There's an Egg in My Soup (4 page)

Teaching methodology also laboured under the communist system, and with it any urge to be innovative. We were trained to teach creatively, to demonstrate and create rather than simply translate. If you needed to communicate the word ‘chicken', you simply pranced around like a twit, flapping imaginary wings until you heard a communal ‘Aaaah' and a collective nod of heads.

Ultimately you had no choice, since you couldn't
speak their language, but this form of demonstration baffled some and amused others. For students unused to such methods it was going to prove difficult, and there would inevitably be those who would not adapt at all. However, it was bound to be better than the ‘book' English that the director had referred to. If they managed to learn anything at all from these books, it's unlikely it would ever be understood by anyone in the English-speaking world.

The books the students were using at the time were hardback beasts that sat in glass cases at the back of the rooms, under lock and key. The teacher would come into the class, open the presses and dish out the books. With one black-and-white illustration per chapter, the first chapter was titled something like ‘A Day at the Zoo'. The illustration at the top of the page showed a few kids in uniform, together with a teacher in uniform, standing near a cage and staring at a zebra. It read,
Today, teacher took her class to the zoo. A zoo is a public institution where living animals are exhibited. In this cage there is a zebra, which is a strikingly patterned, black and white equine animal from the grasslands of Africa.
The more difficult words – just about all of them – would be underlined and a glossary was provided at the end of the chapter with the words in Polish. One book I came across,
Ninth Form English
by A. Starkow and R. Dixon, had chapters on ‘The Museum of the Revolution', ‘Lenin in London' 
and ‘Youth Organisations in Great Britain', mixed with ‘Choosing a Profession' and ‘A Funny Thing that Happened to George's Father'. Newspaper clippings in the paper include ‘Soviet Army Kiev Ensemble', while the conversations go: ‘Hello, Raya! Where are you going in such a hurry?'

‘To the Polytechnical Museum to see the exhibition of earth satellites.'

‘The sputniks? Now that's interesting. Is the entrance free?'

Little wonder then that the bulk of kids weren't particularly interested in learning English. I never bothered with books, and spent five years designing my own lessons with the help of assorted ‘Tips for TEFL Teachers'-style books. Some bombed, others didn't. Either way, I was burnt out by the end of it.

‘I'm doing no teaching this year and I'm going to do less no teaching next year,' one of my colleagues said, going into his second year in a ‘mechanical school'. He was fed up with guys who had no other calling but to drive or repair trains for the rest of their lives after they had served their stint in the army. Many of the guys in such schools, particularly in the last year or two prior to leaving, would get very depressed about the army, which was rife with bullying. There was little you could do to console them.

It wasn't from want of trying. No matter what my colleague did, they just wouldn't respond. They didn't
want to speak English and, since most of them would go back to their country towns and villages to work, they never saw the need to speak English. The performing monkey from the West could stick his classroom antics up his behind. In the end, he agreed to let most of them play cards at the back of the room while he left a book open on the desk and went through the motions for the few interested parties at the front. It was the only thing to do.

The school I was assigned to was an economic school, thankfully, and the majority of the kids were girls who knew the value of foreign languages. It was also mixed with an art faculty filled with good-natured and intelligent kids, but who tended to get bored and wander into tortured-artist mode now and again. There were a few ‘Zawadowa' (professional) student groups, training to become clerks and civil servants, and some tough post-leaving certificate students called ‘Pomaturalne' (meaning ‘post maturity', since the leaving certificate exam is called the ‘maturity' exam).

This last group were older – about nineteen or twenty – and wearier, containing several hard guys who were simply there to avoid the army. Almost all, male and female, shared the same lack of vision when it came to learning English. For the most part, these were the ones who didn't get to university, and returned to school for a post-leaving education as a second choice. It wasn't altogether a bad choice, but I got the impression that it
was still a second choice. They were a generally depressed bunch in school, although good fun outside it, swaggering in late and disappearing from the room before the bell for the end of the lesson had even begun to echo. If some of the younger kids had a problem figuring out my methods, then to the older mob I was a complete enigma. They played cards, swore in Polish, darted in and out for cigarettes and at times didn't show up at all. When that happened, I would have to go to the assistant director, a tough but fair woman, shrug, and say ‘nie ma'.

This ‘nie ma', literally translated as ‘no has', was a handy phrase that could be used in a variety of circumstances to express the negative in Poland. And expressing the negative became quite useful, I discovered. In this case, it meant that the students were simply not there.

She would shake her head, then respond likewise with a casual shrug and a rather indifferent ‘nie ma'. And that was that. I came to learn quite quickly that when something went wrong here it wasn't questioned much. It has gone wrong. And that's about it. It made life easier, true, but it also made it very bewildering.

I was settling into the flat, making do with my own company as best I could. It's probably not a great thing to lead such a solitary existence. You become selfish, developing habits that wouldn't be accommodated by other people and viewing everyone that comes to the door with the wariness of a crack dealer. Sometimes, I would even imagine there was a knock on the door, but there would be nobody there at all.

The corridor that only a few weeks ago had reminded me of The Shining, was now thronged with guys between the ages of fifteen and early twenties. It was full of noise, testosterone, forbidden cigarette smoke and the odd clink of a vodka bottle in the smaller hours. That clink would strike a note of envy in me, as did the occasional giggle of a girl from one of the lads' rooms. But with the corridors of the boarding block, rather grimly known as the ‘internat', patrolled ruthlessly by teachers on night duty, the vodka and the girls were more the exception than the rule.

Once dawn broke, I would be awoken by the boarding-block wake-up call, a penetrating brute of a noise emanating from a strategically placed bell that had
become hoarse but resolute with age. Immediately following the bell, the competition for the showers would begin. The stampede on the corridors would be followed by agonising screams from the antiquated water pipes. I don't know which was worse, the bell with the throat cancer or the rheumatic water pipes. Either way, sleep was impossible in that building beyond 6.30am.

Other disturbances on my corridor were of the general prison variety – the odd fight, mad Polish heavy metal music, universal cries of angst and even football, which was played using my hall door as a goal. They didn't dare use the door at the far end, since that belonged to the Russian teacher. I quickly learned that anything with a Russian tag on it, even a Pole who taught the language, struck the fear of God into the folk here.

Evenings would be spent listening to the drumming of feet on the linoleum floor, punctuated every now and again by a hollow thud on my hall door and a loud, victorious cheer. Whenever I opened the door to go out, the guys would freeze momentarily, utter a polite ‘Dobry wieczor' (good evening), then continue hammering the door once I had gone down the stairs.

They were harmless lads really. And while the younger guys would greet me with an almost uncomfortable courtesy, the older guys in the ‘pomaturalne' classes tended to view me more as a
peer. So much so, that some evenings a couple of them would knock on the door with a bottle of vodka and I'd invite them in. I wasn't terribly sure whether drinking with the students was the ethical thing to do, but I didn't particularly care. I was bored, and so were they. The fact that we couldn't really communicate didn't matter. We would drink, open dictionaries, swap words and pass the night. I would show photos and they would do likewise, broad grins plastered across their faces. Later I became very friendly with some of the older students. It made things a bit awkward the next morning in class, when the girls would laugh at our hangovers. Eventually I cut out the visits to my room and went out instead, reasoning that being in a bar with students was less likely to be frowned upon than being in the room.

There was a group of guys in one of these classes who were in their last year, and I grew very friendly with them. Robert, Piotr, Grzegorz and Mariusz, and two girlfriends of theirs, Monika and Agnieszka. They took me out several times to a bar near where they lived – not a great place at all, but it really didn't matter. It had pool tables, it had beer, and it had a bunch of guys and girls who used to take me there and walk me the whole way back, as they assured me the town wasn't very safe. Everyone knew I went out to the pub with these students, and the vice director even encouraged it. Once they finished school, however, I lost touch very quickly.
Poles have to make a very fast transition from school to being bread winners. Life just takes over and that is it. But the intensity of the friendships that Poles instil – shortlived or not – stays with you.

There was another guy that first year – a decent fella, nineteen or twenty, who didn't seem like the most industrious guy in the school, but he gave it a go in my lessons and I admired him for it. Now and again the pair of us would sneak out past the teacher on night duty to the local café to guzzle a few beers and trade words. Usually it would be arranged, but one night he came banging on my door, already pretty drunk. He insisted on going out and I got the impression that something was up.

We got to the local café – just a poorly lit room where kids sipped on cokes and a few of the older set sipped on beers – and he began sinking bottles at an alarming rate. Eventually, he turned to me and explained that he had got a girl pregnant. Then he collapsed in a heap on the table in front of me. All I could do was buy him another beer and give him a slap on the back every couple of minutes to try and encourage him. By the end of the evening he was a sorry mess. A couple of weeks later he was gone, and I never saw him again.

He was one of only a few guys in the older classes that were genuinely trying, and it seemed a real shame. It occurred to me that such circumstances demanded a
very different response here. Education had to be subordinate to getting some sort of work, getting married right away and looking after the kid. It was really a luxury that he couldn't afford. There would have been no question of him not marrying the girl, of not doing ‘the right thing'. I just hoped he loved that girl. But, judging by the amount of beer he drank that night, I doubt it.

Poland was a deeply Catholic country, with a strict code of morals, particularly among the older people. I had a girlfriend at home at the time, who was due to come over for a short holiday. I was putting off telling the school director though, after I was taken into the office of the boarding school director one afternoon, with the elder of the English teachers as translator, to discuss any ideas I had concerning ‘visitors'. With the door closed behind me, I was sat at the apex of a triangle of seats and fixed with a gaze from the boarding school director, a decent and rather quiet woman in her sixties. She told me, in a low voice as if from the confessional, that I was not permitted to have women, especially women ‘of bad character', in my room. There was a pause to allow the words to sink in, followed by the question, ‘You do know what we mean by women of bad character, Tom, don't you?'

I tried to figure out whether they meant me getting lucky around the town or whether I was the type to go down to the main road, the one that ran from Russia, to
pick up hookers. Either way, it put the bloody frighteners on me. I got on the phone pronto to my girlfriend, telling her she'd better arrive as a tomboy or a lesbian because there was no way she was going to be allowed stay in my room.

In the end, I told them that a ‘friend' was visiting for a holiday. When I came home from work that afternoon, a spare bed had been left in the hall. I don't think anyone actually believed me, but I had covered myself and managed to salvage both of our reputations. Sadly, we couldn't salvage the relationship, which more or less ended as soon as we saw that cast-iron bed.

Besides coming and going, the only time I wandered around the boarding building was to avail of the meals, which I was entitled to as a guest teacher. It was a decent gesture, but I gave it up after a few weeks, primarily because I couldn't handle the food. I also tended to be under some scrutiny from the students whilst eating and began to feel a bit like an animal at feeding time. ‘What's he trying to do with that chop?' I imagined them saying over their forks while I tussled with a piece of meat. In truth, I probably did prod and probe the food a bit. By nature I harbour the inclination to treat everything as suspect until a friend or foe label is confirmed. It must have appeared rude and it's more likely they were saying, ‘Look at the spoilt Irish bastard. If he'd gone through two wars and two occupations he'd be eating shite off a brush and be thankful for it
too.'

The majority of Polish food, much like Irish food, is derived from peasant culture, where you pull what is available out of the ground or running along its surface and fling it into the pot. I would have to say, though, that the Poles are more imaginative than the Irish when it comes to creating dishes of this nature. Most of what went into the boarding school pot was delivered daily by horse and cart. And I was right about the horse. It had a massive pair of blinkers and a shaggy coat and stood deathly still, every day, through every season, at the back of the kitchens while its master was inside ‘nudge-nudging' with the women. Thankfully, the horse remained alive for the duration of my spell, otherwise paranoia would have driven me as far away from that kitchen as possible.

The dining area was open between six and seven in the morning for breakfast, twelve-thirty to three for dinner and six to seven in the evening for tea, and was worked by several friendly but sturdy women in the kitchens, visible through the food hatches.

The hatches themselves were manned by the students who stayed at the internat, and who operated a rota system for dishing up the meals. In fact, the kids played a very active role in all the schools and had a variety of duties and responsibilities to contend with, all bearing a distinctly communist hallmark. Without condoning the system, I could see that it worked. The schools had a
real sense of order about them.

The roles of the students ranged from cooking, washing and cleaning to door duty. Any door really. Students were stationed at the main doors of the school to check IDs; at the doors of the internat to do likewise; at the toilet doors; and even in the classrooms. Schools here, particularly girls' schools, suffer a fair amount from vagrants drifting in and out and peeping through windows. Anyone who enters must show their official ID, which displays their name, address and their profession. If they are students it will say what level they are – primary, secondary or third level – and what institution they are attending. Big Brother is very much present, but he does stop the louts jumping in and out of the schoolgirls' beds – at least when they're in the school.

In the dining room, when you approached the first hatch you would be greeted by one of the kids with a large ladle in her hand guarding a massive cauldron of soup. After a polite ‘hello', the ladle would descend into the depths of the pot with a rather unpleasant sound, like a Wellington boot in a puddle of mud. Once you collected your bowl of soup you moved on to the next hatch for a plate of food and a mug of tea with no handles, which you sort of gripped like a builder. The tea was black and already contained sugar. There was no milk.

For some reason, you were only ever given a fork,
and had to chop with this as well as eat with it. It was a bit baffling. On the first day, when I had dinner with the director, I stood and went looking for a knife. Realising that there were none, I sat down and chopped with the side of the fork, chasing stragglers that were left around the plate with the thumb of my other hand. It felt a bit primitive, but nobody batted an eyelid. When you were finished your dinner, you brought the dishes up to a third hatch, where the cleaning was done.

As for the meals, well, the soup was usually a safe bet and was really a meal in itself. Now and then you'd find odd things in it, like half a carrot, a lump of turnip the size of a boot-heel, or even a boiled egg. Given the eye-like nature of a boiled egg, it is actually quite frightening to find one in your soup. It has a certain foreboding weight when you first go to lift it on the spoon and when it surfaces it's like you're being watched. But in general, the soup was good.

The main dish, however, was a gamble at the best of times. There were days in the beginning when I span on my heel like a ballerina, having caught sight of it early enough. Pasta with white cheese and sugar was one dish; lettuce with sour milk was a side salad, as was salad made from beetroot, an unsettling mound of purple gunk which I nicknamed ‘afterbirth' and could never face again as a result; cutlets, made from minced pork, which were actually really good; minced pork again, this time wrapped in a cabbage leaf and sealed at
both ends to form a sort of soggy sausage, which I called ‘loathsome larvae', was a rather tasty dish too; and finally ‘flaki', which looked like tapeworm but was actually the lining of a sheep's stomach. Tripe, I think my grandmother called it.

Most of these dishes were served with mashed potato containing strange foreign bodies of dubious colour, but at least the potato was, on the whole, familiar. Every meal was accompanied by small pickled cucumbers, which I went on to call ‘slugs'.

The supper was okay – bread, boiled egg, ham or sausage, all served with a mug of black tea straight from a large plastic bucket – but I rarely bothered. I think it was the slosh of that tea-bucket that finally turned me off the supper. It had a prison ring to it that did my imagination no good.

Breakfast saw the return of the slop-out tea-bucket, along with bread, more boiled eggs and sausage. The sausages, incidentally, were those big mothers, the size of a policeman's truncheon. When you cooked them on a pan, you could grease the axle of a combine harvester with the amount of fat that was left behind. Very tasty, but no prizes for guessing why there's a serious problem with heart disease here.

Of course, once on the plate there was little you could do but eat whatever it was, or face the wrath of the largest of the women in the kitchens. One in particular kept a beady eye on the third hatch and
observed the plates coming back with alarming alacrity. A large woman with a blue apron and beefy red arms, if my plate wasn't cleared, out she'd come and point at me, then down to my plate, throwing her hands in the air as if apologising to the Lord for the wanton waste of good food. Then she'd stare at my face and pull at her cheekbones, clearly implying that I was a skinny little bastard and needed every scrap before winter fell. It was all in jest of course, and she was a very kindly old soul, but with gangs of laughing kids at the tables behind me it didn't do much for my confidence. I always did my best to get the food down, or if it was really too bad I'd hide it in the plant pots beside the tables. I eventually decided to pretty much steer clear of the place altogether and take my chances in the shops.