Lapping it all up

TWO thousand miles is a long way to go to have your marriage proposal turned down. Peter Webster admits that when he went all the way to Lapland to propose to his pretty Finnish penfriend Muisto Mantu only for her to say no, he felt pretty deflated.

It didn't get in the way of their friendship, however - and this year marks the 50th anniversary since they first began writing to each other as teenagers in 1952.

It was an earlier girlfriend who first introduced him to Muisto. She was writing to a penfriend in Lapland, and Peter decided he wanted one too. "So she got me this pen friend and I started writing... and we've kept it up ever since!"

Peter was 14 when he began writing to Muisto. Two years later, in 1954, he met her for the first time when she came to stay with him and his family in Leeds. "She was the typical Laplander," he says. "Fair hair, blue eyes, pretty." A smile plays about his lips. "She was quite attractive in those days."

Which was why, in 1958, he went out to visit her with the idea of asking her to marry him. He went by ferry to Gothenburg in Sweden, then by train up through Sweden itself to Rovaniemi, the capital of Finnish Lapland.

Muisto met him at the station, and together they climbed into an ancient motor coach, which took them further North up the Arctic Highway to the village where Muisto and her family lived. The road was unmetalled red earth - and when Muisto's father met them, it was in a horse and cart.

Peter took Muisto - her name, appropriately enough, means 'memory' - out on a local lake to pop the question.

She didn't turn him down straight away and it was only just before he set out to return home she gently told him she already had a boyfriend.

"Obviously, I was deflated," he says. "But I could understand her not wishing to pull up sticks and move over to England. There was no chance of me doing it the other way around because of the language barrier and because, not having been brought up in a cold country, I didn't fancy the idea of moving there permanently."

Over the years, however, they kept writing. Muisto came over to visit him and his wife, Wendy, a couple of times: and in 1985 Peter and Wendy, by now living in Huntington, York, went to visit Muisto and her husband Jaako.

But this year, to mark the 50th anniversary of their friendship, Peter decided to do something special. So with Wendy as his navigator, he set out in June to drive the 4,000 miles to Lapland and back.

Their journey began with a ferry trip to Esbjerg on the Danish coast. From there, with Wendy in the navigator's seat, Peter drove his brand-new Mazda 626 across Denmark to Frederikshavn where they embarked on a ferry again to Gothenburg. From there it was a long, slow pull, hundreds of miles north through Sweden and around the tip of the Gulf of Bosnia into Finland.

Peter, who after retiring from running his own insurance broker's business more than a decade ago worked as a long-distance lorry driver, insists it wasn't as tiring as it might have seemed. The route was mainly through lakes and forests, with wide horizons and empty roads. They took the journey in short stages, seldom driving more than 200 miles a day and often much less - and with Wendy doing the navigating, he was free to drive and enjoy the scenery, Peter says.

They had no problems with the language - most people spoke very good English, Wendy says - or with finding somewhere to stay each night, and the only time they got lost was right at their journey's end, when looking for Muisto's house, 40 miles or so north of Rovaniemi.

Rovaniemi itself, which is just on the Arctic Circle, is best known for being the 'home' of Santa Claus. Children flock there in winter to visit the grotto, take rides in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, and post home a letter with a Santa stamp.

In winter, when the sun never rises above the horizon and the only natural light is the half-light of the stars and moon reflected back off the snow, English teacher Muisto and her engineer husband Jaako live in Rovaniemi itself. But in summer, like many Laplanders, they move to live in a single-story wooden house in a village further north.

Lapland is not always dark and snowbound. In the brief summer it becomes the land of the midnight sun. From June 6 to July 7 the sun never sets, Peter says, dipping to the horizon then rising once more high overhead. Lakes which just weeks before were under feet of ice become warm enough to swim in and there is a brief, frenzied growing season when you can almost see the crops grow. The landscape - mainly lakes and forests stretching to the horizon - becomes carpeted with wildflowers and the Laplanders themselves, starved of sun during the winter, spend every possible moment they can out of doors.

Peter and Wendy have only ever visited in the summer: and one of the things they love is the light and the space.

"There are these wide open spaces," says Wendy. "When you're away from the forests you can see so far, and with so many lakes you get this wonderful feeling of freedom. Everything is so pristine, the air so crystal clear."

There is one problem, though: and it's one you don't hear about in any of the Santa stories. Mosquitoes.

As the lakes warm up, the mossies come out to play. Wendy remembers one summer's night when they went with friends to sit on a hill just outside Rovaniemi and watch the midnight sun. "They were like a cloud," she admits. "It was unbearable!"

They're not always that bad, she adds - it just depends if you happen to run into a mosquito cloud. "But I suppose there's no such thing as perfection," she says. "Something has to spoil it!"

To find out more about travel to Finland, visit the Finnish Tourist Board's website at www.finland-tourism.com

Updated: 09:45 Saturday, December 14, 2002