The Forest for the Trees
by Mike Rogers
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
Wide-spread they stand, the Northland’s dusky forests,
Ancient, mysterious, brooding savage dreams;
Within them dwells the Forest’s mighty God,
And wood-sprites in the gloom weave magic secrets.
That’s what it says at the top of the score, anyway. I have never been there, but I know all about them because I have often listened to Sibelius’s Tapiola, so I’ve got all the atmosphere without the mosquito bites. I was also once told by a heavy-metal fan that heavy-metal bands are always going there for photo shoots and often have to be rescued when they get lost. Whether they are always found is another matter.
No doubt, when they are brought back, they are first of all put into a traditional Finnish sauna, to sweat out whatever problems they may have brought back with them; hitting yourself with birch twigs is alleged to stop the mosquito bites itching quite so much. Saunas don’t seem to help the problems they already have that make them play heavy metal.
And this is where my introduction, about what I thought I knew, segues into the main part of my story, about everything I discovered subsequently.
My friend Malcolm can’t resist a bargain. The evidence for that fills his garage. And his neighbour’s garage. And the double garage of the widow across the road who, not having a car anymore, lets him use it for free in return for his work for her as a general handyman. There is nothing so broken that Malcolm can’t fix it or replace it with an even better version that he picked up for a song at an auction.
That was where the sauna had come from, in flat-pack form. Well, Malcolm had bought it on-line and had had to take it apart in situ and convert it into a flat-pack to transport it to his garage; three trips in all, the shorter pieces inside his station wagon, the big bits on the roof. The third trip had been to pick up the bits that had blown off during the first two.
I found out about it only because I was looking for something else in his Aladdin’s Cave of mechanical waifs and technological strays. I think it was the dehumidifier I needed, after the rats had bitten through the cold feed to the dish washer during my prolonged absence.
But enough about me. When I came across these amazing pieces of beautiful wood that were preventing me — as beauty often does — from getting on with what I ought to be doing, I asked Malcolm what they were, and he told me.
If I raised my eyebrows every time he told me that kind of thing, I wouldn’t have any problem with my receding hairline... He also told me that there was another, smaller dehumidifier that was blocking the back door to the garage and that I’d be doing him a favour if I got it out and took it away and used it. So I did.
But I was still struck by the presence of the sauna and asked him where he’d got it, and he told me he’d seen it on Gumtree, and it had been in a little hotel on the Great West Road, tacked onto the back, no doubt in defiance of all planning regulations, but to the great pleasure of all the commercial travellers on low expenses who’d stayed there.
“Was it easy to take apart?” I asked, choosing not to enquire how easy it would be to put it all back together again.
“Once you get started, you see how it works,” he said, which was a major part of his philosophy.
I didn’t ask why the hotel had wanted rid of it; it didn’t occur to me at the time. My mind was filled with the beautifully made manufacturer’s plate that I’d seen on the piece of wood at the front of the vertical stack. I’d even photographed it with my smart phone, a recent acquisition, because, although a linguist, Finnish didn’t belong to my repertoire, although I was, as a storyteller, familiar with the more popular parts of the Kalevala, without ever having told them myself... Looking at the maker’s plate was probably a distraction technique, so I didn’t have to think about the rats and the flood.
Anyway, not long afterwards, I happened to be on the Great West Road, driving home, in quite a long and slow-moving traffic queue and, as we inched past the 1930s pebble-dashed houses, I saw a larger double-fronted one that had a hotel sign on a pole, one of those with black letters on white that are lit up from inside at night. Under the name, which I am suppressing for reasons that will become clear, was the word ‘sauna’, half-covered with black gaffer tape which had been partly peeled away by rain and wind.
Needing a rest from the debilitating necessity of concentrating on the unpredictable braking antics of the car in front, while casting apprehensive glances at the rear view mirror to keep abreast of the increasingly unwelcome proximity of the car behind, I nonetheless found I had plenty of time to signal and pull off into the asphalted area that had once been a front garden. There, I could gain breathing space and satisfy my nagging curiosity.
The man behind the desk was quite elderly. I had the impression that he had slipped into one of those sitting-upright senior naps with which I have become familiar of late, myself, and that my entry had roused him, though he was concealing it well.
I say ‘desk’, but he was actually sitting in a kind of cubbyhole adapted from the under-stairs cupboard with a thin table in front of him, which had a tasteful floral curtain stretched across underneath it on a curtain wire to spare the clientèle the sight of his legs. I assumed his legs were clothed; the habits of Zoom calls had not yet seeped into everyday life.
I was about to address him, and I had, as a storyteller become accustomed to improvising, not least to cover narrative malfunctions such as forgetting to put in the clue at the beginning which will be the only way to make sense of the end or realising halfway through that one has managed to conflate accidentally two similar but different stories. I had developed an ingenious tale and cover identity to justify my presence and the enquiries I wanted to make.
However, before I could begin the performance for my captive audience of one, an overly made-up middle-aged woman with badly dyed hair in a trouser suit made of crimpilene appeared in a rush from the back of the house and, ignoring me, said, “Oh, so you are awake!” and scurried back again.
“My daughter claims she did a course in Hotel Management,” said the man behind the desk, “but I think she just watched all twelve episodes of Fawlty Towers. Can I help you, sir?”
When I was young, I used to watch Ingmar Bergman films in film clubs. Later on, I heard Sven Göran Erikson apologising for England’s failures on TV. Between them and the Swedish chef from the Muppets, I set my face to the right Scandi shape and began talking with that tone of rising uncertainty that seems to characterise the speakers of the language, except for those from Skåne and, particularly, a delightfully lively redhead I had met when I was teaching English on a summer course in Torquay in 1969 and unfortunately never saw again.
I responded to the clerk: “I have a question about the sauna that you have now ceased to advertise on your sign outside. You see, I am a representative of a firm that manufactures saunas and is keen to increase its share of the English market and, therefore, I would like to know why you were dissatisfied with what may have been one of our products. I am afraid we have had bad experiences with our English franchisees who do not always understand the requirements for successful installation, and we are intending to take the whole process in-house but, before that, we wish to speak to dissatisfied clients, so that we can estimate the extent of customer resistance.”
The receptionist sat there thinking. It had been quite a long speech and, without the benefit of natural rise and fall in the speech tune, it had probably been hard for him to follow. I went for the visuals and continued: “I’m afraid I have already given away all my business cards, but I have a photograph on my phone of our company’s details, as they are attached to every one of our products.”
He didn’t bother to look at the “identification” that I was so fortuitously carrying around with me, probably because he had the wrong glasses on, but he obviously accepted what he had understood of my spiel. He replied, “Well, I must admit that we bought the sauna second-hand from another establishment, and why they wanted to get rid of it, I couldn’t tell you but I certainly can tell you why we chose to get shot of it.”
He glanced towards the door from which his redoubtable daughter had emerged, hunched up his shoulders and leant forward in a conspiratorial pose, lowering his voice to match. “You see, when my daughter’s husband did a runner, a couple of days before Christmas, leaving all kinds of debts, including unpaid bills for rent and utilities to do with his mistress’s flat, the way he did it was to go into the sauna... and not come out again! Well, that was the impression he wanted to leave, obviously, because he must have got away somehow, even if nobody saw him.
“Frankly, I was glad he went and, because the place had never been in joint names, she was able to buy it out of bankruptcy and carry on running it. But she was still unhappy about the sauna so, in the end, I put it on Gumtree, and this man came round and looked at it, and finally I said he could have it for nothing if he managed to take it down and take it away. So he did. She became a lot cheerier after it was gone.”
I nodded sagely, admiring the man’s parental devotion for sticking to his daughter when she’d been even less obliging than she was at present. But my emotional involvement hadn’t satisfied my curiosity; I asked, “If you bought it from another establishment, then perhaps there was some financial agreement, some record of payment, some receipt... ”
And my modest persistence was rewarded, not least because it gave him a chance to prove his business efficiency.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m sure there must have been. It was before I came into the business, of course. I had to sell up the old house, you see — only me in it, anyway — to finance the purchase of this place out of bankruptcy. But when I came here, I took over the financial records, which my daughter had been keeping, scrupulously except, of course, for what her husband took out before she ever got any sight of it... Ah, here it is!”
He stopped scrabbling in the shoe box he’d produced from the floor under the table and waved triumphantly a little piece of note paper with the hotel’s heading and an illegible signature. “They didn’t want much for it, either,” he said, looking, probably for the first time, at the document, which after all, dealt with a transaction in which he had never been involved.
How grateful I was for my smartphone! No need to continue the conversation or strain my pseudo-linguistic abilities any longer.
By the time I left, the slow-moving jam had cleared, but waiting for a gap in the fast-moving traffic that I could pull out into ate up any time I thought I might have saved.
Nonetheless, when I got home, I consulted Google Earth. It’s always fun to pretend to be a Divinity, looking down on the human race as if it were a load of ants and, as I had somehow expected, there was no easy way out of the back garden of the hotel. The errant husband, apparently in his birthday suit, would have had to climb over an endless row of garden fences whether he went east or west. At the time, it was just a piquant detail, especially given the time of year when it had happened.
The following day, I pursued the thin end of the thread that I had on my phone and rang the number on the hotel stationery that had been used for the receipt. The address told me that it was in Bayswater, so it wasn’t going to be too posh, which meant I had a fair chance of being able to have a proper chat with someone and wouldn’t just be faced with the six options — none of which corresponded to what I needed — that would lead me to extensions which would ring and ring and not be answered, before dropping me into silence followed by automatic disconnection.
A human voice replied pretty quickly. It wasn’t the accent that disturbed me, it was the fact that it answered with a totally different and foreign — Slavic — hotel-name. Well, things change... I didn’t bother pretending to be a Swedish-speaking Finn. Understanding a foreign language on the phone is hard enough without having to cope with someone who’s pretending to speak it with a fake foreign accent. I said I was an English agent for a Finnish sauna-maker who was trying to track down people who’d bought one of our products. We were hoping to get feedback...
The obliging man on the other end of the phone told me that the previous proprietor was the only person who could tell me about the matter — there had been no sauna when his father acquired it — and he even went so far as to tell me that the previous proprietor was running a pub in Somerset, and he gave me its name, address and phone number... “He has lots of friends,” he said, “and they still keep on ringing here, to try and talk to him.”
Ah, what did we do for research before the Internet? Not everything was available in the library. An on-line search revealed that the pub was in The Good Beer Guide. Clearly, any contact had to be face to face, and it was only a few hundred yards from a railway station. I rang first, to make sure that the landlord himself — and I’d been given a name as well — would be there when I wanted to visit.
It was a slack Tuesday lunchtime, which was good, and the Lancashire hot-pot had a cheddar crust, which was even better, and the beer — three hand-pumps, one of them a porter — was as advertised, so I was already in a good mood before I explained to Duncan just what I wanted from him.
As Scottish as his name suggested, he poured himself a half, deserted his station behind the bar and came to sit down with me, as though he didn’t want what he said to be spread around among the regulars.
“In retrospect,” he said, “I should never have bought it, but it seemed a good idea at the time, something to make my hotel different from the others. Ye have to have an edge over the competition, ye ken? But I should have wondered why they wanted to sell it so cheap... If I’d read the papers, I might have known, but I was only interested in the fitba’... That’s the way ye are, if ye grow up where I did.”
He finished the half, went and got himself another and came back with two small whiskies. “Ye said ye were on the train, did ye no?”
I nodded. Never interrupt when someone’s telling you what you want to hear.
He drank the whisky and started on the chaser. “There were no problems tae start with. Everyone loved it. It wasn’t for sex, it was for relaxation. Sweatin’ oot all your stresses. Went in mysel’ a coupla times.
“Just before Christmas, it happened. Young couple. Newlyweds. First time in London, not quite a honeymoon, but nearly. Went in. Niver cam’ oot. No sign. No note. Left their luggage. Left their clothes. Polis came. Found nothing. Lots o’ news at Christmas. We got away wi’ it. But I felt guilty. Sold the sauna. Sold the hotel because I knew the new owners wanted tae change the name, any road. Once ye’ve got a bad name, ye never recover. An’ I like this place. Anither?”
I shook my head, but he still brought back two small whiskies with his third half.
“A wee deoch an doris,” he said, “one for the road.” And because my mother was from Glasgow, and I knew what the phrase meant even before he told me, I took it and toasted him with it, especially when, as a parting gesture, he told me the name of the posh hotel in the West End that had sold him the sauna. Such a bargain! And he also gave me a name, as a clue.
And I needed a clue, because I knew the posh hotel would never speak to me, would deny everything and fob me off in every possible way. I couldn’t be bothered to go up there, hang around, get talking to one of the lower staff and discover the truth and get them the sack, because somebody would have spotted them talking to me. It was easier to go on-line and trust the search engines.
Copyright © 2026 by Mike Rogers
