Finland Forever by Diana Webster
In the summer of 1967 when the rest of the world was heading to San Francisco to smoke hash and drop acid in Haight/Ashbury, I went to Finland for two months. I lived with a family in a tiny place called Säynätsalo, nearly 300km north of Helsinki. The village was home to a plywood factory, but is unexpectedly world-famous among appreciators of modern architecture as being the location of a Town Hall and library designed by Alvar Aalto. The house where my family lived looked straight at it, as this rather faded picture shows.
I had a wonderful time, and have kept fond memories of Finland and the Finns ever since, so I was intrigued when I was lent this book. It was written in 2013, but is a memoir of the author’s experiences sixty years earlier when she went to Finland in 1952 as a fresh graduate in English from Oxford to work as a teacher of English and general organiser for a branch of the British Council in Turku/Åbo.
At that time very few English people had been to Finland or knew anything about it, so Diana Coleman (as she was then) had to try to understand and come to terms with a very different society from the one she had grown up in. Even the fact that the town where she was based had two different names was a puzzle for a while before she learned about the two languages spoken in Finland.
It was interesting for me to compare her experiences with mine some fifteen years later. Looking back at how much England changed from the early 50s to the mid 60s, it’s not surprising that the Finland I saw was different in many ways to the one Webster describes. I also had the possible advantage of having travelled and worked in other parts of Scandinavia. The Finnish society I experienced was less formal than Webster’s, just as England had become much less formal over the same period. She had to learn about the sensitivities of Swedish and Finnish speakers; in Säynätsalo and among the friends and family of my hosts I never met a Swedish speaking Finn. But I recognised other aspects immediately: the crazy state alcohol monopoly, the social customs around drinking generally, the uncomfortable relationship with their Russian neighbour, the way Finns don’t feel the need to fill every moment with noise and chatter, their love – passion – for the simple life, a small cabin by a lake, a sauna.
From her perspective of sixty years on, Webster writes too about how a young woman’s role was seen differently in Finland and England at the time. In England in the 50s women were almost always expected, or even forced, to give up work when they married, and certainly when they were pregnant. She saw in Finland that it was possible to have a job and be a wife and mother. Her time in Turku/Åbo changed her outlook for ever.
Of course it’s impossible to know how accurate Webster’s account is, remembering events and emotions sixty years ago. Even so, it’s an interesting and perhaps surprisingly entertaining account, written with a good degree of English self-deprecation and quiet humour; a glimpse through a clouded window of a period now almost lost.
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