She heaves a circus strongman above her head and tosses policemen into bushes, vanquishes hapless burglars and wrongfoots the uptight, bourgeois woman who wants her put into a children’s home. Yet Pippi Longstocking, the girl with the freckles and protruding pigtails, has not yet won a place on every British child’s bedside table.
When the first book was published, two months after the end of the second world war, the reason was obvious, believes Karin Nyman, daughter of the character’s creator, Astrid Lindgren. “A country which has got Alice in Wonderland, and which has got Winnie the Pooh, and other stories, they didn’t need Pippi Longstocking,” she says.
But now that David Heyman, the producer behind the blockbuster Paddington films, has signed up to give Pippi a reboot, Nyman and her son Olle hope that will change. “If it becomes as good a film as we hope and expect, the English will love it and, hopefully, they will discover the books once again,” Olle Nyman says.
We meet over a Swedish fika of coffee and biscuits at Lindgren’s Stockholm apartment, a sort of shrine to the writer, kept exactly as it was when she lived here from 1941 until her death in 2002.
Karin Nyman points to a wooden cot, heavily embellished with carved decorations. “This bed was mine,” she says. “So that is where she told all of her stories [to] me.”
It was she, the legend goes, who came up with the name Pippi Longstocking while lying in bed, aged seven, sick with pneumonia. “Tell me a story!” she pleaded. “A story about what?” “A story about Pippi Longstocking.”
“It was,” Karin Nyman says, “a random name, just plucked out of the air.” But its outlandishness forced her mother to create a character, and Pippi, with her bright orange pigtails, freckles, differently coloured stockings, and hilarious, back-to-front logic, was born. Now 85, Nyman admits she has no recollection of coming up with the name, a moment that changed her family’s life for ever.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of the first Pippi book, and Lindgren’s descendants are pulling out all the stops. In Stockholm there will be Pippi at Cirkus, a musical circus produced by Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, with new music from his old collaborator, Benny Andersson.
This Tuesday, the family company will launch a project with Save the Children called Pippi of Today, which will harness the anniversary to raise money to support unaccompanied female child refugees. And in the UK, Oxford University Press is releasing six new illustrated editions, while a new musical, Pippi Longstocking: A Swashbuckling Musical Adventure, premiered in Northampton in December and will go on tour this summer.
Karin Nyman says she has always struggled to decide how to relate to the character. “It’s so difficult for me to analyse and understand what I have eventually got from Pippi Longstocking. She has been with me, almost, my whole life. It’s absolutely not a burden and, probably, inspiring.” Temperamentally, though, she couldn’t be further from her mother’s larger-than-life heroine. “I couldn’t identify with Pippi,” she says. “It just wasn’t me. I was the one who would like to play with Pippi. I would like that very much. But I had nothing of her strength and originality.”
Instead, she says, she identified with Tommy and Annika, the overprotected, middle-class siblings whose lives are transformed when otherworldly Pippi moves in next door.
Pippi is every child’s fantasy, living without father or mother in a villa with her pet monkey, horse and an endless supply of gold coins. She makes pancakes by smashing up eggs in their shells, sleeps with her feet on the pillow, and rolls out gingerbread on the floor.
When I ask how such a subversive, strange figure as Pippi could have become the most-loved children’s character in orderly, rule-abiding, reserved Sweden, Olle Nyman suggests there’s no contradiction. “Maybe it’s the other way around,” he says. “It is because we have to do the right thing all the time and do what the authorities say, maybe it’s even more tempting that there’s this person who doesn’t care.”
Pippi’s enormous popularity in Germany has similar roots, she argues, particularly given that she was launched in the immediate aftermath of fascism.
“There was a complete emptiness in children’s culture in Germany after the war,” she says. “When all the Nazi books and culture had been thrown away, there was a vacuum, and then Pippi came and filled it up.”
Ever since her mother’s death, Karin Nyman has been the character’s chief guardian. She appears to know the history and origin of every painting, book and piece of furniture in the flat, where she also lived until she was 25. She is anxiously awaiting the appointment of a screenwriter for the new film. “I’m always worried about how it’s going to turn out,” she admits. “But I also understand that I can’t demand that everything has to be precisely how I would have wanted it.”
You might think, for example, that Lauren Child, a recent UK children’s laureate and creator of Charlie and Lola would be an ideal illustrator. But Karin Nyman has never been happy with Child’s 2007 Pippi makeover.
“I very much prefer Ingrid Vang Nyman,” she says firmly, referring to the original illustrations by the Danish illustrator [no relation].
“Of course, Lauren Child’s illustrations are fun, but I don’t think Astrid would have dreamed of giving the impression of Pippi without her shoulders, without her strength.
“You know, the Lauren Child Pippi is ‘nee nee nee’ [she hunches up her shoulders like a sweet but mischievous little girl]. She is very weak physically. It is sort of illogical.”
Olle Nyman says the family itself selected and approached Heyman, impressed with his treatment of Harry Potter and Paddington Bear, and by the fact that he is “a passionate Pippi fan”.
“When it comes to the casting of Pippi and so on, we very much trust our partners to make their judgment. They are the pros,” he says.
“We are the pros on the story: for us it’s really important that every adaptation stays true to the original story, so that neither Pippi nor any of the other characters become something other that what Astrid intended.”
Heyman’s film production, then, will be limited to what Lindgren wrote – the stories in the three original books, the 1969 Swedish television series, and the four Swedish films. “They will use the original stories,” says Olle Nyman. “I really hope so,” his mother adds.
So Pippi will still be “the strongest girl in the world”. She will still be wilful, and – like that other uncompromising Swedish girl Greta Thunberg – unafraid to talk back to adults. She will be independent, energetic, and wonderfully unconventional. Indeed, on her 75th anniversary, Pippi feels more progressive, and more timely, than ever.
