 |
| A huge folder full of my letters from Finland |
Many years ago, after my parents died, we cleared their house. Fortunately, we could take our time over the task. We kept what we wanted, gave things away to their and our friends, and sold what we didn't need. Among the things we treasured were several boxes of 'keepsakes'. Some of them had been stored in their loft since I came home from university.
I didn't settle anywhere for very long, till 1980, when I moved in with Alan, who would become my husband. First I went to Leeds University to do a Postgraduate Masters in Folk Life Studies, but then, instead of looking for museum work (the obvious choice) I did a summer school in teaching English as a Foreign Language and in 1975, I set off for Tampere in Finland, to teach English to adults. This sometimes involved business English, often conversation with groups, occasionally complete beginners (challenging when I didn't speak Finnish!) and quite a lot of one to one sessions.
A few weeks ago, when I was searching these keepsake boxes for something else altogether, I found a great bundle of letters I had written to my parents, starting with my arrival in Finland in the autumn of 1975. I worked there for two years, but for some reason, my parents had only kept the letters from my first year in Tampere and a few from my return to Finland in autumn 76.
I spent hours sorting them into date order and reading through them. I was an enthusiastic correspondent back then, and it was clear that mum and dad wrote back, although sadly, all their letters are missing. Sometimes, I would write two or three letters a week, but post them all at once, so some of the envelopes were very fat. I would add little drawings to some of them, to illustrate what I was writing about.
It makes me a little sad that this kind of correspondence no longer exists for most of us, although I suppose blogs like this one fulfil the same purpose - but without the spontaneity, the immediacy and intimacy.
It astonished me how many things I didn't remember till reminded by these letters. Memory is very strange and very fluid. I had certain events fixed in my mind, the 'stories' I told myself. But as I read through this long and detailed correspondence, it struck me that over time, I had edited my own memories. Well, some of the correspondence was edited as well, given that I was writing to my parents, but not in quite the same way. Most of it was written in longhand, spontaneously, late at night, and I seldom crossed anything out.
I was working long hours, having the time of my life (most of us teachers were young, footloose and fancy free) and just loving the country, the people and the landscape. I was writing about it because of course I was also writing my own work: poems, stories, plays and the first draft of a novel. I'm not sure where I found the time, but I did.
Among the keepsakes was the typescript of a novel which I seem to remember one of my students typing up for me. I had filed it away as 'not very good' but now, I think that judgment came from UK publishing's reluctance at that time to publish anything with a remotely 'foreign' setting. Rereading the first couple of chapters, I reckon it's worth revisiting - a curious little story set in Finland, that I'll probably retype, rework and publish for my own satisfaction. As for the letters - well, I'll type those up as well, immersing myself in that time and place. I may even publish an edited version of them.
Meanwhile, there's a certain symmetry in the notion that our video game designer son is currently so much at home in Scandinavia.
