FARAWAY FINLAND

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 August 1938, Page 12

FARAWAY FINLAND

COMPARATIVE PARADISE. To the average tax-paying New Zealander, life in a land where there is no unemployment, no domestic servant problem and very little party politics may seem impossibly near to Paradise. Yet that, according to a woman traveller who passed through Wellington, is exactly how life goes in far-away Finland —a compact and self-sufficient country which is remote enough from the world’s hurly-burly to be allowed to manage its own affairs.

However, although this visitor formed a liking for the Finns and found them a race with many admirable qualities, she thought, them gloomy and pessimistic, taking even theJr pleasures sadly. Remote from the world, they are remote, too. from the sun and ever-dull skies have darkened the texture of their lives The Finns are able to drink large quantities of fiery, raw wood whisky with a slight, but very slight, loosening of the tongue as the sole effect. Very rarely is a Finn seen drunk.

Finns are so taciturn, she said, that the stranger cannot do business with them at all until he has clinked glasses across the office desk. It. is not that they are unfriendly—for, indeed, they are an easy-going, hospitable people with few faults and innumerable virtues. It is merely that they seem unable to warm to life without the aid of raw alcohol. “Those Finns are a fine race —tin

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. “Congratulations, Mrs. Brown,” said the vicar genially. “It’s been a pleasure to christen your child. I've never had such a well-behaved one before.” “Ah, well,” replied Mrs. Brown. “You see, my husband and I have been practising on him for a whole week with a watering-can." HE WASN'T SURE. “Mummy, why do you wear powder?" “To make me beautiful.” “Mummy, are you sure you have the right powder?”

admirable race,” she said in an interview, “and were it not for the sunlessness, I would enjoy a home in that country. The men work hard, almost none is unemployed—and the women are capable, willing housewives who have no false scorn of domesticity.

"The scenery, of course, is splendid in. a. sombre, rugged way. The great forests make a dark carpet over the hills to the snow peaks . . And the trains were so amusing!”

“They are stoked with birch logs,” she explained, “burning immense numbers, which are loaded on the tender at frequent stopping-places. Then the engine starts, painfully, and chugs its way by degrees to a huge hill. You think it will never reach the top—but it. does; and then starts down a little faster. All is well. Yet inevitably, at. the bottom of the hill is a tiny village. The train, of course, must stop! And there you are! Again the laborious, grunting start, and again a jerky, breathless crawl -to the top of another crag.”

Only the Swedes and’ the Russians can rouse the Finns to an unreasoning lever of hatred—so much, indeed, that they have pulled down the most magniticeni. (>! all Helsingfors’s cathedrals because it was planned by a Russian.

Somewhat similar is their dislike of the Swedes. "If you speak to a Finnish person in Swedish, it is probable you will get no answer,” remarked the traveller. “You may repeat -the question again and again, but they only stare impassively. By using German or some other tongue you may learn the reason. ' ‘Finland for the Finns’ they will tell you firmly.”