Books were a Refuge from the Upheavals of Life

My mother, Anna Wallenius, had grown up with her grandparents in Gesterby, Sibbo, 

a few miles east of Helsinki. 

Nobody explained to her why she could not live with her own parents who moved to Helsinki in 1906 when she was barely a year old. 

Only when she was sixteen, she moved to live with her own family. She then decided that if she ever had children, she would never leave them in the care of others for extended periods.

Anna, second from left, when her parents visited Sibbo.

Anna far left, one year after moving to live with her family.

In her marriage vows, she promised to accompany her husband wherever he went - but not without her children. Nine years earlier she was forced to face this choice.  She had to decide whether to travel to the troubled country of China with her husband and kids or leave the children with relatives and travel with her husband. The children went with her. She had to make many difficult decisions during the seven years that followed that choice. A few times she had to travel alone with the children when dad went before us or would come after us. The hardest situation was when she left dad in China and fled with us children to Ceylon just before Mao's troops captured Kunming where we had lived the last two years. She had to wait eleven months before dad joined us in Kandy and reunited with the family.

She clung to her choice to keep her children together.

Now we children were nine years older. How my siblings experienced the break-up from Finland, I do not know. In any case, they had some opportunity to form more lasting friendships as they were older and had participated in youth camps of the Saalem church during our two summers in Finland. I was too young to attend the camps and therefore played with the children in the neighborhood. I wrote letters to some of them after we had left but did not get any response, so the short-lived friendship died out.

I even kept reading when someone wanted to take a photo of Grandma, my aunts, mom and me.

I liked to stay at home and read. I discovered that books were better friends than some of the kids I had met. The stories gave me new words and did not laugh if I pronounced something wrong. I began to understand something about the experiences I was going through. The stories did not point at me and say I was different because I had grown up in other countries.

On the contrary, the books gave me words and expressions for my experiences. Zacharias Topelius Stories for Children gave strength to my need for an identity, a homeland. Especially his story "The Birch and the Star" gave me an incredibly intense feeling of finding my way home after traveling around the world for seven years. Two tall birches stood right next to the grandmother's home. The stars that shone between branches during dark evenings confirmed the feeling of home.

They reach the exact place!

Now I had to go on a new journey. I had to leave all the birches and the stars that shone through them; leave my grandma and aunts in the cozy white house in Åggelby. They were my friends and would remain faithful to the end of their lives. wherever I moved around the world. They wrote many letters to us over the years we were gone. Sometimes I also tried to write a few lines to them, until I forgot the Finnish language as English became stronger in my new homeland, Ceylon.

Dad had heard the call and we all went along on the journey, 

sometimes not understanding the full meaning of his call. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAamGJabl2o