A Life of Extremes by Tony Lurcock

Author:Tony Lurcock [Lurcock, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909585157
Google: xbk-jgEACAAJ
Publisher: CB Editions
Published: 2015-01-15T03:30:12+00:00

Joan and Peggy Webster

Further evidence that Lapland was no longer a male preserve was the journey undertaken by two English girls, Joan and Peggy Webster, whose Footprints in Finland was published in 1940. They were neither adventurers like Ingram, nor professional writers like Sutherland, but describe themselves as ‘two very amateurish travellers’. What they present is a personal, occasionally gauche account of what they saw and did, combined with a lot of rather poorly digested background information. Despite its limitations their book has at times an engaging freshness; they do not mention the Tourist Association, and the photographs are all their own. Their book represents another new voice (or two, rather) among the British travellers.

After some time in Grankulla, where they learned and practiced skiing, and made brief visits to Helsinki, they took the train for the twenty-four-hour journey to Kauliranta in the company of a German girl, Kirre Henschel, who was fluent in English and Finnish. They observed characteristic details not always noted by other travellers:

it is the custom of the inhabitants of these northern towns to use the station restaurants in the evening as social gathering places. There we saw girls dressed in their best clothes conversing with older women, children, and men over beer and coffee.

From Kauliranta, ‘a scrubby little station with one restaurant building, a station office, and a few odd sheds’, they took the post bus north to Muonio. Like Sutherland, they provide vivid descriptions of the idiosyncrasies of this mode of transport:

The post-bus had all good intentions of departing at half-past one, but whether it left then or an hour later did not seem to trouble either the driver or the passengers. This may have been a matter of mutual understanding and, perhaps, even consideration, for long after the driver was safely installed and the engine ticking over patiently, all sorts of odd people – mainly ‘friends and relations’ – continued to pile in at haphazard, how, when, and where they liked. The last comers, looking rather disgruntled, seated themselves disconsolately on the conglomeration of rucksacks piled up behind the partition . . .

At long last the driver, without the slightest warning, jammed his foot on the accelerator, the passengers rose as one man from their seats, and we were off – very nearly off the road, for the bus skidded wickedly on the frozen surface. We had had our warning of ‘things to come,’ but in common fairness to the man at the wheel it must be said that he was a splendid driver up against difficult circumstances. The road was nothing but a glittering sheet of ice in some parts ; in others the surface was rudely broken by blocks of ice and deeply furrowed where the snow was soft.

There were two stops for coffee, bread and ginger biscuits on the eight-hour journey. The second of these was at Kolari, where ‘not a little amusement was caused by the postman, an extraordinarily ugly youth, producing from his pocket a broken mirror and a piece of haircomb’.

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