Читать книгу Against All Odds - Jorma Ollila - Страница 13

CHAPTER 1

A Small Town in Finland

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 while my grandfather lived upstairs. My father began work in the family electrical business, which my grandfather must have expected him to take over eventually.

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 new faces. I had to build my own world ever more robustly so I could withstand those changes. I turned into a boy who played and studied with others, but who at heart knew he had his own life to lead.