Paradise lost - a childhood in the Finnish archipelago
I was born in Helsinki in 1966 and grew up there. Most coastal areas in Finland are still Swedish speaking and this is especially true to the archipelago. This is another reason it feels like home to me. When I was two years old in 1968, my mother heard about cottages that were up for rent in the outer archipelago from a friend who owned a cottage there. My mother had spent her childhood summers in the inner archipelago and was familiar with boats. When they got married my parents bought a wooden boat and did island hopping in the summers. In Finland we have freedom to roam so you can go anywhere you like as long as you don’t camp in someone's front years. From the pictures I have, it looks like such a marvellous life.
As a family, we spent every summer from 1968 onwards in Rosala. We gave it up in the late ‘80s, and it’s as if a piece of me went missing. In hindsight, however, I can see how lucky I was to have had a dad with a stable job who was able to pay for the rent each year until he preferred to go travelling with his girlfriend. What a shame that my parents were unable to make their marriage work. My summer vacation lasted 2.5 months and somehow my parents always managed to take time off to spend the whole summer there. I obviously don’t remember the first years but as far as I recall, we spent the whole summer there from 1st of June to mid-August. It was always so wonderful to come out there in early June when the nights were almost non existent, and it was sad to leave in August when the days were getting shorter.
The cottage was in a bay not too far from the village on an island called Summer Island (Sommarö), We visited the village on most days by boat. When I was little, I went to the village to swimming school and gained the diplomas. I preferred to go and play with a girl in the village during the day, so my parents would drop me off when they went shopping and picked up the post, and then pick me up in time for dinner. Dinner was usually fish which they fished themselves. The cottage was a simple, plasticky prefab and not very charming, and I always wished we could have decorated it properly. But there was also charm in simplicity. We bought some things such as rag rugs and some furniture at local auctions. We had no running water or electricity, so we had to carry water from the village and use petroleum lamps and candles for lighting. We washed the dishes and the clothes in the sea. At some stage, my parents got a small black and white TV that ran on a car battery, so we had some entertainment in the evenings after a long day outdoors. They also built a sauna which we enjoyed a lot. We went for walks on the island, and the cats often came along. I remember following our black cat Sebastian on his adventures and wishing I could marry him! I also roamed a lot by myself, and got to know every bush, every tree, every stone. It was a profoundly silent and very simple world. It’s something I think about a lot now that I have screeching tinnitus in my ears.
As a child I was the picture of perfect health, but as soon as I hit puberty, my health went downhills pretty fast. This is quite typical of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. It all started with back pain that I noted on walks in the forest, and eventually, the spinal issues turned into spondylolisthesis.
My mother was a periodic drinker, and she also had her bouts of drinking at the cottage. It was miserable. In one of my diaries I described the way she smuggled alcohol into the house when my dad wasn’t present. Somehow she found other alcoholic women in the area that I remember visiting. Sometimes we had fights even when she was sober, because when I was still quite little, she could be quite harsh. I used to run into the woods, and hope she would come after me. Thankfully, she did. Mum used to drive us to the marina on the mainland in our own car until she lost her driver’s license due to drunk driving. When I was about six, we even drove all the way to the cottage on the ice one harsh winter when the ice was strong enough. We must have sometimes gone there for a weekend because I remember mum picking me up on a Friday afternoon from school when I was seven. She was wearing a trench coat and a silk scarf over her head, and I remember wishing she’d always be that well dressed and ‘mumsy’. When my mum lost the car, we would make a five hour journey by bus, with the cats in a big laundry basket with chicken wire on top.
Apart from the bad spells, life in the archipelago was quite wonderful. The Baltic Sea in those days was such a very peaceful and clean environment, and it was amazing to do island hopping by boat and to swim in the sea. I loved that the water was bracken, just suitably salty, not overpoweringly salty like the Atlantic. The granite cliffs were beautifully smooth with enticing shapes and lines from the Ice Age, and there were so many friendly little coves and lagoons. The horizon further out in the archipelago seemed so wide and open, yet it was never scary. I can’t believe that I will never go there again. Once you have been brought up with that sense of openness at sea, it’s very difficult to live on the mainland. You feel regret because as a child, you took something for granted that was a really unique way of life.
I have never been able to reconcile with the loss of this paradise, even with its faults. The cottage and the environment haunted my dreams for years and years. I think life is rather pointless without this kind of place to spend the summers at and I simply can’t get used to not having it. Along with the clean, healthy and simple Moomin style life, I obviously also miss the good health I enjoyed as a child. Most importantly, I had normal hearing and enjoyed silence more than anything - the kind you can only find way out in nature where there is barely any machine driven activity. Nowadays when I’m out in nature somewhere, I’m not satisfied unless it’s a very large, untouched area and there isn’t another human in sight.
Epilogue:
My mum, who was born in Kuusamo during the war, decided to try and find herself there when I was fifteen. While she spent a few years getting to know her biological family, I visited her during the holidays. In the summers, I spent two or three weeks in Rosala with my dad who was kind enough to pay the rent for a few more years. Somewhat disappointed with her relatives and the ways of the North, my mum returned to the South in 1985. She settled as far South as you can possibly get while still remaining on the mainland. This area was not far from Rosala and the coast line is quite spectacular as well, but I always felt a terrible longing out into the wild open spaces of the actual archipelago. Over the course of several years, I only spent a few weeks in Rosala. I’m not sure I even visited at all in 1985 and 1986, and in 1987 my dad and I only had four days there, so it’s clear we had to think about giving it up.
In 1989 when I had commenced my studies in art history at uni, I spent a weekend at the cottage with two friends. Surprisingly, I was quite able to read the maps and drive the small boat safely, something I had never practised before. I wish at this point, I could have spent more time there, but I was young and busy, trying to make money in the summers. If you didn’t fish, then survival there was more difficult and quite expensive. My dad had no interest in Rosala anymore - it had always been my mum’s project.
1989, short vacation with two friends:
In late summer of 1989, my mum and I took a trip together to Rosala and collected some things, including the small boat. I was very sad to see that a lot of the forest I knew so well had been cut down. We left, and I didn’t think too much about it. When I spent time with my mum in her new place of residence, there was still the possibility of making trips by boat to some of the beautiful smooth islands that are scattered around the southernmost peninsula. Again, we were quite busy with other things and my mum was always short of money.
We made one last trip to the archipelago that is etched in my memory because the atmosphere that day was magical. It was a bit foggy and amazingly peaceful. I remember a lagoon like cove and how the bright green algae was swaying in the clear water. It would have been the perfect place to swim, had it not been too late in the autumn. Soon after, my mum sold the boat without consulting me. She needed the money and didn’t feel capable of paying for the upkeep of the boat though she was friendly with the older generation of fishermen who rented out the space for her, and probably didn’t charge much. I didn’t foresee how depressed this would make me but it did. Every summer I would gaze out to see and wish I could go there, away from the humdrum of civilisation. It was so near, yet so far away.
When I met Martin, I wish I had made more efforts to visit the archipelago, but there was really not much time and there was perhaps little point in taking the ferry to Rosala village as that was not the ‘true’ archipelago, i.e. the wilderness I missed. We did take a trip to another village a bit closer but again, there was not that much point to it. It was just not the same thing as scurrying around in a boat on the open sea, navigating the waters around uninhabited isles and islands.