There was a real sense of purpose. My home background taught me that one must work, and work hard, if one intends to succeed in life. My grandfather worked very hard in his business, and my father worked seven days a week. My mother toiled at home looking after our growing family, and she taught in the village school as well. As well as his paid work, my father devoted a lot of time to his own projects. He designed the electrical wiring for other people’s houses, and built houses and summer cottages. There was enough work to fill every waking moment, and every waking moment was filled with it.
Working was as natural as breathing. Leaving work undone or enjoying moments of creative leisure was considered unnatural. That was laziness, the start of a slippery slope. It might lead to vodka-drinking, which was one of the deadliest sins (village brawls and domestic violence were common to Ostrobothnian life). People were judged by their ability to work. “A good worker” was the finest compliment you could pay someone. Working well was linked to another value: autonomy. People should stand on their own two feet and make their own way in life.
Sitting on my father’s lap with my sister Leena in Kurikka 1954.
The people I grew up with thought you could never do too much work, while leisure time was a potentially fatal menace. It was just this mindset that enabled Finland to become a developed country. There are parallels with the developing economies of Southeast Asia. I see there a mindset familiar from my childhood: work enables one to get on in life, to achieve prosperity, and to educate one’s children for a better life. I learned this from my parents. And when life is full of things to be done, at least it isn’t dull.
My mother believed in God. Some of her family were Pietists who wore black and sang psalms. I remember as a boy in short trousers taking part in Pietist meetings. God wasn’t really mentioned at home, though. We went to church at Christmas, for christenings, and for funerals. My parents were more interested in natural history than in religion. There were many books about geography and natural history on our shelves, and we had encyclopedias and maps and illustrated books of natural wonders, but the family only began to read novels in the 1960s. We read the literary classics, but science books were regarded as a better use of time.
Arithmetic and math were part of everyday life, and our family regarded them as positively virtuous. My parents always assumed their children would have no difficulties with math. They didn’t even bother to look at the grades we got for math, for they knew they would always be the top scores. My grandfather’s skill with figures had been passed down to my father and then to me and my siblings. And my mother was also known for her mathematical ability. I was keen on mathematics from a very early age, and I demanded high standards of accuracy from myself. Later I demanded them from others. “Surely you know your own numbers,” I would say to subordinates who got their figures mixed up when reporting results.
Numbers revealed a much wider world. Numbers meant things, and things could be very important, indeed. If I understood the numbers, I would understand things as well. If I understood things, I could control the world. When the numbers were clear, I could concentrate on the reality they represented. Then I could achieve something new. All this became clear to me much later, but without the respect my father and mother showed for mathematics I would not be the person I am now.
We lived in that small apartment in my grandfather’s house until I was four. Then we moved to a bigger space, a flat above a bank in the center of Kurikka. That’s where my childhood memories begin. We rented our new home, where we children had our own rooms – there was quite enough space in this old stone apartment block. From home it was a short trip to the shops and schools. This was the first of many moves – I lived in at least seven places before I was seventeen years old.
My own world. That’s what I had as a four-year-old in Kurikka. It comprised our new home above the bank, my parents and siblings, and lots of interesting things in the buildings around. Next to the bank building there were wooden buildings in a regular pattern. In our part of the world houses were built in orderly rows. Everything had to be properly organized.
Summer was of course the nicest time. I rode my bike and swam in the river, since there weren’t really any lakes where we lived. I also did my bit to feed the family, catching little perch and carp from the river and looking after grandma’s cows and sheep. My mother made wonderful sandwiches and buns and the hot chocolate was the best ever.
My mother and father didn’t have much time to spare for playing with me, so I could explore in peace. One of the most interesting places was a store a few hundred yards from home. Agricultural machinery was kept there: machines for threshing corn, for shredding straw, for ploughing fields, and for mowing meadows. They were all brand-new, positively gleaming. I found them truly enthralling.
They had red-painted metal parts and bright yellow wooden boards protecting the heart of the machines, where there were motors, blades, belts, and axles – everything that excited me.
Together with my friend Heikki Sillanpää I found one especially fascinating machine. Heikki grabbed the handle. On the other side was a hole through which I could see the blades as sharp as knives shredding straw for the barns. The machine was new and splendid. We must have seen at once how it worked. I decided to look at the mechanism from the other side when Heikki experimented with turning the handle.
The experiment was a roaring success: I thrust my hand inside the machine and Heikki turned the handle. The blades started rotating quite fast and one of the blades cut off the tip of my finger. When I pulled my hand out the end of my finger hung by a thread of skin. The blood spurted all over the place, and I ran toward home, the safest of places, as if possessed. The pain must have been terrific, but oddly enough I don’t remember much about it. My sister Leena was in the yard and when she saw blood spurting from my finger she started screaming. Her cries were much louder than mine, since I had managed to control myself. She ran upstairs to get my parents, while I followed up the stairs, bleeding profusely. My blood left permanent traces on the walls of the stairway. Somewhere along the way the tip of my finger had fallen off and couldn’t be found even though my parents went out and looked for it.
In the hospital they did the best they could without the missing bit. I will never forget that summer’s day in 1955. On that day I learned that while the world may feel safe, it is in fact full of danger. Even curiosity has its limits, if you want to hang on to your hands, fingers, feet, and toes till the end of your natural life.
About that time my father decided to build a new house for his family. Renting the flat above the bank had gone on long enough. Having our own house would tell the world that the Ollilas now lived an independent life, free from undue dependence. Building one’s own house was a matter of honor. The previous winter my father had fetched the timber from my mother’s family’s woodland. The trees had been cut down with handsaws. Then the logs had been dragged out of the forest on a horse-drawn sled and cut down in Kurikka to the right size for building. My father had designed the modern, roomy house himself. He planned every detail meticulously; even the door knobs of cast metal were beautiful examples of craftsmanship. Behind the house was a garden and in winter a skating rink.
I remember carrying bricks and mixing cement when the house was being built. I spent the summer of 1957 on the building site and was proud when I heard passers-by whispering to each other that the Ollila house would be the finest on the whole street. And so it was, and what was best of all was that we children got more space, which was what we needed, for there were now four of us. I would start school in the autumn and would need space for my books and to do my homework. My mother had started work teaching in a middle school, and she too needed room to work at home.
This was the first house that Father built. After that he built one after another and in the end there were seven. He wanted to move to new places and get on in life. He wanted his family to be prosperous and to live a more comfortable life. This meant that we were moving all the time. Just when I’d gotten to know my new classmates, we would move again and I would find myself once more among