Where Does Self-Confidence Come From?
A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD BOY is perhaps a little young to follow world events. Nevertheless they impinged on the life of every child in Finland in the 1950s. Finland was looking for its place in the world.
Helsinki should have hosted the Olympics in 1940, but war had intervened, and we hosted the 1952 Games instead. They certainly raised Finland’s profile. Along with the Games both Coca-Cola and black athletes came to Finland for the first time – the athletes were almost a tourist attraction in themselves. There’s even a picture of me, taken a few years later, on the edge of the athletics field, posed in the lap of a black runner. I’m perhaps five years old.
A boatload of Coca-Cola was imported especially for the Olympics and sold in aid of Finnish war veterans. A whole family would often share a single bottle between them. After the Olympics Coca-Cola disappeared for a few years, and it was still a precious beverage when I was a teenager. It was expensive, it came in little bottles, and one sipped it sparingly.
My own self-confidence and self-esteem grew because they had to. Although our home was a secure place to grow up, there was more than enough change to contend with. Just when we had settled into our fine new house, my father decided that we should move to Turku, a city on the Finnish southern coast. He had decided to give up his job in my grandfather’s electrical business. This was a disappointment to my grandfather, who closed the shop soon after and found other work. My father got a new job at a larger electrical business in Turku. He wanted bigger challenges and a better standard of living. He was advancing at the same rate as Finland was industrializing. The whole country was a building site. Electricity and electrical equipment were needed more and more. There were still places in Finland waiting for their first electrical cable.
My parents were seeking a new life and a better future, but they also yearned for freedom, to break away from their families and the obligations and preordained future they entailed. My father and mother wanted to create their own life with their own hands, which meant risk, change, and humility. There wasn’t much money and every penny had to be earned, so my father worked every day of the week. Mother again looked after the family. We moved to our new home, a wooden house in Turku, in 1959. Our house in Kurikka was sold, and I had to get used to a new school class once again. I left my friends in Kurikka with a heavy heart, and only ever received a couple of letters from them. We didn’t waste words, at least not on writing superfluous letters when we were still in primary school.
In Turku I was an ordinary, diligent, well-behaved boy. I was lonely and I wanted to go back to the people and places I knew. I pedaled my bike around the streets of my new home town, trying to make sense of the strange dialect my classmates spoke. The city was much bigger than Kurikka, and my old home seemed a long way away.
My classmates had decided I was a country boy – a yokel – and they let me know all about it. I found it difficult to make friends, not least because I had been to three schools by the time I was ten. I can’t regret that I was constantly changing schools. I had to find new friends and conquer my lack of confidence by hard work and good grades. I learned to fit in with all sorts of other people.
Sometimes I look at a school photo from that time. I remember how it was: you had to at least try to smile. The photographer had come to the school with his big camera and a black cloth. He cracked a joke, which should have made the children laugh, and at the same time his flash went off. Everyone sat and looked into the camera. And many did smile, though the teacher remained serious. In the photo I look unsure of myself. My head is sunk into my shoulders and I seem to be seeking reassurance. I had decided to show everyone and be the same as them in the picture. But I didn’t begin to smile.
The youngest child in our family, my little sister Sirkku, was born in Turku. Now there were five of us: me (born 1950), Leena (1952), Harri (1954), Yrjö (1956), and Sirkku (1959). My mother’s time was spent looking after my siblings, especially when there was a baby in the house. Nevertheless, our home was always spotless. There was always an aroma of freshly baked buns and bread, despite the babies. In our semi-detached house our big family had two rooms and a kitchen and also an attic.
Ollila family Christmas in Vaasa in the mid -1960s (left to right): father Oiva, Sirkku, Leena, Yrjö, mother Liisa, Harri, and I am standing in the back.
The house had been built just after the war, so badly that it seemed about to fall down. Cold water came in and went out again. It was heated with logs. I slept in the attic room with my sister Leena.
We moved to the western part of Turku and this was an improvement. Now we had three rooms and central heating. The rooms were heated by oil, so no one had to fetch logs any more. The windows were no long iced up on cold mornings. The rooms were upstairs; on the ground floor was a dairy. Town and country were still intermingled in 1950s Finland. Our house opened straight on to fields. There we grew spinach, which I helped to pick.
One day when I was about ten I found a little growth on my neck, which required surgery to remove. There was nothing dangerous about the operation, which was a routine matter, and I wasn’t scared of blood or hospitals. My parents had just given me a proper, grown-up bike as a present – I kept it for years until it was stolen when I was a student. That morning I packed my rucksack, hopped on the bike, and cycled over the hill and then along narrow streets for a couple of miles to the university hospital, a big white building. I checked in for the operation. It went well and I spent a week convalescing in the hospital. My parents came to see me there once. In the next bed there was a very pleasant girl, who asked me something in her Turku accent that sounded like “ain’t it tough?” Only later did I realize that she was asking me if I had any toffee, rather than offering a comment on life.
When I left the hospital a few days later I went home the same way I had come. The experience was vivid, but not particularly scary. Back at the turn of the 1960s it seemed perfectly normal for a ten-year-old boy to go to the hospital on his own.
In spring 1961 my father announced another move. He had already changed employer in Turku, and his new company was transferring him to Vaasa. We were returning to Ostrobothnia.
Because we moved so often I had developed my own interests and activities. One of the most important was tennis. It was a breath of air from a better world. Tennis is more often associated with large towns than with remote villages. It originates in the Anglo-Saxon world, where the more fashionable people play in pure white kit. Finnish sporting life consists of skiing, skating, running, the high jump, baseball, weightlifting, wrestling, and the shot putt – but not tennis. My father, however, was an exception: as well as houses he had decided to build a whole world. He played tennis. I don’t know what attracted him, whether it was the sport’s image or the technical skill it demanded of its players. Either way, he passed his enthusiasm on to me, and tennis became my lifelong friend, my therapist, and a way to work off the pressures of the day.
When I was eleven I wrote a letter to my mother. She was at home in town; I was spending the summer at my grandmother’s farm. My large, carefully formed letters are easy to read. Even so, I nearly put the pen through the paper. I had just learned that we were to move again, to Vaasa. I had done my research and found out that tennis was played in Vaasa. “There’s a tennis course for beginners starting today,” I wrote. “When I can I am going to join the tennis club, whose name is Tennis-61,” I wrote solemnly. I folded the letter into an envelope, wrote mother’s address with care, and took the letter to the post office, which was next to the shop. Mother opened the letter the next day, saw my message, and was delighted. Nor was tennis the only reason I was glad to be moving to Vaasa. As I wrote: “It is indeed nice to move back to one’s birthplace.”