In Search Of The Moomins In Helsinki: The Enduring Magic Of Tove Jannson’s Characters

It is the end of October when I arrive in Helsinki with my nine-year-old son, with whom I first read the Moomin stories when he was three years old, and we were living in Scotland together during a harsh winter. We read The Invisible Child and various other exploits and adventures of this family of strange creatures, which appeal to adults just as much as children, with their wry humor and wistfulness, their resilient togetherness.

We had come to Helsinki in search of the original Moomins, in a sense, but we were here for other reasons too. Although I had never been to Helsinki before, my father spent much of his life here. He trained as an architect and then wrote several books on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; he had a Finnish girlfriend whom he would visit many times over several decades, but whom I never met.

At the end of the Cold War, he liaised with the Finnish and Russian governments to save a library designed by Alvar Aalto, The Viipuri Library, which had been taken into Russian territory and left to disrepair until these diplomatic talks secured its future. He was given a Finnish knighthood for these mysterious negotiations with the Russians in the 1990s, and the library is now in good condition.

I had heard many interesting stories about Helsinki, therefore, even if they were lacking in detail, but I had never been to the city myself; it came to represent some mythical place where my father had always just disappeared to. He had returned bearing gifts—Marimekko pyjamas, little chocolates, snacks involving lingonberries, fur hats—but it seemed like a fairy-tale location rather than a real place. I just knew it must be worthwhile, for him to so frequently disappear there.

All these years later, and a decade after he died, I saw HELSINKI come up on an airport departures board, on the way back from another trip, and suddenly this mythical place seemed within reach. I could just book tickets there, I realized; I could take my son with me; I could find out what it was really like.

I could write about Tove Jansson while I was there, and tell myself I was looking for her, and tell my son we were looking for the Moomins, when perhaps, really, I was just looking for my father.

*

Tove Jansson (1914—2001) grew up in Helsinki, the daughter of sculptor Viktor Jansson and illustrator Signe “Ham” Jansson, and as a child she sat for her father’s works; you can find a mermaid in her likeness in Esplanade Park. She began drawing with her mother, too, and she was a precocious talent, contributing cartoons to a political magazine called Garm in her teens.

As war broke out, she mocked the Nazis, and the first Moomin-like creatures appeared in these scenes. In the years following the Second World War, in which her brothers had served, her stories began to express the melancholy that arose from this time of recovery and rebuilding and attempts to contain a traumatic recent past.

Her father, Victor, had been a bon vivant before the war, but had come back a different man, taking to drinking and affairs, and her parents’ marriage broke down. Tove sided with her mother.

In her Moomin stories, the family remains intact, though troubled. Various natural disasters, from comets to floods, and volcanoes to supernatural beings, would threaten their peace, and yet together they would triumph and persist in their resilience. As all this is going on, Moominpapa often withdraws from the family, shut away in his bedroom to write his memoirs, or drinking whiskey, or sailing.

In Moominpapa at Sea, a crate of Old Smuggler whisky is washed up on the island. Moominpappa joyfully takes it for the launch party for the great novel about the sea that he has been working on, only for the sea to take back all but one bottle, which is then confiscated by an irritated lighthouse inspector.

Moominpapa is often not quite there; he is working on his memoirs (some of which form the fourth Moomin book, The Exploits of Moominpappa), or he is remembering his exciting youth, or he is sailing away.

*

As we explored Helsinki, perhaps inevitably, I kept thinking of my own father. As we sat in cafes and parks, I wondered which of them he had gone to, which of the museums and islands he had explored. Helsinki felt so familiar that it was as if I had already been here, and yet the more time we spent there, the more I realized that I didn’t know anything about my father’s time here at all.

He had not really told me stories about coming here; he had just gone and come back. I had imagined his times in Helsinki based on the gifts he returned with, the pictures in his books, and later the Moomin stories; but he had not really told me anything himself.

He had written about Alvar Aalto, expressed joy at the sight of herrings or gooseberries or meatballs; I knew he loved the place. He had even tried to build a Finnish summer house, in the same sky blue that was popular here; but he had never been very practical minded, and it had not stood up well to the elements.

Nevertheless, I had lived there for several years as a teenager. Perhaps this experience, living in a weather-beaten wooden Summer House in the woods, is what made Finland itself seem familiar to me, rather than anything my father ever told me about the country.

And yet, now that I was here, I found myself wondering about him anyway; had he gone to Esplanade Park, had he had coffee at Fazer, had he known Rock Church or the Uspenski Cathedral, had he felt this light as I did now? But I didn’t actually know, and I never would; he was not here, only his ghost was.

But the Alvar Aalto buildings were, all the other reminders were. And the Moomins were here, too; in gift shops and cafes, these friendly creatures appeared, giving the whole city the cast of a fairy-tale, along with its mists and sea, its pastel-colored buildings, its ships and cobbled stones.

*

On our second day, we went to lunch with two very nice people from Amos Rex Museum, as I was writing about an exhibition there, and I mentioned that my father had spent a lot of time in Helsinki, but I had never been until this trip. It turned out that one of them had written her thesis on Alvar Aalto, and she suggested that we go to visit his studio and home.

But there were no available times that day, so it was not possible. The truth is that I had known about the house and studio before, and I could have booked it in earlier, but something stopped me.

As I thought about it, after our lunch, I realized that although I had come all the way to Helsinki, which was in many ways his city, I did not want every aspect of the trip to revolve around him.

“He never took you with him?” one of the women had asked.

“No,” I replied, but I wish he had taken me to Helsinki, and I felt it more intensely now I was here. And so, perhaps childishly, I did not go to the Alvar Aalto house, as he might have wanted. I didn’t go to the Alvar Aalto Studio. I didn’t even go to the Alvar Aalto Café, which would have been much easier, as it was a few minutes from where we were staying.

I knew these places would remind me too much of him, and the furniture he liked, and the books he wrote. It was too painful to go there because he would be there and yet not there at all, so I went looking for Tove Jansson and her Moomins instead.

She was also everywhere in Helsinki, and she told stories that circled round the melancholy I felt. She was in the Ateneum Museum (once her art school, now showing the brilliant Gothic Modern exhibition); she was in Tove Jansson Park (where she had played as a child, and where the street she lived on once crossed), she was in her father’s sculptures, she was in the vast murals on show at Helsinki Art Museum, with her charcoal drawings and her self-portraits. She was in the books we carried with us.

I read Moominvalley in November on our last full day in Helsinki, the last day of October, when we took a boat to Tallinn in Estonia. In this book, the last in the series of Jansson’s Moomin stories, and written the year that Tove Jansson’s mother died, we meet various characters who have decided to go and see the Moomin family in Moominvalley; but it is November, and they are not there.

Over the course of the story, they busy themselves in preparing for the Moomin Family to return; they clean, they worry, they start building a tree house, they make food from what has been left. In one moving scene, they throw a party in their honor, creating a shadow-play of the Moomins, who seem so much like them, but are of course their own creations in their likeness. Eventually, as winter comes, they all go their separate ways.

In the story, it transpires that the Moomin family have taken their boat and left Moominvalley; I had come all the way to Finland just to leave it on our last full day, to visit Estonia instead. I thought about all this sailing away, not just in a melancholic sense, but joyfully. I loved it, and I was most content on a boat, out on the sea.

Perhaps I had inherited this characteristic from my father, who so loved to leave, to be away on these trips; certainly now, as I was sailing away from the place that he gone to, away from us.

Perhaps in this particular journey, I had found my father, too; he was always somewhere out here, after all. By coming all the way to Helsinki, and then leaving briefly for Tallinn, by turning away from Alvar Aalto for Tove Jansson, I felt I had forged my own relationship with Helsinki. Perhaps the idea of it had haunted it more than I knew, and so, on Halloween of all days, I seemed to have befriended the specter of it, and learned to love it for myself.

And, more importantly, I brought my son with me; we discovered it together. Where Helsinki once symbolized this mythical place where my father disappeared from time to time, whose designs I lived in, whose food I ate, but which I never really knew, now it was a real place we had enjoyed together.

He was no longer in Helsinki, and yet it became magical in a different way, as if he had recommended it many years ago, and I had only just acted on it. It had been waiting here all along, and now was the right time to visit.

I realized as we left, too, that I had not only left out Alvar Aalto because it would be too much of a reminder of my father, but also because it meant we had an excuse to come back, another reason for another journey in the future. But this trip had been for us, with Tove Jansson as our guide, her stories in the background of our own.

I think this is a testament to the enduring power of Tove Jansson’s stories, both for children and adults; she tells simple and yet magical stories that rest in the hinterland of family, remembered and longed for. All of her characters, as fantastical as they may be, are sharply observed and feel deeply familiar; when the old man character grows frustrated with what he calls The Ancestor, and prods him with a stick, only for his reflection to shatter with the glass that contains it, it is uncannily moving.

Jansson captures the communality of creatures, and their individual loneliness so well, in the last Moomin book particularly. She writes of Snufkin, “The rain fell on his green hat and on his raincoat, which was also green, it pittered and pattered everywhere and the forest wrapped him in a gentle and exquisite loneliness.”

*

At the end of this book, when all the characters leave Moominvalley one by one, even though the family have not returned, and may never, it begins to snow. On our last day, too, the first day of November, it is also the first snow fall of the winter. As we wait in the airport for our plane, and it falls heavier, the sight of my son’s joyful expression gives me a wave of contentment.

As Jansson wrote in the book:

The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won’t find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.

We are ready for winter, for going inside during the cold.

Before we fly back to England, I look at the map of Europe, and realize how close we are to Russia. The Viipuri Library, in what is now called Vyborg, which my father worked so hard to save, is unapproachable because it is on Russian soil, and so I wonder what has become of it. Are the Russians still looking after it?

We are so close, and yet so impossibly far; I may have got to Finland, but it’s likely I will never get to the library. Though the border opened at the close of my father’s time in Finland, it was now very much shut again, in the depths of another cold winter.

“She went on across the bridge without turning round. They disappeared into the swirling snow, lost in that mixed feeling of melancholy and relief that usually accompanies goodbyes.”

It is time to go back inside, to come in from the cold; to wait, to hope for spring.