quite aggressive about her own creation...

"I've poured out my feelings into Moomintroll but he is changing.

"I no longer feel safe in my secret cave. It's trapping me inside."

..and you can see that in the figure of the Moomintroll.

He gets bigger and bigger and is really, really big,

and it's like a metaphor for the artist that is hidden.

She is hidden behind a Moomintroll.

It's just a Moomintroll, it's not Tove Jansson any more.

It all came at a very high price.

She practically fell apart.

Her commitments to the newspapers

and the public did more than threaten her spirits.

By 1956, over two years had passed with no sign of a new book.

It seemed Moomin's adventures beyond the comic strip were over.

This particular favourite of mine is from the first story and it has

Moomin saying, "I only want to live in peace

"and plant potatoes and dream."

Knowing Moomin's character, that sums him up perfectly, I think,

and it sums up also, I think,

a longing in Tove Jansson for the simpler life -

not having to strive and try and be more and more successful and rich.

As her obligations wore away at her creativity,

a new muse was about to enter her life.

Following an introduction at a party, Tove was invited

to listen to jazz records at the home of a fellow artist -

Tuulilkki Pietila.

Tuulilkki lived a bit away from the studio and it was a very cold winter,

there was a lot of snow and she walks all this way to Tuulilkki,

thinking of Tuulilkki and the snow and what she's going to experience,

and they play their records

and Tuulilkki had a bottle of wine behind a curtain.

And they talked about Paris, both of them.

Well, they talked about other things you can talk about

when you meet someone that you know that you're going to love.

Not only had Tove found a partner for life in Tuulilkki Pietila,

but that love would reignite Tove's interest in Moomin

and inspire a new book.

Well, she began writing Moominland Midwinter.

She was often sitting at Tuulilkki's place.

So that is really the book of Tuulilkki

and Too-Ticky, as she is called in the book,

a new character.

In the character of Too-Ticky, a sea-loving tomboy,

Tove Jansson created a soulmate for Moomintroll

just as Tuulilkki had become for Tove.

It's a book about how beautiful the winter can be

and how philosophical the winter can be.

You can say that Too-Ticky, she's the philosopher of the winter,

though she says nothing is secure and that is the point.

You never know and that is just the point with the winter.

So Moomintroll, in this book,

he experiences a lot of new things,

just as Tove did, I think, with Tuulilkki.

In Moominland Midwinter, Moomintroll's habitual hibernation

is disturbed, and, for the first time,

he wakes during winter, revealing an unfamiliar version of a world

he has only experienced in the warmer months.

The squirrel comes out too early

when the snow is still on the ground and he gets frozen

and there's a wonderful picture of him

with all four paws in the air, lying on his back,

but looking strangely peaceful and the little mouse says,

"He's quite dead," in her matter-of-fact way

and I think she's secretly rather pleased.

Then there's this wonderful footnote at the bottom of the next page

that says, "In case the reader feels like having a cry,

"please take a quick look at page 126, author's note."

So we whizz through to page 126 and sure enough, two more pictures

of a rather nice little squirrel scampering around in the snow.

So I think he made it.

By the time the book was published the following year,

Tove and Tuulilkki, or Tooti, as she was known,

were almost living together.

Tooti had her studio, sort of around the corner, in the other street,

but they could get to each other through the attic.

So Tove would be here in this studio working

and Tooti would be in her studio working

and then they would meet and have lunch.

Well, they could be together but then they could return home

when they wanted to and it was also very important

because both of them were artists,

and they could have a studio of their own.

That was very important, I think. Work was the most important thing.

By 1960, Tove's talents as a writer

and illustrator had brought her wealth and fame

and yet her true ambition -

to be acknowledged as a fine artist - remained unfulfilled.

Determined to change this,

she turned down the opportunity to renew her comic strip contract.

Its responsibility would pass to her youngest brother Lars,

a talented cartoonist in his own right.

After the cartoons, she was full of energy,

eager to paint.

There was a big exhibition in Helsinki

and all the other artists were abstract artists,

except Tove. Tove has her apples and citrons

and they had to put her work away from the big hall to a smaller room

because it would not suit the others, so it wasn't very easy

and I think it hurt her very much.

In search of solace, Tove returned to the peaceful little islands

in the Gulf of Finland she had enjoyed as a child.

Instead of renting the Gustafssons' house as her parents had done,

Tove and Tooti began a project to build their own house

on a tiny island that would be all their own.

This house would be a haven, somewhere Tove and Tooti

could work through the summer,

out of the spotlight, living a simple life.

A 30-minute boat ride from the Gustafssons' island towards the open sea

took them to their chosen spot, a tiny uninhabited island of Klovharu.

After two years of challenges and setbacks to construction,

the simple, charming house was completed.

To reach it, Tove and Tooti often braved the elements

but, for them, it was worth it.

One of the greatest pleasures the girls, Tove and Tooti,

had here was to actually watch the sea and the storms.

This place changes character completely.

You can watch the sea raging and from all directions.

When Tove and Tooti moved out here, they had a good view of any boat

that was coming in so they would see us coming.

Most often, Tove would, of course, run out of the house,

you know, with a warm welcome.

And often Tooti would say hello from there and be smoking cigarettes.

Then you'd go on a picnic and you'd be looking for beautiful stones,

or swimming,

doing all sorts of things. So she was always ready for a small adventure.

It was always nice to come here, actually. Yeah.

In some ways, it was very hard because of the weather.

They had to plan for the food, for everything, for weeks ahead.

They didn't have electricity.

They didn't have any toilets, they didn't have any of these things

you are used to when you live in the city, for example.

Tove's island adventure helped her regain the freedom she longed for.

While here in 1970, she began her next Moomin tale,

Moominvalley In November,

which features a new character called Toft,

whom she based on herself.

When it begins, Toft arrives at the Moomin house,

only to find the Moomins are not home.

The book would send shockwaves through Moominland... and its readers.

All the people who are very dependent, emotionally,

on the Moomins, come to the Moomin house for comfort

and for pancakes and good conversation, and they're not there!

There is this sense of autumn and winter

and knowing that the end is coming,

but all with the hope of the Moomins returning,

they're coming back from somewhere by boat.

While writing the book, Tove faced a devastating personal loss.

Ham, her mother, took ill and died in the mid-summer of 1970.

In the autumn, Tove resumed her work.

Rather than return to her remote island, she stayed

at the Gustafssons' house, where she found comfort and inspiration.

"Just before the sun went down,

"it threw a shaft of light through the clouds,

"cold and wintry yellow, making the whole world look very desolate.

"And then Toft saw the storm lantern

"Moominpappa had hung up at the top of the mast.

"It threw a gentle, warm light and burnt steadily.

"The boat was a very long way away."

You don't really know if they are coming back to Moominvalley.

It's left to the reader to decide, or to imagine

if the Moomins are coming back or not.

Having lost her father Viktor in 1958 and now Ham, her mother,

the family of Tove's childhood was disappearing.

Just as the Moomin house was now empty,

the Jansson household would never be complete again.

It became some sort of turning point, or ending point.

Now this is the end of the Moomins also when Ham is gone.

It's an extraordinary melancholic book.

And when later on one finds out what Tove herself was going through

when she wrote it, that again puts another perspective on it.

I was devastated when the Moomins didn't turn up at the end.

I thought, "Surely...!" You know, because everyone in it was so sad.

And, of course, as an adult reading that book,

I know they never came again,

because Tove Jansson never wrote another Moomin book.

Ending the Moomin series only increased interest in its author...

..still struggling with the loss of her mother.

And the business matters were never-ending.

It was the agreements and the rights and translations and enquiries

and demands of all kinds.

And because she had a bit of a hard time saying no herself,

she needed somebody like Tooti to actually, you know, say,

"No, she's not available."

To escape these relentless pressures,

Tove turned once again to adventure,

and in July 1971, she embarked on a trip around the world with Tooti.

"Tooti and I are going to go around the world!

"Japan, then Hawaii and San Pedro,

"and Mexico, and, by multifarious ways, including a paddle steamer,

"up through the States to New York!"

On their travels they always bought a lot of records abroad.

And when they lived in New Orleans for some time,

they went to jazz clubs every evening.

"I haven't quite yet realised it's true.

"Tooti's studying English - four to five hours a day -

"and the map of the world is constantly open."

Whilst travel provided a welcome distraction,

Tove's thoughts would return to her absent mother, Ham...

..eventually giving birth to a new book.

One of the ways to deal with her mother's death for Tove

was to write that book.

The Summer Book would be a decisive move into adult fiction,

and is now celebrated as a classic of Scandinavian literature.

It is based on observations of Tove's six-year-old niece Sophia

and Sophia's grandmother Ham

during one of the last summers of Ham's life.

Both the main characters, Sophia and grandmother,

are in sort of points of crisis.

Grandmother's ill and frail and Sophia asks her,

I think, in the first few pages,

"Grandmother, when are you going to die?"

And she says, "It's none of your business. But it's going to be soon."

And that's what she knows.

Sophia's mother has very recently died and she's come to the island

with her father who is very absent.

Again, Tove drew on real life.

Two years before Ham's death,

the Janssons suffered a terrible loss.

Sophia's young mother had died suddenly.

Her father Lars, already taxed with his Moomin comic work load,

would now have to cope as a single parent.

My father didn't discuss my mother's death.

Not then, and not later.

It was...

That was his way of handling it.

I was an only child and, at the time, the only child on these islands.

So while the adults were doing other things, my grandmother,

she'd be left to spend time with me.

They'd do wonderful strange and eccentric games.

Create Venice out of a marsh.

You find yourself thinking, "Yes, why not?"

You know, if there's nothing else to do,

you'd find yourself doing anything to pass the time.

Things like dressing up. Those sort of things were...

You did things for fun.

It's as if her and her grandmother

are both able to be completely honest.

They have nothing to lose.

They describe people as they really are

rather than how someone else might politely describe them.

There's a moment when Grandmother's false teeth go missing

and everyone starts searching for them.

"It was an early, very warm morning in July

"and it had rained during the night.

"The granite steamed, the moss,

"the crevices, were drenched with moisture

"and all the colours everywhere had deepened.

"Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade

"was like a rainforest of lush leaves and flowers,

"which she had to be careful not to break as she searched.

"She held one hand in front of her mouth

"and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.

""What are you doing?" asked little Sophia.

""Nothing," her grandmother answered.

""That is to say," she added angrily,

""I'm looking for my false teeth!""

At the age of 58, Tove had transformed herself again.

With the Moomin stories behind her,

she became a respected writer of adult fiction,

producing a substantial body of short stories and novels,

praised for their acute and witty observations.

Tove and Tooti spent almost 30 summers on Klovharu.

But by 1992, they were both in their 70s

and their island adventure was coming to an end.

"Last summer, something unforgivable happened. I started to fear the sea.

"The giant waves no longer signified adventure, but fear -

"fear and worry for the boat

"and all other boats that were sailing around in bad weather.

"We knew it was time to give the cottage away."

Once they'd left, they never wanted to come back.

They didn't even want to talk about it. It was the end, and that was it.

In the last decade of her life, Tove was diagnosed with cancer.

She had stopped smoking. She smoked all her life. And I still smoked.

And then she said, "Could I just taste a puff from your cigarette?"

And then she took it, and said, "No, it's not good. Not good at all!"

She wanted to be like it was before, but she was tired.

But she was still... she was still Tove.

I remember once when I said goodbye to Tooti and Tove,

they stood close together in Tooti's hall.

And maybe that was the last time.

And they just looked so, you know, a close couple.

Tove died on a summer's day in 2001, aged 87.

Only death had parted her from Tooti,

who buried Tove with her parents Viktor and Ham

and her youngest brother Lars, who had died the previous summer.

Tooti followed eight years later.

It's different coming now when Tove and Tooti are not living here,

because it's not the same without them.

Because when they were living here, it was full of life.

Across eight decades, Tove Jansson lived life to the full.

Pioneering, gifted and courageous, she always made time for fun

and laughter.

# It must have been moon glow

# That led me straight to you... #

Her legacy is still growing today,

bringing joy to new generations of adults and children.

Through the Moomins, she is writing absolutely from the heart.

She connected so easily with me, across all those demographics

and those oceans and those gaps of time,

because she put so much of herself into those stories.

They're so honest, they're so vulnerable.

There's nothing calculated about them.

And that's always universal.

If you're really, really personal, if you're really, really particular

to what's hurting you or what's making you happy,

then you become universal.

"Then Toft began thinking of himself.

"His dream about meeting the family again

"had become so enormous that it made him feel tired.

"The whole of Moominvalley had somehow become unreal.

"The house, the garden and the river were nothing

"but a play of shadows on the screen.

"And Toft no longer knew what was real

"and what was only in his imagination."

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd