MY JOURNEY BEGAN in southern Ostrobothnia – a rural province on the west side of Finland – in the middle of August 1950. The time and the place are significant. I was an Ostrobothnian on both my mother’s and my father’s side. My roots went deep into that flat landscape, home for centuries to stubborn farmers, dogged tradesmen, and fanatical preachers.
At the beginning of the 1950s Finland had yet to recover from the war years. We had not been occupied; the country had not been laid waste; and, above all, we had kept our independence. But things were not easy, either. Finland had lost a tenth of its territory; and painful memories of war were still fresh. We had to pay huge war reparations to the Soviet Union. The country was anything but rich, and indeed famine was still a living memory. Industry was developing rapidly, but a large proportion of the population still lived by agriculture and forestry. No one wanted to hang on to the past, rather everyone was looking ahead. There was no room for freeloaders; everyone had do their own share and preferably more. The country’s self-esteem still seemed rather shaky. No one could be confident about the future, but every effort went into building it. The war had ended just a short time before, and it was uncertain whether peace would last. Our political leaders were trying to make Finland as secure as possible in a world that was anything but secure.
The whole country was a building site: new houses, flats, little shops, and workshops. Everyone was in a hurry to move forward after the difficult war years and the tedious, lifeless period that came after. The birth rate was high. Poverty coexisted with faith in the future. Everyone was in a tremendous rush so that children were just left to get on with things. There was no television, no computers, no mobile phones, and our days were filled with school, sport, housework, and homework. Our world was small, the size of a village. Everyone knew their place, and life felt secure.
The Ostrobothnian landscape was one of large fields and meadows dotted with barns and divided by riverbanks, as it remains today. In the winter snow would cover the fields, where clumps of trees would stand like black islands. In spring, when the snow melted, the rivers would swell and flood the fields and roads. There wasn’t much forest by Finnish standards, but the fields and cows produced enough for expanding families to feed themselves. If you couldn’t survive from your smallholding, you had to try something else. For that reason there were many small businesses in Ostrobothnia: in Kurikka where we lived there were a sawmill, a textile works, metalworks, dairies, and various other factories. Around 10,000 people lived in this typical small town, whose center consisted of a church, schools, sports fields, banks, shops, and a factory with a tall chimney. On the short cold winter days grey smoke would rise from this chimney and freeze into little clouds of red against the brilliant sky.
I was born into a family that was not poor, but not rich either. My grandfather Kaarlo (Kalle) Ollila had set up an electrical goods business in Kurikka. His great-grandfather had bought a farm called Hiiripelto – “Mousefield” – in the village of Vähäkyrö. This became the Ollila farmstead. My grandfather’s father did not stay to take over the farm, but moved to Copper Cliff, Canada. Two of his three sons died in infancy. The only survivor was my grandfather, who came back to Finland and attended the commercial school in Raahe, a port on the northern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia. He was known as a man who could do complex calculations in his head.
My grandfather was a tall, wiry, headstrong man, who didn’t do small talk. He was widowed young and did not marry again. This left its mark on his life. Through a child’s eyes granddad seemed a stern and somewhat mysterious man. Kalle fought in three wars: the Civil War, the Winter War, and the Continuation War. He took part in the siege of Tampere in 1918, fighting on the White side. This was the worst battle of the Civil War, and at that time the biggest to have taken place in the Nordic region. But to this day I can’t find out anything more about my grandfather’s role in these wars. The siege of Tampere was an especially closely guarded secret in our family, and I only learned of it while going through my late father’s papers. At my grandfather’s funeral we – his grandsons – went through his desk drawers, and in one of them we found a loaded pistol. We had no idea why Kalle Ollila had retained his weapon; but at the very least it posthumously augmented his aura of a man apart.
My father, Oiva Ollila, returned from the war, completed his studies, and graduated in engineering from technical college. He met my mother in Helsinki. Her name was Saima Elisabeth Kallio – she was always called Liisa – and she had studied agriculture and forestry at Helsinki University. They lost no time in starting a family. My mother broke off her studies and returned to Ostrobothnia with my father.
My mother was enchanting, beautiful, and clever. She had large, soft, inquiring eyes, a high forehead, and dark wavy hair. Her bright smile lit up the whole world, though now and then she would gaze yearningly into the distance. She didn’t look Finnish: she seemed to have a drop of Italian blood and a dash of Mediterranean warmth. I was the eldest and a boy, so I had no need to compete for my mother’s favor: I was always the apple of her eye, the focus of love, and her trusty helper. My sister Leena was born two years later, but I didn’t have to compete with her because she was a girl. I was very much my mother’s boy, from the beginning and right up until her death.
As the eldest I naturally had responsibilities as well as privileges. I not only had to look after myself, but my younger siblings, too. My parents didn’t always have much time to spare for me, and it was assumed I could look after myself. I had family responsibilities: I had to organize the other children to do their chores, and it was assumed I would speak up for them with our parents. And I was expected to set a good example.
Our mother exuded a quiet charisma, which I have come to appreciate more and more over the years. She always made me do my best and expected good results, though these demands were never spoken. I understood them perfectly well from her demeanor and solicitude. I realized I was expected to do well, and I tried to live up to those expectations. My mother accomplished that. She supported me in my studies; she respected knowledge and education, and she had her own reasons for that.
My mother’s family was from Isokyrö, not far from my father’s family home. Generation after generation had lived in the area. So my entire clan, as far back as the sixteenth century, was of Ostrobothnian farming stock. My mother grew up in modest surroundings with seven brothers and sisters. Her father was Isak Isakinpoika Kallio, a fantastically obstinate farmer who hated the gentry and all its works. He had decided that none of his children should go to secondary school because they would be exposed to bad influences there. My mother was the second youngest child, and her father died before she reached school age. So my mother did after all have the chance of an education. She became the first of her family to graduate from high school. She would certainly have graduated from university had she not met my father and started a family with him.
My father was tall, lean, and hard-working. He was a little unusual because he talked a lot – except about the war, on which he was silent. He was a war hero who had received medals for his part in the battle of Taipale. He had served as a field artillery officer but he never talked much about that time, and certainly never boasted. It wasn’t until his grandson – my son – came along that he opened up about his experience of war. For decades after the war it was simply not the done thing to talk about it. And it was not in my father’s nature to do so: he had done his duty on the Front, and there was no need to go on about it.
My father worked non-stop, planning and building. He always had many irons in the fire. Through him I became interested in a thousand different things, which caused problems in later life when I had to focus on just one thing at a time. Where we lived men had the right to take an interest in whatever took their fancy, while women were expected to clear up after them. My mother did all the housework, as was usual in Finland in the fifties. When I was born, my mother was twenty-four and my father twenty-eight years old. We all lived at my grandfather’s house in Kurikka, where the growing family had to squeeze into two rooms. We shared the ground floor with some other relatives