‘I was in this fetish club in Berlin…’ I was trying to negotiate a route through the islands on the electronic chart and concentration was difficult, but I gathered that a colleague had invited Chris to a club, which, to his anguish, turned out to be a kinky one. ‘I felt such a fool,’ Chris said, ‘because I had left all my usual stuff at home. I had to go in these pants.’ He was still lazing around the deck in his skimpies. ‘Ordinarily I have a fetish mask I wear,’ he went on, ‘with a zip down the front, just in case I’m recognized.’
We were passing through by far the most exquisite scenery we had yet seen on the journey. No, more than that. The most exquisite scenery we had seen, ever. The southern coast of Finland, the northern coast of the Gulf, was dotted with over 80,000 islands. And every one was beautiful.
The border had moved back and forth along this fragmented shore many times in the last 1,000 years. The Swedes had been beaten back home by Peter the Great. For 300 years Finland had been part of Russia. (During the Crimean War, a British fleet had been sent to bombard Åland, which was way out to our west.) Russia had only let go of this wonderland, where the tsar had yachted, in 1917, when the Finns negotiated their independence with Lenin.
We snaked past reed beds, close to rocks, in and out of channels. We twisted between high boulders of granite, running alongside bright patches of green reed, periodically breaking out into sudden wide sounds, crossed by larger boats.
‘There was this bloke by the door who seemed to be wanking for hours and hours.’
‘How long were you there, then?’
‘I don’t know. Oh, I see. Oh, all night, I suppose, but it was a little bit off-putting, because the corridor was rather narrow and you had to sort of get by without ever getting in the way.’
By the terms of the slimy Ribbentrop–Molotov agreement, on the eve of the Second World War, the Russians had been ‘given’ Finland, as a sphere of influence, by the Germans. They invaded in 1939. To the north of where we were now, up in Karelia, in a freezing, vicious winter war, the Finns miraculously held off the Russians for 100 days. But, with no one to support them, and in temperatures of minus 40 degrees, they had been forced finally to agree to the Peace of Moscow. The tiny country lost 25,000 people, and a lot of territory, but it did halt the Red Army, a feat so worthy of everyone’s admiration and respect that it is disturbing to realize that Finland ended up on the wrong side at the end of the Second World War. During their fight for independence, they had looked to Germany for help. As a result, they narrowly avoided becoming a post-war satellite, as the Baltic states did. They remained free, but had to pay huge reparations to Russia – $226 million by 1938 prices.
We had decided on a passage marked with a ‘4’, which meant there was never less than 4 metres of water. There were others marked ‘3’, ‘6’ and ‘10’ and they ran for hundreds of miles, intersecting each other, or heading off north to cities way inland, or plunging south, to an open sea we hardly even glimpsed. The whole area was alive with potential. Like a smoothly edited travelogue, it continuously fired visions of exquisite beauty at us. Nothing was grand or magisterial. Everything was proportionate. It was totally exhausting.
‘Look at that!’
‘God, how lovely.’
To begin with we drew attention to the little humped boulders, flecked with lichen, the deeper woods, the crooked pines surmounting an islet, the cleft in the rocks, the turn in the channel, but then we ran out of awe. And there were hundreds of miles of this to go. From here until we left Åland, a week of constant motoring later, the engaging, mysterious, unfolding, sliding-screen, revelatory, ever-changing spectacle never let up.
Finland’s entire history, like that of so many of the small countries of the area, had been driven by a wholly justified fear of its neighbours. The disputes, the civil wars, the blood-letting, even the internal political geography were caused by the aggressive policies of Russia, Germany and, before them, Sweden. During the post-war period, the cost of reparations motivated the Finns to industrialize and, ironically, this was the foundation of a thriving capitalist economy; but the ‘special relationship’ they had with Russia gave the Cold War a new word: ‘Finlandization’, as used by American hawks, meant a Western European country too sympathetic to Russia. With liberalization, in the 1980s, the Finns wanted to clear their name, and so they sent for Melvyn Kenneth Smith and me.
Yes, us two chirpy Brit sketch-comics played a small but, we like to think, vital part in the post-war history of plucky Finland. I played a smaller part than him. He played Santa Claus. I was just ‘interviewer’.
Ronald Reagan was coming to Europe and he intended to visit Finland. They feared that the Great Communicator, like rather a lot of Americans, thought that Finland was still part of Russia, and they wanted to demonstrate that, though not allied with Nato, Finland was a free, Western-type place, with the right ideas and good toilets. To do this they decided to show him a short film on the plane on the way over.
The Finns had taken to Smith and Jones in a way that probably baffled the BBC. When we were shipped over to begin work on this important propaganda, we were embraced by restaurant owners and stopped the traffic in urinals. Naturally, ever since, I have had an affection for Finland. I remembered smiles from stunning elfin girls with white blonde hair. I remembered bear-hugs from massive stoker types in hotels. I had assured the others on Undina it would be like going home, and I was excited to be now threading through the islands to Helsinki, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite so beautiful on the way.
‘Why do the British go to the Grand Canyon, get on an airliner to fly to Australia to look at Ayers Rock, or visit the Seychelles, when they could come to these extraordinary islands?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bob, lighting another cigarette, ‘but, tell me, Christophe, do you go to these fetish clubs in London too, or what?’