Against All Odds. Jorma Ollila

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      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.

       CHAPTER 2

       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.

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