Girls of the fifties. Diaries as a mirror of internationalism

Abstract

(S 7.4.1954) Guess what! Well, you'll never guess, will you?, so I'll have to say it instead: "WE'VE GOT A RADIO!" Isn't it ghastly! We've had it since Saturday. It's wonderful and you can hear terribly well. It's a portable radio, a Fazer. On Saturday evening I was here on my own and I listened to "Saturday Sauna" on the radio and I had a lovely evening all alone.

(S 10.2.1955) Desirée's been made into a film! Or at least it was filmed a short while ago. It'll be on in America and every other country of course before it comes to Finland, for ages I expect. Just have to be patient. There's Jean Simmons as Desirée and Stewart Granger as Jean Baptiste! Wonderful!

(K 22.5.1956) The journey (school outing to Turku) took three hours and we sang and ate and watched the scenery. The train went through Porkkala,¹ and you can now ride through without pulling the blinds down. The area looked grim. There were bright blue and green hovels sticking up all untended in the middle of the fields, the trees had been chopped off three metres above the ground, and wherever you looked you saw the charred ruins of burnt-out houses. The houses looked so awful we were horrified. The only living thing we saw was a solitary hen. The Russkis certainly got an earful on this trip!

¹ The area leased to the Soviet Union for a period of 50 years under the interim peace treaty signed in 1944. It was returned to Finland in already 1956.

² EPILOGUE: A STORY OF THE TWO DIARIES 1951-1960

Once upon a time there were two young Finnish girls, Satu Koskimies (S) and Katarina Haavio (K) (the latter of whom is also the writer of this article, Katarina Eskola). And it so happened that these girls applied to and were accepted in the well-known secondary school for girls called the Girls' Normal Lyceum in Helsinki, and entered the same class in spring 1951.

Although they did not at first sit side by side, they became - after bitter struggles of jealousy and friendship - the best of friends. For S, who was the only child of her parents, both musicians, this friendship meant entrance to a larger family. K was the second youngest child in an academic family of five children. The head of the family was the father; the mother had died in January 1951.

The two girls loved to write. Apart from their diaries, they wrote poems and stories as well. Their dreams about their future professions were connected with writing. (And these dreams also came true: S became a poet and an editor, K a journalist and later a university scholar and teacher.)

S and K kept diaries during the whole time they attended secondary school. K had started her diary just a few weeks before her mother died, in January 1951. S, in turn, wrote her first diary entries in February 1953. In 1951-1960 they filled the pages of as many as 22 diaries, which they have carefully preserved. Together, the diaries amount to 3100 pages.

The friendship between S and K has continued up to this day. Today we live about one hundred metres apart in Käpylä, Helsinki, ring each other up every day, and meet as often as possible. When we turned 50 some years ago, we started, for some reason, to read our early diaries. This glimpse into our bygone selves and bygone worlds launched a longer process that we could not imagine at the time. It ended up in two thick tomes, 50-luvun tytöt (Girls of the fifties), which was published in 1992, and 50-luvun teinit (Teenagers of the fifties), which came out in 1994. The books consist of our authentic diaries from the years 1951-1960; and in addition, the latter volume contains the letters we sent to each other.

Since our original diaries had over 3100 pages, we knew we would have to reduce the number of the entries. However, it was far from easy to decide what to drop. Everything felt important. When selecting the entries to be published in our joint volume, we therefore tried, first and foremost, to retain the everyday life in all its aspects, as recorded in the diaries, in the book as well. This made it necessary for us e.g. to accept some repetition.

When abridging a manuscript, one also has the chance to censor the text. We decided to drop some epithets and sequences that we thought would be extremely delicate or insulting to the persons involved. Our choices were naturally very subjective; if someone else had abridged the manuscript, the result might have been different. However, even the reader of our book form diaries can, to some extent at least, see where the text has been cut, since the deleted parts of text have been marked with an extra space between lines.

As a result, 50-luvun tytöt(Girls of the fifties) contains about 60 per cent of the text of our original diaries. In the volume 50-luvun teinit (Teenagers of the fifties), we included 80-90 per cent of the original material.

We made no changes to the structure, language, spelling, or punctuation of the texts. Apart from the abridgements, the diaries were published as such, with all their clumsiness and errors.