"Perhaps Anna is right after all, and we do have most fun in the summer. Except I like going to school, and when our teacher says goodbye to us on the last day of the summer term it almost makes me cry, because I know I can’t see her for such a long time. But I soon forget that because it really is lovely having summer holidays.

On the first evening of our summer holidays we usually go down to North Farm Lake to fish. There is almost nothing that feels as summery as fishing. We have made a fishing rod each. It’s only a long hazel branch, but we’ve got real fishing line and floats and sinkers and hooks that we bought in the shop in Storby Village.

Lasse calls the evening we finish school the Great Fishing Evening. There is a heap of rocks just the right size where we usually sit and fish. It’s called Perch Mountain. It’s called that simply because you never catch any perch there, says Anna. The only things you do get are mosquito bites, she says. But Bosse caught a big perch last time we were there, anyhow, and Britta got two small roach.

Anna and I sat on our kitchen doorstep afterwards and counted mosquito bites. I had fourteen on my right leg and five on my left. Anna had nine on each leg.

‘You could almost use it as an arithmetic question,’ said Anna. ‘We’ll have to write it down on a piece of paper for our teacher. “If Lisa has fourteen mosquito bites on one leg and five on the other, and Anna has nine on each leg, who has got the most bites and how many are there all together?”

But then we remembered it was the summer holidays, and how silly it was to spend time doing sums. So we just scratched our mosquito bites and had a lovely time right up until we had to go to bed. Oh, how lovely the summer holidays are!"

Translation: Susan Beard