by Helena Halme
‘I just thought that one day you two might move to Sweden,’ she’d said.
‘And what would Peter do?’ Kaisa had replied impatiently. ‘He can’t speak Swedish and he’s in the Navy! Who would employ him here?’ Kaisa got up from the table where they were having coffee, and went over to Peter who was reading a two-day old issue of The Times. Why was her mother now trying to sell Sweden to them when she herself had just moved back to Helsinki? But Kaisa had not asked; she’d been far too occupied with her own problems. She now regretted her impatience and wondered if she’d really listened to her mother – or Sirkka – they might have been able to help each other. But now it was too late; Kaisa didn’t know when the opportunity would arise to talk properly to either of them again. Phone calls were so expensive, it was difficult to discuss anything too deeply.
Now, alone again in the flat on King’s Terrace, and with nothing else to do but plan for the move to Faslane, Kaisa wished she could relive her short time in Helsinki. She hadn’t even had time to see her friends. Tuuli had taken three months off from the bank where she’d been working since graduating, and was travelling around Europe, and Kaisa had never even told her school friends she was in town. When Peter was getting ready to depart the day after their return from Finland, she’d cried and said she missed her mother.
‘Darling,’ Peter had said, looking at her with alarm. They were standing at the railway station, waiting for the platform number to be announced. Peter was on his way back to Scotland. ‘Soon you’ll be with me in Faslane, and when I’m not away, I can come home every night.’
The words, ‘When I’m not away,’ rang in Kaisa’s ears as she walked home from the station. It had started raining while they’d waited for Peter’s train, and Kaisa had no umbrella, so she was soaked through by the time she ducked inside the block of flats.
This time Kaisa missed Peter dreadfully from the first night she was on her own, and during the first week the feeling of loneliness seemed to only get worse. She thought it was because she’d got used to his presence in her bed, and to discussing everything from their future together to what they should have for dinner. It was so lonely in the flat without him.
Perhaps when she was in Scotland with him, she might try to find out more about what he actually did every day at work, and how the nuclear submarines worked. How she had changed. She didn’t recognise herself in that sentence. How did she end up being a Navy wife, only concerned with her husband’s career and not her own? On the TV there’d been another report from Greenham Common and Kaisa wondered how she’d ended up being married to a naval officer who’d soon be working in a submarine with nuclear warheads onboard? She was now a willing part of the vast machinery that wages war – or if it didn’t wage war, it certainly increased the arms race. When Kaisa mentioned these things to Peter he always answered, ‘We keep the peace more like!’
For something to do, Kaisa had phoned Sally and they agreed to meet up. It was the first time since her marriage in Finland that Kaisa had seen the older woman. Sally was as small and thin as ever, but her dark hair had more grey strands. Kaisa thought it weird that she could talk to Sally about anything at all, as her life was so different from her own. But she made her laugh when she said Kaisa had gone all ‘posh’ with her accent.
‘Oh, sorry,’ Kaisa said, but Sally replied, ‘No, it’s good, girl, that’s what you need to do when you’re with those other officers’ wives.’
They sat in Sally’s kitchen drinking instant coffee out of flower-patterned mugs. Although Kaisa couldn’t stand the stuff, because it tasted more like muddy water, she didn’t say anything because it was so lovely to see her old friend and neighbour. Sally and her husband and their son still lived on Devonshire Road, opposite number 23, where Kaisa had spent such happy times with Peter and Jeff and the rest of the gang when she first came to live in Britain.
The street hadn’t changed at all. While walking along the road from the bus stop Kaisa had fully expected to meet Jeff coming out of number 23, and was startled when a total stranger suddenly stopped outside the house and walked inside.
It seemed not much had changed in Sally’s life – her guitar-playing, country music-loving husband still went to the pub at the end of the street each night for a pint, and occasionally Sally would join him for a vodka and tonic. Their son, Jamie, was now at school, so Sally had started a ‘little’ part-time job in a hairdressers at the bottom of the road.
‘Hey, I could see if I could get you a job there too?’ she said, but then she must have seen something in Kaisa’s eyes, because she immediately added, ‘Of course, you’re married now and won’t be wanting work in a salon!’
Kaisa explained that she’d only been working as a dogsbody at IDS, but that she’d not applied for any more jobs because of the pending move to Scotland.
‘Oh, but you just moved here!’
Kaisa had to look down to her half-full cup of coffee to hold back the tears.
‘You know Peter is in one of these nuclear subs,’ she said, swallowing hard.
‘And they go away for months and months and then they have a long time at home. If I don’t move up there we’ll never see each other.’
‘I know, lovey,’ Sally said and touched Kaisa’s hand.
‘I can’t quite believe I’m actually married to someone who does that.’ Kaisa added, and bit her lip.
‘I know, it’s wonderful!’ Sally said and gave Kaisa the broadest of smiles. ‘I always knew he’d ask you eventually!’
‘No, I don’t mean that.’
‘Oh?’
‘No, I mean, he is part of this huge war machinery, when I’m …’ Kaisa looked at Sally to see if she understood what Kaisa meant. Sally’s eyes were wide and her head was tilted to one side. Kaisa took a deep breath and continued, ‘You know the women at Greenham Common?’
‘Hmm, you mean the hippies at the peace camp?’ Sally said after a while.
‘Yes, the thing is, I sort of understand what they are protesting about …’ Kaisa looked to see what Sally’s reaction was. Kaisa didn’t know why all this had come into her mind again. Perhaps it was triggered by the scenes on the news the night before, of women linking arms and blocking the whole of the entrance of the base with their physical presence, while all the time singing protest songs. They wanted to stop another delivery of nuclear warheads to the base. Policemen in black uniforms with batons were trying to wrench the women apart, and eventually they succeeded. Many of the protestors were taken away in a black police van and arrested, the newsreader said. Still, watching the women fight the policemen with nothing but their bodies and the support of their friends, made Kaisa wish, for a brief moment, that she’d been one of them instead of married to Peter. Then she remembered how much she loved him and missed him and thought what a stupid girl she was. How could Kaisa ever do something like that? She didn’t even have the courage to voice her opinions in front of Peter’s friends or their wives. And she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d really discussed the arms race with Peter. It must have been well before they were married.
When Kaisa saw Sally’s startled face, she said, ‘Anyway, thinking of him sleeping on top of those weapons makes me so scared.’ There Kaisa was again, losing her nerve when it came to saying what she really thought.
‘Oh, yes, I understand, but they do know what they’re doing. The subs are incredibly safe. And I’m sure he doesn’t sleep right on top of them!’ Sally laughed. She hugged Kaisa so hard when they parted, as if she wasn’t going to see her ever again.
Fifteen
Smuggler’s Way, Helensburgh
In mid-September 1984, Kaisa and Peter moved up to Faslane. It rained on the day the removal van arrived at Smuggler’s Way, and it had rained every day since. ‘If it’s not raining, it’s about to,’ Peter laughed and said that’s what the officers at the mess said to him. Kaisa hated rain, but laughed all the same.
Their new house, or married quarter, was in Rhu, on a hillside a
bout ten minutes’ drive from both Helensburgh and the base at Faslane. Kaisa could see the steel-grey loch in the distance between two other pebbledash houses exactly like theirs. The view was fantastic; it took in the Gareloch out into the east, where Kaisa could see the autumn colours in full glory on the opposite banks. Kaisa hadn’t known how beautiful the scenery was. It reminded her of Finland, and Kaisa felt an acute pang of homesickness when she looked at the grey loch and the auburn and red leaves on the trees. But the houses on the hill with the stunning view were ugly. They were two- or three-storey square blocks, made out of grey concrete. The cold wind and rain brought in from the loch found its way between the buildings, creating a chilly wind tunnel.
The house itself was quite small; it had a tiny garden with a lawn and a two-seater swing at the back. The first night Kaisa and Peter slept there, they were kept awake by the empty, rusty swings swaying in the breeze. Next morning, Peter got up and, finding an old can of oil under the sink, went out in his dressing gown and oiled the joints of the frame. Kaisa watched the fabric of his gown flap in the wind and wondered how he didn’t feel the cold. His annoyance was keeping him warm, Kaisa thought. He hated being kept awake at night, especially if he had to go to work the next morning.
A single paved path divided the lawn in half in the garden. There were no flowerbeds. (‘Because nothing will grow here,’ Peter said laughingly when Kaisa pointed out the lack of plants.) Their neighbour’s house almost touched theirs, and some evenings Kaisa could hear their TV through an open window.
As in their King’s Terrace married quarter, all the furniture was ugly, and all the curtains drab. Kaisa planned to take them down and replace them with the ones they’d had in the flat in Portsmouth, but she soon found that the windows here were a lot smaller than in Pompey. Peter said it would be a waste of money and fabric to make new curtains because they were not going to be in Faslane for more than three years. ‘Three years!’ Kaisa thought and her heart sank. Is that what a ‘minimum of two years’ meant?
This time the colour scheme of the ugly Navy issue furniture and the whole house was blue, if that’s what you could call it. It was really a dark blue-grey-green. Like a baby’s first poo, thought Kaisa. She knew this because in their first week in Scotland, they’d been invited to visit one of the naval wives in the Wardroom who’d just given birth. Peter knew the husband from a course they’d been on together. Phoebe, the new mother, was holding the baby when it suddenly produced so much poo that the blue-green stuff leaked out of the nappy. All Kaisa could think was that it was exactly the same colour as their sofa in their new married quarter. Phoebe must have seen Kaisa staring because she laughed and said, ‘That’s the first poo. They all produce it.’ The new baby girl was Phoebe’s third daughter.
‘We submariners only make girls,’ Peter’s friend, Bernie, laughed. He nudged Peter and said, ‘Isn’t it time you started your own netball team?’
Kaisa didn’t understand what Bernie meant at the time, but Peter told her in the car on their way home that in England only girls play netball at school.
‘So?’ she still didn’t understand what he’d meant.
Peter sighed. ‘Because submariners tend to only produce girls – it must be something to do with the nuclear radiation onboard – and because Bernie and Phoebe now have three girls, guys in the Wardroom keep teasing him that he’ll soon have a netball team of his own.
‘Oh,’ Kaisa said. She didn’t want to bring up the subject of babies, but since they’d been in Faslane, she’d noticed that almost all the other wives were either pregnant or had kids.
When they got back to their house, it was cold and damp inside. Peter quickly put the heating back on and tinkered with the boiler for a long time, so that it would come on early in the morning and just before he was due home from work. ‘If you want to have hot water during the day, you press this red button,’ he showed Kaisa what to do. In the King’s Terrace flat, the heating had not been a problem, because they were in between floors, and enjoyed the heat of the flats below and above them. ‘And if you are cold, I mean really cold, during the day, you press this button.’ Kaisa looked at the complicated panel, and decided she’d just wear more jumpers. As if he’d read her mind, Peter added, ‘I think it’s quite expensive to heat this house, so we must be careful.’
‘When do you think we’ll have the phone?’ Kaisa asked. They’d been promised a phone and that the connection would be there the same day as they moved in, but there’d been no sign of the telecom engineers.
‘I’ll ring them again tomorrow,’ Peter said, and Kaisa was reminded how lovely it was to have him at home to organise things. She still found all the arrangements with house movers, electricity and phone companies difficult; she just didn’t seem to possess the right words to speak to them.
When they at last got a telephone connection, Peter and Kaisa spent nearly the whole of the following weekend writing letters to friends and family telling everyone their new address and phone number. Peter said that when they had more money they would get cards printed with their details, but for now they used the same kind of blue Basildon Bond paper that Peter had used to write to her when she was in Finland. It seemed so strange to Kaisa to be writing to her mother and Sirkka, and Tuuli, on that particular paper. It was as if her life had been flipped upside down since she left Finland. When she thought about it, perhaps it had.
It seemed Peter was determined to make Kaisa feel happy in their new home in Scotland, so he took her down to the base to show her the swimming pool and tennis courts. Kaisa was not at all good at tennis, but Peter tried to teach her, and they had fun messing about. It was one of the rare mornings when the sun was out, and the wind was mild. Afterwards they swam in the vast pool on the base. The water was nice and warm, not cold like in Finland, and it was like stepping into a warm bath. Peter laughed when Kaisa told him about the chilly pools at home. ‘You like to punish yourselves, don’t you!’ Peter said. He told Kaisa she could use all the facilities at the base, which pleased her. There was even a sauna in the ladies’ changing rooms, though there was no water to throw on the coals and everyone wore a swimming costume. Noticing this, Kaisa was glad she’d taken a towel in with her and noted this strange British habit of wearing clothes inside a hot sauna for future visits. Not that this sauna was warm enough. When she asked where the bucket for throwing water onto the coals was kept, a slim older woman with short grey hair next to Kaisa looked horrified and said, ‘Oh goodness, you’re not allowed to do that. That’s dangerous!’ Kaisa didn’t want to tell her that she was from Finland and that, as this was a Finnish sauna (she’d seen ‘Kota’, the manufacturer’s name, on the stove), throwing water on the stove was exactly what you were supposed to do to create steam. Kaisa decided to speak to one of the staff next time she was there. All the same, it was nice to have a sauna, even if it wasn’t as hot as she would have liked.
Afterwards, when she met up with Peter in the reception area, he asked one of the staff to write up a temporary card for Kaisa so that she could come into the centre whenever she liked while he was away. The man at the reception told Kaisa in heavily accented Scottish that her proper pass would be in the post in a few days’ time. The only problem was that the base was a fair walking distance from the new married quarter. Being on the hill meant even the awful little shop was a long walk away. ‘I’m sure you could get a lift from one of the other wives,’ Peter said during the drive back. Kaisa said nothing and he looked sideways at her. She was sure he knew by now how difficult she found it to ask favours. ‘If you babysit the girls, I’m sure Phoebe would give you a few lifts,’ he added, and he put his hand on Kaisa’s knee, ‘All you have to do is ask.’
‘Yeah,’ she said and looked at the steel-grey loch beyond the base and the wire fence. The road ran along the hillside with woods to one side and the inlet on the other. It suddenly occurred to Kaisa how beautiful the place would have been without the unsightly base with its ugly dockyard buildings and the
menacing black shapes of the submarines rising from the grey water.
‘There’d be no jobs in this area, and Helensburgh would be a ghost town if the Navy wasn’t here.’ Peter said, as if once again he could read her thoughts. They were just passing the even more unsightly peace camp on the other side of the road.
‘What these people don’t understand is that the Navy brings jobs and prosperity to this forsaken land.’ Peter added.
As the car came to a halt, Kaisa saw a girl with matted hair, wearing a colourful stripy woollen poncho, stoking a fire in the middle of a circle of run-down caravans, all in different states of disrepair. One of them was painted bright red, but the rest looked dirty and old. The whole site was a mess. When they’d been to see the new baby, Phoebe said that the women on the campsite wrapped old T-shirts or ripped pieces of cloth between their legs when they had their periods. ‘They don’t believe in consumerism and sanitary towels are a capitalist invention, it seems!’ Everyone around the room had laughed, but Kaisa had shuddered. Now, looking at the woman crouching next to the fire, Kaisa imagined that under the layers of skirts she had just a dirty cloth to stem the flow of her period.
‘This is all we need!’ Peter said and suddenly Kaisa noticed that beyond their vehicle two cars had been stopped by a group of demonstrators. ‘I’d forgotten it was Wednesday!’