Mama always had a very strong influence on me! I had to submit. As soon as my sister was born, I became an adult at 9! She grew as a restless child, and our whole life “spun” in one room, a five-metre kitchen and a toilet combined with a bath. The parents had no bed; there was a topchan — that is a spring mattress with a wooden frame. It was set on bricks. Well, there was nowhere to buy a bed, nowhere! There was only a huge, boundless country of total shortage. ...
I wrote such a heading because when I became a teenager, Papa was no longer for me the beloved, dear one whom I could not wait for from work, did not sleep if he came late… All that remained in childhood. I already had a sister. At that time she was considered a “late” child. She was born when Mama was 36 and Papa 45. Before her birth they “improved” our housing conditions. We moved into a separate one-room apartment, bathroom combined with toilet, on the fourth floor. And the hardest moment of that life was Papa’s going on pension. Or rather, “they went him” or as they say now “they set him up.” This affected our material situation, and Mama’s attitude to Papa, how shall I put it more softly now… changed…. not for the better. Well, and I took Mama’s position and “struck the same pretentious poses as she did!” (Lord! If you knew, those reading these lines, how ashamed I am now, how bitter, how hurt I am at my stupid behaviour!) ...
I talked today with my institute girlfriend. I say: “Come on, remember how we studied there at our cultural institute? Do you remember Elena Semyonovna Pozina?” — “She is unforgettable!” answered my friend. “She always had beautifully coloured lips, she wore a green suit, I remember I answered poorly at her exam and Elena Semyonovna said that it was precisely this material she had explained sequentially, and you, unfortunately, ‘did not listen, but only looked at me.’” Well, Elena Semyonovna was right, if my friend to this day remembers what colour her suit and lipstick were! ...
Every time, beginning to write a new chapter, I have to invent a heading. And that is hard for me. Well, all right. How right our Storm of the Revolution was, having said such words about a woman’s lot, which in the future could befall most of us! I remembered our class lady-curator Nadezhda Ivanovna. Of course, “Baba Nadya”! She spoke German perfectly, I think from the time of military operations, but she had a very simple appearance, for which she got a simple nickname. Once our group decided to organise an evening meeting with cadets of KVIRTU in an institute auditorium. ...
I will leave for a time that hard period of restoring English in my “clogged and atrophied from post-Soviet life brain” and return to the period of my happy student youth. I studied at the library faculty of the Kiev Institute of Culture from 1973–1977. I will try to pull from memory some interesting moments of my life then. I did not “just so” title this part of the narrative in Ukrainian, because it can be called a quotation. I think in the last year we had such a subject in our specialty as “Bibliography of a foreign language.” The subject was taught by Lyubov Zavadskaya. …So it was precisely Zavadskaya who more than once stressed to us how important it is to study foreign languages. I think she was a very educated person (in youth I did not think much about this). Much later I came across the book “Myths of Ancient Greece” with a wonderful translation by Lyubov Zavadskaya into Ukrainian. And since I have remembered her now, I want to say that there were people in Soviet times who made no small contribution to the development of Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language. ...
The main thought, I think, I have already conveyed to the reading public. Listening must be put in first, honourable place in the study of a foreign language. Precisely now this is available to everyone: films, cartoons, songs and the words to songs can be found on the computer. By the way, about songs. Now it has somehow become unpopular to sing songs, or, if they do sing, one sometimes wants to cry. I mean learning songs in a foreign language for oneself. Well, all right! I will not give advice. ...
Since I write everything from memory, I may allow some slight inaccuracies. The first textbook that left an indelible impression in my memory and later influenced my late teaching career (I have already written that by the will of fate I became an “Englishwoman” at school at the age of 45). In 1967 a textbook came out by a real Englishman, Richard Richardovich Dixon. Now we all know that abroad they do not use patronymics, so it sounds funny. ...
At school we almost had no listening. (listening in English). And where would it have come from? Sometimes Riola Mikhailovna could bring a modest record player with a worn record. “How do you do? How are you? I get up at seven o’clock every morning. I wash and dress myself and do my morning exercise, then I have breakfast and go to school” — came from the record. Perhaps it was English speech, and perhaps not. Simply good English pronunciation of a Soviet person. ...
Riola Mikhailovna turned out to be the person in whose person I could somehow imagine “foreign life.” I still remember her clothes….. not outfits!, but precisely elegant clothes. Every lesson she looked “anew” wonderful! I remember exactly, we did not learn dialogues. But we learned topics. Of course the first topic was called “About myself.” The topics had to be learned by heart, which I did with success. One topic stuck in my memory for life. It began like this: “People of good will, all over the world, want peace. They say: ‘No war’” (People of good will, all over the world, want peace. They say: “No to war”). I learned that topic more than 50 years ago! And the topic has not lost its relevance to this day.
I decided for a time to tear myself away from “my native Moscow region” and “smoothly” move to the present moment. It seems not much previous material has been written, but I experienced enormous emotional tension. I will try now to recharge, telling a favourite theme. I began studying English at ordinary Kiev school number 90, which is now considered not very ordinary, with a “cool slant.” Our 5-B class was divided into two groups: English and German. I remember I was offended, landing in the English group (I wanted to study German). Apparently I was strongly influenced by Soviet films about intelligence officers who spoke German fluently. ...