On hiatus

On hiatus until I finish my PhD.

I keep saying this and then not going on hiatus at all! But this time I'm serious!

Invitation to a funeral

My grandfather was stationed in Africa with the RAF. He worked on the ground and it was his job to check the pilots before they took off. Some, including a friend with curly red hair, he never saw again.

In the late eighties he married a spiritualist. She said that my grandmother had come to her and told her to look after him. He believed in those things too and he often embarrassed us at the dinner table with talk of this or that dead relative appearing at the bottom of his bed in the middle of the night.

They went to a meeting and he was told that a man with red hair was looking for him. Not long after the plane was found buried in the desert sands and my grandfather was invited to a funeral.

Columbia

Watching Channel 4's special on Columbia reminded me of an incident at a language school where I worked after leaving Italy. I did some teaching and so over a few weeks got to recognise a lot of students. I gave each one a cheerful hello because I'd just spent two years in a village. It was just the way things were done there. One of the students was a Columbian guy. Everything normal, everything ok and then he began dating a girl from the same country. The reception to my hellos changed and after a particularly sarcastic response I ignored them. I realised that they thought I fancied him. Maybe girls don't give boys cheery hellos in Columbia? It irritated me a lot because it's never nice to be misunderstood like that.

Maude Morris

When I knew Maude Morris she was an old lady living in sheltered housing near my school. I visited her every Wednesday lunchtime for several years. It was never a chore and she never made me feel guilty if I missed a week. One summer's day I was her wheelchair pusher on a pensioners' outing to the seaside. I still remember the way my heart leapt when I carelessly let go of the wheelchair at the top of a steep slope. I grabbed it again before she rolled more than an inch so it was ok.

Maude was twice widowed. She missed the man she had married in middle age. There had been someone before, the father of her children. He was one of the prisoners involved in the building of the real bridge on the River Kwai. Afterwards he spent several years in a sanitorium and then died.

I used to try and get her to talk about it but it was too painful for her. In my clumsy teenage way I didn't really understand that.

Ten bombers

I spent part of my early childhood near an RAF base. In the playground we sung a variation of ten green bottles. It went 'There were ten German bombers in the air, in the air. There were ten German bombers in the air.' At the end of each verse a plane was shot down by the brave boys from the base. One day we were singing it in the back of the car and Dad shouted at us. I didn't understand why it was wrong.

I didn't have any strong feelings about the Germans. I was just ignorant. Even though I was born thirty-two years after 1945 comics still carried wartime stories. I read classic 1940s children's fiction full of German parachutists, bomb shelters and Nazi spies. It was taken for granted that the Germans were the enemy.

The idea faded and was forgotten. Maybe by the time I was nine or ten. I don't remember. When I started secondary school there was a girl who was half-German. I was fascinated by the romance of it and didn't even think of the war. I'd heard all these strange exotic place names like Bavaria and Prussia. I quite fancied being half-German myself. I asked tactless questions and couldn't understand why her response was so hostile. I couldn't understand why she wasn't proud and didn't want to talk about it. Looking back I can see that she must have been teased horribly.

Now it seems absurd that any British child could grow up thinking what I did or experiencing what she did. The war ended sixty years ago and we live in the age of the Euro.

Adette and Arno

Adette was the child of her father's autumn. A native of Dresden he had fought as a common soldier in the war. He never forgave the allies for their occupation of Germany. He taught his daughter that it was utterly unjust and when she came to study in England she told the other students. She was so angry. I couldn't say anything. The war was something my grandparents dealt with and was history to me. I didn't want to get emotional about it. One day she went too far and our Greek friend snapped.

"My great uncle had to walk across Greece with no boots because of the Germans! Everyone suffered."

I don't remember Adette's reply.

Years later my friend Arno told me that his father had a British first name.

"His father was in the first world war and captured by the British. He liked the guards in the camp so he gave his son a British name."

TEFL people part 2

Teaching English as a foreign language can be a very rewarding profession. Knowledge of English is now such a necessary business skill that a good teacher can really make a difference to a person's life. The problem is that the poor work conditions in large areas of the TEFL industry drive a lot of teachers away.

I was a typical example of where TEFL has a problem. I'd just left university and I wanted to live abroad. Teaching English was the only way I could do it. So like hundreds of other young people I went onto the TEFL employment market. When your employees are mostly youngsters looking for a gap year experience you have no reason to pay well. I was paid the equivalent of a shop assistant's wage and there were no pay rises so my far more experienced colleagues got the same. I had a month's training from a very good school but I was still very inexperienced and unable to teach properly. If I'd been older I would have been able to make up for my knowledge gaps but I was 21 and all at sea. I worked for a private school and the problem with private schools is that they're there to make money. My boss decided that there was profit to be had in teaching English to kindergarteners. She told the parents that I had had a lot of experience teaching children whereas I really had none. Four or five is far too young to be learning a foreign language in the classroom. The kids didn't know how to behave and they had no concept of what a foreign language was. I had no idea how to control and get through to children that young. Children think differently so you need a whole set of different skills. I had one student who was very good at English because she'd had a British au pair. That's the definitely the way to do it. The class lasted all year and was an absolute disaster. I had no idea what to do with them so by the end we were just watching the smurfs.

I'm sure teachers working for large organisations like the British Council have a much better time of it than I had. I was a bad teacher because I went into it for the wrong reasons, I had no experience and no back up.

Family holidays I

When I was 6 we went to the Algarve in Portugal. On the last day I was sick in the hotel bar whilst we were waiting for the coach to take us to the airport. I had ear ache on the plane and spent the journey with my head on my mum's lap. I remember a white church in a square where lemon trees grew. My sister and I were made to wear pink straw sun hats shaped liked upturned vases. I didn't like mine because it kept blowing off in the wind and I'd wanted the one on the stall with an elastic chin band. There were huge advertising boards by the sides of the road. Strange to me then because they would never be given planning permission in Britain. I remember one that stood high on a dusty brown ridge and depicted the dark silhouette of a man with a cloak and a broad brimmed hat. We must have sat in the car a lot because I remember long games pretending that I was a mosquito and daydreaming. We saw trees with bark made out of cork and bought a straw donkey from a shop on a cobbled hill.

Mr L

I couldn't find the friend I mentioned in the post below. I found my old classmates on Friends United. So many of them have ended up as teachers or moved abroad.

I remember the day I saw Shakespeare's grave. We went on a school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Romeo and Juliet. In that same year we also saw Othello at Birmingham. At the point where Othello fell into a jealous rage two thirds of my class started sniggering. There was snow on the ground when we went to Stratford. I wore a red t-shirt and a light weight jacket that I wouldn't do up for some peculiar teenage reason. One of my favourite English teachers, Mr R, took a small group of us to the church. He explained how Shakespeare had paid not to have his bones put in the charnel house. I remember looking at Mr R and my other most revered English teacher Mr L and admiring them so much.

At some other point in the year we went on another trip to see Twelfth night. I annoyed Mr L because I couldn't stop laughing when one of the actors did a funny dance in an owl costume. I was going through my pseudo-intellectual phase and before the play started I tried to show Mr R and Mr L that I had bought Rousseau's Confessions. Mr R refused to be engaged in conversation about it and I knew it was because I was boasting about having bought a clever book.

A few years later I went on a school trip to Paris with my best friend. The group was led by Mr R, Mr L and the female teacher who had terrified me when I was 14. I had been keen to go because the teachers had given us a handout saying that we would see the Louvre, Versailles and possibly the beaches where D-day took place. We didn't see any of that. On one day when we could've gone to the Louvre Mr L insisted that we see the Tour de France. He said it was a historic occasion that we would remember for the rest of our lives. We waited in the blistering heat for ages and after a while Mr R took pity on me and the two of us went to the Orangerie. We saw a huge canvas by Monet but I don't remember now whether it was the water lilies or not. Mr R pointed out a painting by Raoul Dufy then complained that his sandal was squeaking.

Later still when my mother was almost dead and a girl was killed at school in a car accident Mr L gave a speech. He told the sixth form that we should be happy for the girl because she would never know how much pain there was in life. His own mother had died not long before so I can understand that he was in a certain state of mind. I cried for my mother and everyone thought it was for the girl. His speech annoyed me so I said 'For God's sake' in just the way my father does when he's being particularly gruff. Mr L stopped speaking and Mr R led him away. The next year Mr L was asking questions in class and I gave an answer that had nothing to do with his speech. We'd never mentioned it. But as soon as I spoke I realised that it sounded like I was having a dig at him. He flinched but didn't say anything. Two years later in Italy I sent him one of those postcards featuring the genitalia of various Renaissance statues. On it I wrote 'Here's a slice of Italian life.' There was no reply.

First year university

The first year undergraduates were housed in a university village just off campus. My window looked out onto the council estate next door and a grassy verge that was covered in daffodils in the spring. I was so shy when I arrived that I didn't make friends with my flatmates. In the beginning I scurried in and out of the kitchen and after a while I gave up using it at all. I ate lunch on campus and kept a toaster in my room. My room was like a ship's cabin. There was a tiny en suite toilet and shower in the corner and the rest was taken up with a fitted bed, wardrobe and desk. The cleaners were scheduled to do the en-suites once a week but I was so shy about having a stranger clean up after me that I rarely let them in. We used to leave our bins outside the door to be emptied but there had been some suicides so the cleaners were ordered to check on us by placing the bin back inside. The carpet and curtains were brown and the furniture was wooden. I made it as bright as possible with posters, colourful rugs and ornaments.

My father urged me to go to the Freshers night in the student union. They were giving away cans of beer and iced tea, and I didn't drink either. I was standing on the swirly patterned carpet feeling out of place when a girl introduced herself. Her name was Mandy and she lived in the flat opposite. I made friends with her flatmates and so for the first year they were my crowd. I'm still friends with one of them now. We lost contact but after her mother died we started speaking more regularly and I ring her nearly every weekend. It was less than a year after my own mother had died and I was finding it difficult. I didn't know how to feel. I'd clamped down on my grief so that I could do my A'Level exams and when I got to university I found it coming up again. I thought I was being self-indulgent for hanging onto these feelings and I didn't understand it at all. I remember once I sat in the department cafe with my coursemates and a mature student told an anecdote about her mother and an iron bath. I felt a pang of anger that she could be so old and still have a mother. Another mature student who had befriended me said it was grief but I didn't understand.

My mature student friend was a 40 year old woman who had gone back to university after several life changes. I was from a standard middle class Daily Mail reading household and she wasn't what I was used to at all. She wore tie dye patchwork trousers and filled her room with incense. She talked about meditation and reincarnation. If I met her now we would be on a more similar wavelength. Back then I needed her because she was old enough to be my mother. She visited me the following year when I was on student exchange in Italy. I was horrible. The week began well but we both got food poisoning and I was irritable with her because her New Age beliefs were so alien to me. We were never friends again after that. When I returned in the third year I felt hurt because she didn't behave like we had ever been friends. She was nice but just another course mate. I'm not surprised really. A few years ago I found her on Friends Reunited and wondered about contacting her but I was too shy and I didn't want to pay the fee. It's one of the things I'll always regret so I think after posting this I'll see if I can find her.

Why?

I shouldn't be online at this time of day but I wanted to say one more thing. I've started writing here in this way because I've long admired bloggers like Flea and Petite Anglaise. The blogger who actually got me started was Cass. I was fussing about whether or not my PhD had been worth the money. He compared my time at university to an adventure by saying:

I didn't go to university but in the days before it was done by the many, roughed it in the North Sahara and lived as a peasant in the Pyrenees. Same thing as you - just a different school.

That got me thinking and I saw that my whole life has been an adventure of some kind or another. I've often lost perspective and failed to count my blessings but when I look back I see I've had a lot of good times. I've been very lucky. Losing my mother is the only bad thing that's happened to me but I now accept that everyone loses loved ones so I shouldn't feel victimised. So thank you Cass. :)

Hamdi

The first Christmas of my adulthood was also the first without my mother. Dad decided that it would be too upsetting to spend it in England so he booked a holiday in Istanbul. I expected a city out of Arabian nights but it was surprisingly European and bitterly cold. We stayed in an old hotel in the central tourist district, near the big mosques. I had learnt about Suleiman the magnificent at A'Level so I was excited to see his tomb.

My father found that when he went outside alone nobody bothered him. Friends from Greece tell me that he's dark enough to pass for a Greek so maybe that's why. When I went out with him we got a bit of hassle from enterprising locals trying to sell us carpets and guided tours. They knew a few words in every language and they usually tried their Swedish and German out on me. When we went out with my sister it was a different story all together. She was rather buxom but had a lot of body confidence and liked to wear very tight skimpy clothes. I remember her walking along in a very tight white t-shirt stretched across her chest. Men stared at us. Boys waggled their tongues at us. Locals called out the old 'how many camels for your daughter?' joke. The attention got so bad that I vowed never to return to Istanbul without a man for protection.

I shouldn't leave you with an unfair picture of the city. One day my father and I took a long walk to the suburbs to see a Byzantine church. As soon as we left the central tourist district everyone left us alone. We stopped in a cafe and rode on a bus without anyone even giving us a second glance.

About half way through the holiday my father was 'rescued' from a shoe shine scam by a handsome man called Hamdi. He said he was an English teacher from Northern Turkey and that he would like to buy us a drink. He had a large friend with him who didn't speak much English. We went to a cafe where I drank the first and only coffee I've ever had in my life. I'm not a coffee drinker but I couldn't be rude. The friend taught us how to say thank you in Turkish. It was something like Tea-Sugar-Iri-d-um. (Tell me if that's actually a rude word won't you?) We had a nice chat but then Hamdi mentioned that his cousins owned the carpet shop next door. When he invited us to dinner Dad realised that it was all a marketing trick. He told us later that if he'd been on his own he would've gone even if it had meant buying a carpet. I think he felt quite bad for standing Hamdi up. For the rest of the week we worried that we would bump into him but we didn't.

Schoolgirl politics

I had a nice normal childhood but I didn't enjoy it much because I didn't like being a child. I was quiet and well behaved, never causing my parents a moment's trouble. My school reports were always good and the worst thing about me was that I was rather tearful. If I didn't like something I cried very easily and it was a habit I didn't break until I started secondary school. What I didn't like about being a child was the lack of power. I suspect most children are like that.

The other thing I didn't like was the way children behave. Little girls can be very cruel. When I see playground politics in action now I cringe with empathy. I remember the moment when I realised that if someone picked on me it was their problem not mine. I was nine or ten years old. I felt as if a weight had lifted off my shoulders.

I changed schools three times before I was eleven because my father had to move with his job. I spent just over a year at the final school. My new class had a disproportionately large number of boys. The small group of girls formed a small series of cliques. When I went to secondary school a girl from another primary school told me that her Netball team had met my classmates and had noticed how bitchy they were. When I arrived I was placed with best friends Monica and Sarah. For a while I had my own best friend called Laura but she went off with a much cooler new girl about a term later. Then somehow I ended up with best friends Susie and Michelle. Susie used to tell me how it would be nice sometimes if I didn't hang round with them and she'd kick me hard whenever I said something she didn't like.

As I said before, when I see schoolgirl politics today I cringe with empathy. Particularly for the quiet timid kids. They have no idea how much better life will be when they're grown up and they will know to walk away from people who give them problems.

A memory

Some things still irritate long after they should have been forgotten. Even after twelve years.

We had to read Roll of Thunder Hear my Cry for GCSE English. Our teacher was a middle-aged woman who terrified me. In the very first lesson I stuttered so much when I talked to her that she thought I was trying to say that I was deaf. I was so embarrassed when I had to tell her after the lesson that I wasn't. I often misunderstood her instructions and I hated asking her to repeat them. She set us an essay about Roll of Thunder and as usual I got the wrong end of the stick. I thought that she wanted us to write a story based around the characters when really she asked for a literature essay. I don't know how I misunderstood so badly. Anyway, I wrote my story as a series of letters between the characters. One character was a sexist pig so I made him express those kinds of views. After my teacher chided me for getting it wrong she tackled what I had made the character say. I still remember her saying something like "I know those are your views on women. I know what you're like." I was annoyed that she didn't think a 14 year old could be capable of giving a character views that she didn't hold herself. All this time later it still annoys me. I know it shouldn't.

Big Frog

When I was an Erasmus student in Pisa I shared a flat with four other girls. One was British and the others were Northern European. Looking back I think I existed in a kind of bubble just floating round the rooms and not really making contact. I was part of the group but I don't remember any kind of personal connection.

One of the Northern Europeans had two male French friends. In honour of Petite Anglaise let's call them Big Frog and Little Frog. They both came from wealthy families and Big Frog liked to present himself as a man of culture. One day he invited us for dinner at his house in the hills outside Pisa. He wanted to show us the way to dine. I don't recall much of the meal itself which is probably just as well because we ate wild boar so rare that it was bloody. I do remember standing in the garden and looking down at the lights in the valley below. I also remember the journey to the house. Big Frog had a landrover that was so shabby that it really was held together with string. As we bumped up the steep winding track through the olive trees I remember feeling like I was in a film. Afterwards two of my flatmates said Big Frog had been condescending; but I didn't notice because I was so easily impressed.

My three dates

Whilst my chips are under the grill I'll tell you about my entire dating history. I have only been on three dates and they were all with Italians.

The third date took place about four or five months before I met my boyfriend. He was called Lorenzo and he'd been living in England for some time because he hated Italy. My friends from Torino found him for me in the college bar one Saturday night and we arranged to meet in the pub for a language exchange. I genuinely thought it was for a language exchange because I'm a bit thick like that. I only realised that it had been a date after I left the pub and noticed that we'd only spoken English. We didn't click and after that we never met socially again.

The second date was also with an Italian I met in the college bar. He was called Antonio and he looked a bit like Jesus. I knew his hometown so we spoke about that and arranged that I would go to his house for dinner that weekend. The day of the date arrived and I had a terrible hacking cough. I was very nervous and tried to dress up but as soon as he opened the door I realised that it was a horrible mistake. He wasn't my type at all. I obviously wasn't his either because after five minutes he called in his friend who was also a Veneto lad. He then spent the rest of the evening telling me how beautiful and mysterious one of my friends was.

My first date was with a vet called Guido. I was 19 and an Erasmus student in Italy. My friends and I went to a carnival party in a big old villa on the outskirts of Pisa. We met a very bubbly and excitable man dressed as a cat. He asked me if I would like to meet him for a drink one day so we arranged a mid-afternoon date for the next weekend. By the time the day arrived I wasn't at all excited. I'd never been on a date before and frankly I was wishing that I hadn't accepted. My Danish friend waited with me in Pisa's main square. We met a French student and when we told him what I was doing he rolled his eyes and smirked. My lack of excitement increased and I really wished that I wasn't going on this date. When Guido arrived he wasn't like the excitable cat I had met at the party. He was tall and quiet with strange eyes. He bought me a can of fanta in a bar, tried to talk whilst I sat silently squirming and then I made my excuses and left. I remember he offered to walk me to my Danish friend's house but I told him that she was a very private person and didn't want anyone to know where she lived.

Thank goodness I managed to meet my boyfriend without dating him first.

Massimo

In Italian the word massimo can be used in the same way that we say great! One of the Italy hating Italians I met was also called Massimo. He made a joke out of his name but twitched whenever I said non e' il massimo. (It's not that great.) I must admit that I was doing it on purpose. When my English friend and I met him he went to great lengths to tell us what was wrong with his country. He said that England was better and that he liked to be with foreigners rather than Italians. The way he kept going on about it was quite sad. It made us uncomfortable and reminded me of myself. I've always found it easier to make friends with foreigners than with English people my own age. There are a lot of people like us. I wonder why?

TEFL people part 1

Whilst my potatoes are going round in the microwave I'll tell you about the sort of people who teach English abroad. These are going to be generalisations that might offend but I've never met a TEFL veteran who hasn't seen the truth in them.

I don't know about people from any other country but Britons only choose to work abroad for one of a combination of four reasons. They've always been attracted to a particular country and have decided to try living there. They want to have an adventure before they go back to Britain and settle down. They are unhappy with their life in Britain and so are trying to escape. They are on the run.

As a result of this when you teach English abroad you can come across some very strange people. I'll admit that I originally went abroad because I had lost my mother and I was looking for an escape. That's why I can recognise the other escape artists very well. I went through a phase of running down every aspect of British life I could think of. Later on I met Italians who did the same thing and I realised that they were unhappy too.