Against All Odds. Jorma Ollila

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was not the sort of boy who would have been voted form captain. I didn’t tell anecdotes or jokes, I didn’t organize parties, and I didn’t experiment with alcohol or tobacco. Girls liked me, but I wasn’t a heartthrob who received a constant stream of secret love letters during boring lessons. I had been taught to behave well. At home it was emphasized that everyone was equal and we should all have the chance to develop our talents. No one should need to look up to other people, nor should anyone be allowed to look down.

      I was in school to learn, not to enjoy myself. Many of my classmates enjoyed themselves at our teachers’ expense. Some of them were fun to tease. Our scripture teacher was so absent-minded that he could never remember where he had left his car; sometimes he even forgot which day it was. Some teachers would find wet mushrooms or sharp tacks on their chairs. I didn’t take part in these activities, and I’m sure many of the other boys thought I was a bit of a prig. I certainly seemed more mature than most. Perhaps today I’d be called a geek – nörtti in Finnish.

      In those days I often used to cycle to play tennis in the evenings. In the winter it might well be twenty degrees below zero. I took my tennis racket, put on a thick winter jacket and a woolly hat, and rode along Vaasa’s dark and slippery streets to the other side of town. The front wheel never seemed to keep straight, and cycling was rather like skating. I would play for hours with my friends in the tennis hall. If I lost I would go home quiet and dejected. Tennis had become a serious contest, like so many other things. But above all I competed with myself, and in myself I encountered a tough opponent.

      Besides tennis my recreations were the scouts and a nature club. At that time almost every secondary school in Finland had a nature club. At Vaasa High School it was called Reviiri – the Finnish word for territory. It had members from every class in the school and some former pupils as well. I joined when I was about twelve and later I became the chairman of the club. We focused on ornithology because we lay under one of the major avian migration routes. For many a nature club member the hobby was the spark for a career as a biologist or nature photographer.

      Through the club I also got to read some fascinating books, such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The book’s title refers to the dying away of birdsong because the over-use of DDT had disrupted the food chain, and bird populations were in decline.

      As the eldest child I was expected to behave better than my brothers and sisters. And we didn’t do silly things in our family – we didn’t get up to pranks we could all laugh at together. Life wasn’t solemn, though, even if it was earnest at times. We didn’t broadcast our emotions, either joyful or sad. My mother’s family in particular valued silence above great emotional tempests. Everyone in our family kept themselves under control, and our parents were a model for this. I grew up to be a polite, reserved, hard-working, eager-to-please, and ambitious young man.

      Global politics intruded on Finland when in November 1963 President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I read this in a newspaper, but many of my fellow students learned about it from television. We had watched television at a neighbor’s on a few occasions, but our parents were in no hurry to acquire this new and revolutionary device. In conservative Ostrobothnia television was feared as likely to ruin family life, to destroy children’s chances of success at school, and to spread subversive leftist opinions.

      We finally got a television in 1964. My schoolmates had convinced me of its advantages. I told my mother that I wouldn’t do so well at school if we didn’t have one. I really needed to follow world events. My mother told my father, who bought a set the very next day. Television or no television, however, we had to keep order in the family. To do that I gathered all the children and my parents round the table and set out rules in writing for watching television. According to these, we could only watch it at a certain time, only after homework was completed. It would be turned off by ten at the latest. There were exceptions for news and sports, which my father could watch in the middle of the night – for example if a boxing match with Cassius Clay (who had yet to become Muhammed Ali) was broadcast then. Then we boys too would be woken up and would come down and watch. Otherwise the rules I had set out were to be followed.

      In 1963 and 1964 something crackled over the airwaves that changed the world for my whole generation. “All my loving, I will send to you / All my loving, darling I’ll be true,” announced a group of mop-haired Brits. In my mind I bawled the words of “Eight Days a Week,” even though I didn’t understand them. I was fourteen, it was summer, and I was again in the country, where there were some cows, sheep, and chickens in the barn. It was a long way from Liverpool, the launchpad for the Beatles’ attack on the Finnish countryside. Our cows didn’t seem in the least bothered by their brilliance.

      In my enthusiasm I introduced the Beatles to my mother as well, and she tried to understand them on the radio. My sister had a tape-recorder on which to capture new Beatles recordings. It wasn’t only the Beatles’ music that inspired the world’s youth: their haircuts did, too. The Beatle cut was a novelty and an act of rebellion against the older generation. My own hair remained respectably short, but otherwise the Beatles were part of everyone’s life.

      The upper floor of our school offered an excellent viewing platform for the yard of the girls’ high school. Many of my classmates already had a girlfriend. We both envied and teased the boys who had girlfriends. One of my classmates began going out with a girl when he was fourteen and ended up married to her for many years. But this was an area where I was far from precocious: I was perhaps too shy, too reserved, always in control. Or perhaps I just wasn’t sufficiently interested in girls.

       CHAPTER 4

       The Day that Changed My Life

      SCHOOL WAS NOT A PROBLEM FOR ME, SO I was pleased to see in the newspaper an announcement that Atlantic College, an international school on the coast of South Wales, intended to recruit some Finnish pupils. I knew at once I wanted to go there. The following day the Rector of the High School, Olavi Niemi, stopped me in the corridor and suggested that I apply. I told him that I’d already sent off for the application forms. I wasn’t sure I’d get in because the college required language skills and other qualifications, but I was sure I would do well. In March I submitted the papers to the Finnish Cultural Foundation, which ran the selection process in Finland. In April ten promising candidates were invited to an English-language interview in Helsinki. I spoke stuttering school English. I had never been abroad. I had never used the language anywhere. I had heard people speak English on television, but otherwise I knew nothing of international life.

      On the last day of April but one I rang the Finnish Cultural Foundation. I asked if I’d been accepted. The telephone tingled in my hand as I was told that I had. I would leave for the Atlantic coast of Wales the following autumn. My heart jumped for joy. I told my parents the news and they congratulated me. My father slapped my back. My mother conjured up a dinner excelling even her high standards. That meal, which started at five, lasted for hours as we discussed everything that lay ahead. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

      I didn’t know then that the whole course of my life had changed. But looking back I’m absolutely certain that it did. Some seemingly random events do change the direction of our lives. We don’t realize it at the time, only in retrospect. My acceptance at Atlantic College was precisely such an event.

      Atlantic College was established to bring together students from different countries to study together for two years. The school was academically ambitious: gifted pupils were chosen on the basis of references and interviews to see how well they would fit in. This year two of us from Finland would go. A stipend from the Cultural Foundation would cover our tuition costs. You could also reach the school by a different route: rich parents could pay the school fees, but their offspring still had to pass the СКАЧАТЬ