A Dutch cargo carrier, Flevoborg, has been loading all day. She comes out now, low in the ice, steam, snow and orange light billowing behind her. The pilot boat sets off into the white, looking like a snowmobile moving over the pack. Behind Flevoborg is a much bigger ship, red and black, loading iron ore. She looks like something from another time, as if she has sailed out of an archive, austere and haunted.
‘The wind is coming from the north-east,’ Ville murmurs. ‘Ideal for ice formation.’ He has taken over from Arvo, keeping us just offshore, not easy in the wind and snow. Ville seems to feel the want of work, the want of ice most keenly. There is something about Ville, in his standard grey tracksuit and sandals, the way his bulk moves swiftly, the way the others defer to him despite his shyness. I understand it now: sea time and something else, some deep relationship with his role the others do not quite have. There can be five master mariners on this bridge: Sampo and the silent Villi-Matti work together; Arvo, a grandfatherly man, is paired with Ville, and Tem comes and goes. But when Ville handles the ship I have caught the others watching.
Quietly, when we are away from them, Tem says, ‘Ville is amazing. I love watching him teaching Arvo. He doesn’t say anything.’
We take Flevoborg out to the edge of the ice. Open the bridge wing door out here and you stand in a truly frightening night, the snow riding horizontal on a fierce wind, the sea moving strangely in all directions, as if stirred and swirling. Pancake ice knocks against the hull and there is loneliness and peril everywhere.
Now we wait and wait. I turn in late and we are still standing by. Sailors have always waited, like truckers and train drivers, like anyone who has worked on the conveyor belts of trade. In a half-dream before sleep I am wheeling through a future of outraged nature, of deserts of heat and cold in which machines work and humans monitor, where the environment is vengefully dominant, forcing us to live like Finnish seafarers – behind glass, monitoring, waiting.
CHAPTER 11
Bright Weekend
DAZZLING SUN! THE sky is purest white-blue at the horizon, rising by degrees to a glowing lapis blue overhead. All the ship’s smells are sharp in the morning air: whiffs of diesel, sulphur and cooking, and the blunt smell of steel. Seaward, the ice field runs to the end of vision, only the channel buoys breaking the white, frozen in their lurching. In all the pristine immensity only a raven moves, carbon black, flying out to an island of pines like a ragged priest bent on establishing a mission. A fisherman appears in a yellow hovercraft, steering towards us then veering away as if he can detect Ville’s move towards the megaphone. ‘We don’t accept visitors,’ Ville says with a comical growl. We talk about books; the ship has an excellent library of thrillers and classics in Finnish, locked in a cupboard and not much read.
‘I have made a book,’ Tem reveals, ‘part of a book. It is called Ninety-Nine Shades of Grey. That is what it is. Ninety-nine different greys. They crowd-funded it. The third shade in the book is called Maja after my wife.’
I look at Tem with delight and some disbelief.
‘The Finnish sense of humour in a book! Was she pleased?’
‘Oh yes, she likes this very much. It has an ISBN number and it is in the Library of Congress.’
‘What kind of grey is Maja?’
‘Very pale. Like ice!’
There is no work, it seems, so a straggle of engineers and deck crew head for the gangway. At the bottom of the ladder it takes only a couple of kicks to break through the skin of snow to a slush layer on top of the ice.
‘We think this is safe?’
‘Yes, yes, we will measure it!’
We proceed, toting an ice drill, a measuring stick and the drone. The ice is twenty centimetres thick, we discover, and they make me repeat the measurement in Finnish: kaksikymmentä senttimetriä paksu, like a riddle or a motto in jumbled verse.
Being out on the white plain brings a feeling of joyful lightness, as though distance and time have lost their grip on being. We wander about, the snow crumping in our boot treads. Sampo flies the drone around and over his beloved ship while I operate the camera. It is kite-flying with a robot, disguised as public relations. We need the cover, in case someone from the world should cross the ice and ask, ‘What are you doing? Why are all these men not working?’ Ville’s grab for the megaphone when the hovercraft approached was revealing. It is somehow part of our identity to be quarantined; we are not ourselves but Otso – independent, mighty, mid-voyage and always operational, especially when mooching about in the white.
After an hour someone declares, ‘Now it is time we go for one small coffee!’ and we troop back aboard. Finns drink more coffee, per head of the population, than any other nation. ‘But we like it weak,’ Tem confides. ‘The Swedes always say they cannot taste it.’ I discover the cabin steward, Tom, on a rare break. He is a shy man even by the standards of shy men. ‘I worked on supply ships for oil platforms,’ he says, ‘off Italy, in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea. It is not that scary,’ he says quietly, ‘except the helicopter transfers. You have to do your training in Amsterdam. They put you in a helicopter simulator, drop you in a pool and turn you over.’
As the sun loses its grip on the heights, the snow begins to glow in spectrums of blue. Leads in our wake take on the pale azure of the sky; low dunes of snow are white kraken backs. The smell of ice becomes less indistinct – it is there always, like a premonition of snow – but now it is sharp in the nose when you inhale, a pellucid starkness, an absence, clean and clear. Falling towards the forest, the sun leaves the light citrine. I scramble to the bridge and watch the twilight draw out the colours. In our shadow the broken ice is green as the sky and the ice play the light between them; now the sky is aquamarine, almost green, and the ice green-blues in answer. The sun’s retracting flare makes black spires of the pines. You can see the temperature dropping: it is minus five as the sun touches the trees, down from plus one at noon. The sunset still lingers after supper, dim carmines and greens glowing all along a horizon which is minutely serrated with countless trees.
There is a holiday mood on the bridge. The light and ice have shriven us of the claustrophobia of routine. Ville fires up the engines. ‘Look, Horatio. Black smoke! That’s engine number three!’
A horrible pall of exhaust goes swirling away into the evening. It is funny in a ghastly way, of a piece with Ville’s mordant humour. We back out of our foxhole as a small bulker comes out of Kokkola to follow us.
Tem wrinkles his nose at Ville. ‘Where do you find all these small ships? You can hardly see it.’
The night fills with stars as we steer west; a satellite crosses fast to the north-east. I am hoping for the aurora borealis, but Reidun summons a site on her phone – the great green nets are far to the north-west of us. Our night is a back and forth of escorting. Kokkola’s approaches are marked by substantial structures, concrete and steel beacons.
‘Kokkola is notorious,’ Tem explains, ‘because the fairway is very narrow and there are many beacons. So you should never have a ship unattended. If she sticks and the ice is moving she can be swept into the beacons.’
Sunday’s sky is a soft sea of silvers and greys. We are holed up outside Kokkola again. I am looking for someone, anyone, who is doing something interesting.
‘We are doing nothing!’ says Robbe the deck cadet. ‘Drinking coffee upstairs.’
‘Everyone onto the ice!’ Ville commands, and out we go into an immense and windless silence, a drilling party to establish that the ice here is twenty-five centimetres thick, a drone party obviously, and a shovelling party which Ville leads. They sweep a great H out of the snow and take turns landing the drone on it.
‘I was going to write “Tem”,’ Ville says, ‘but too much effort.’
The captain as hero. They are so affectionate and informal with him, and their meticulous attention to their work functions as a protective bubble around him – if anything goes wrong Tem will take the final blame. Although so many metaphors of l
eadership on land borrow from the sea, the actual relationship of Otso’s officers to their captain seems reversed. In his manner Tem retreats from the position of overseer, assessor, wielder of power; instead he sets the larger parameters of the mission, disposing his icebreaking fleet, and the officers fulfil it.
‘Every year I do this job because no one else wants it,’ he says, coming off the phone to one icebreaker and preparing to call another. ‘Things can go wrong, but if they do we fix it! So it doesn’t matter.’
Perhaps this is Tem’s secret, a fatalistic optimism.
The temperature drops, the cold clamping my head and legs as small squeezed flakes of snow blow through silver light. The cook is smoking a cigar, gazing at the calendars in the smoking room.
‘It’s nice to wake up and have a cigar and look at these nice women,’ he says, his tone paternal. ‘I have been on ships since 1976. During the Biafran War I was off the coast of Nigeria. We had people from both sides of the war on the crew. This was terrible, angry all the time. But I am never frightened. I have trust in the captain and the mates; I have trust in what they will do. If you do not have trust it is better you stay ashore.’
‘What do you do when you leave the ship?’
‘I am taking care of my mother in Raahe – she is eighty-seven. Then in summer we do maintenance in Helsinki and I am still cooking – in the ship; I do not want to cook on land!’
He cannot explain why land repels him, but the money, the habitual rhythm and the contained, simplified nature of sea life must be part of its attraction. In the cupboard of coffee mugs on the bridge is a deeper reason, I think. The mugs are all labelled with the officers’ names. Otso is not one family, but a network of family groups. The cooks, Penntti and Ulla, and Tom the steward take their meals together. The engineers form a group, the cadets another. Reidun and I, as guests, are assigned to Tem, Sampo, Arvo and Ville.
Two of the cadets have little English, but the third, Katri, is voluble. She is serving as an apprentice repairman, she says proudly, a work placement organised by her technical college.
‘I don’t want to work on land! Everybody works five days on, two days off, waiting for summer vacation. This is my fourth time at sea. The first was on a bulk carrier, we were taking coal from Russia to Sweden. The sailors were fine! I grew up in a mannish environment anyway. I get along with everyone. I only have two friends really. They keep in touch. Mum was asking, what about kids? What about getting married? I don’t have plans for kids so it’s not a problem for me. My first goal is to be an officer. This is my first engineering apprenticeship. I find it interesting. I might slide a bit to the dark side.’
‘The engine room?’
‘Yes!
‘So what did you actually do today?’
‘We were trying to fix the heat exchanger. And I was working on my own project. I go to dog shows at home so I was making a lead from plumbing beads and flag cord.’
‘In the engine room, you were doing this?’
‘I don’t mind the noise, but if you hear something weird you are on your toes! I finish at four, go to the gym, watch Netflix.’
She becomes suddenly vehement. ‘I like ships because I like my own time! When you’re off duty you can sleep how much you want, watch Netflix when you want. At home I have no time. It started because I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to consider studying at uni, and everything else – nursing, plumbing, car mechanics – no. But then there was a ship simulator and it felt right. The first time at sea was a little scary, but I made friends. I didn’t mind all the men. I liked the attention! Boyfriends think it is weird, but that is why you should only date seafarers – ha ha! I have a friend who is a first mate; he does four to eight in the morning so I message him then. The first time I went from Finland to Germany to Southampton on a car carrier. But there was one guy, he told another of the crew I was with him, and that guy started acting weird. I could have started a lot of drama but I promised the first guy I wouldn’t say anything because they had four months together …’
‘Did your college prepare you for that side of ships – dealing with the people?’
‘They said when you join a ship the first impression really matters so you have to be really open, tell everyone who you are. The first time I was most worried if I would be seasick.’
‘Is it all as professional as it seems, Katri? No parties, just work and Netflix? I thought I smelled vodka …’
She laughs. ‘Not on Otso, but my friend was on a ship, they were at sea for five weeks and she was only sober for two. They were on the Atlantic side of Norway and she was really ill. But this wasn’t seasick, this was hangover!’
‘So you don’t miss all that?’
‘We will dock on Thursday. I will probably be drinking then. On Friday I am going dancing – foxtrot, cha-cha, tango. I like long drinks. Do you know long drinks? Gin and grapefruit …’
Katri’s ease and confidence in this male world is in line with the great tradition of Finnish women’s self-realisation. They achieved universal suffrage in 1906, the first women in the world to be able both to vote and to run for office. Their standing in society was noted by Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, who travelled around the country in 1897. Her story of the trip, Through Finland in Carts, is suffused with humour and insight and a joy which is extraordinary, given her circumstances. Her beloved husband, Alec Tweedie, her father and her dearest friend all died within the space of five months in 1896. She and her two children were bereft and ruined, her husband having lost his fortune before he died, and her father dying intestate. But Ethel Tweedie was emphatically unbroken, although her journey was made in deep grief. This is as much of it as is allowed into the pages.
Grave trouble had fallen at my door. Life had been a happy bounteous chain; the links had snapped suddenly and unexpectedly, and solace and substance could only be found in work. ’Tis often harder to live than to die. Immediate and constant work lay before me. The cuckoo’s note trilled forth in England, that sad, sad note that seemed to haunt me and speed me on life’s way. No sooner had I landed in Suomi than the cuckoos came to greet me. The same sad tone had followed me across the ocean to remind me hourly of all the trouble I had gone through. The cuckoo would not let me rest or forget; he sang a song of sympathy and encouragement. It was on a brilliant sunny morning early in June that the trim little ship Urania steamed between the many islands round the coast to enter, after four and a half days’ passage from Hull, the port of Helsingfors. How many thousands of posts, growing apparently out of the sea, are to be met with round the shores of Finland!
And with that she is off, curious, delighted and very funny. In Helsinki she observes Finnish women working on building sites. Later in her account of the journey she presents her conclusions.
In fact, one cannot travel through Finland without being struck by the position of women on every side. As no country is more democratic than Finland, where there is no court and little aristocracy, the daughters of senators and generals take up all kinds of work. Whatever the cause, it is amazing to find the vast number of employments open to women, and the excellent way in which they fill these posts. There is no law to prevent women working at anything they choose.
Among the unmarried women it is more the exception than the rule to find them idle, and instead of work being looked upon as degrading, it is admired on all sides, especially teaching, which is considered one of the finest positions for a man or woman in Finland. And it is scientific teaching, for they learn how to impart knowledge to others, instead of doing it in a dilatory and dilettante manner, as so often happens elsewhere.
We were impressed by the force and the marvellous energy and splendid independence of the women of Suomi, who became independent workers long before their sisters in Britain. All this is particularly interesting with the struggle going on now around us, for to our mind it is remarkable that so remote a country, one so little known and so unappreciated, should have thus suddenly burst forth and hold the mo
st advanced ideas for both men and women. That endless sex question is never discussed. There is no sex question in Finland, men and women are practically equals, and on that basis society is formed.
Eight years after Mrs Tweedie observed women labouring on a building site in Helsinki, working-class women were organising and participating in the 1905 general strike. Nineteen were elected to parliament in the country’s first elections, nearly a tenth of all MPs, with the first female minister taking office in 1926. In 1991 Finnish women broke the world record for representation in a national parliament, occupying seventy-seven out of two hundred seats. In 2000 the country’s first female president was elected (Tarja Halonen served two terms); the first female prime minister, Anneli Jaatteenmaki, came to power in 2003. By 2007 over 41 per cent of elected MPs were women – a figure achieved without quotas. Quotas do apply to the boards of municipal authorities, governing bodies consisting of elected officials and companies majority-owned by the state, and equitably so: the Finnish definition of equality is 40 per cent representation of each sex. Since 1991 more Finnish women have voted in elections than have men. Though there is more to do – women have only marginal influence over Finland’s economic decisions, for example – the progress of Finnish women towards equality is a story of rapid advance.
Farming in the Finnish wilds of the early nineteenth century allowed for little distinction between the agency and influence of men and women. Twentieth-century wars and a fall in the male population required the advance of women into the workplace, with many staying in paid employment. Finnish innovations in childcare have been crucial to the success of this story: in 1973 legislation funding and obliging municipal authorities to provide day care created a new professional class of family childminders, allowing parents to return to work after generous leave. This was followed by a home care allowance, paid to parents looking after children under school age. Parents can now choose between home care and day care. Two-thirds opt for day care and return to work.
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