My mother's stories
chapter 26
Too much of a good thing
(the continuation)
A lot of people help their children to do their homework when they are at primary school. But for my mother this situation was special. She herself had unfulfilled ambition of becoming a primary school teacher. Who knows how often I heard the sad story about my mother giving up her education because of her mother's imprisonment? And there I was at last – her only pupil. No wonder she was so eager to help me. Who could have predicted then that my future mother-in-law would be a teacher at primary school and my husband would play the guitar with the same zeal my young father used to? It's amazing how such things work. It's true that I took notice of my future husband when he was playing the guitar but I don't think that his mother's profession added much to his charm. I just considered this a funny coincidence.
As for me back then when I was seven I really couldn't do without my mother's helping hand as I spent too much time sitting at home with a sore throat and a running nose. So my mother had a lot of additional work, learning our homework assignment from my class-mates, then helping me to do it and at last bringing my copy-books to our quite unpleasant and arrogant teacher. I suspect I caught a cold so ridiculously often partly because of that woman as she was so rude and shouted so much at her pupils. It was just my bad luck. My mother told me once that while she was waiting for me and walking to and fro along the school corridor she couldn't help noticing that only our teacher's voice was heard behind the door. It seemed that other teachers could do their job without shouting.
I don't remember that woman shouting at me. Perhaps I didn't give her a lot of opportunities as I was good at reading and maths. Still it was difficult to watch her abusing the others. It looked like our teacher especially disliked the boys. At least I still recall one unlucky child shrinking near the blackboard while she was scolding him and calling him a blockhead for not being able to grasp her explanation. I knew she disliked me too, because she never missed the chance to throw something offensive in my direction. Once, for example, when I began to eat a meat ball with a bit of garlic in it, which my reckless mother gave me for lunch, our teacher immediately squinted her beady eyes at me and, wrinkling her disdainful nose, asked loudly whose terrible smell it was. And I, it seemed, tried only to increase my teacher's antipathy towards me.
It really looked like that when we got a home-task to write a composition “My favourite teacher”. Everybody grasped at once who we were expected to be fond of. And only I came straight up to our teacher during the break and asked for permission to write my composition about Tatyana Ivanovna, who worked in the class next-door. That cheerful and kind woman taught us once for a few days and I was hugely impressed by her character. It seemed like a miracle that a teacher could be so nice. We all hoped she was going to stay but not with our luck, of course.
Still people can get used to almost anything. So in due course we got accustomed to our harpy of a teacher and even became less frightened of her. My mother's dark predictions that she would dislike me much more after my insolent request didn't come true. By our fourth year our teacher even smiled sometimes, while telling us that it was her last year at primary school too. Actually, she was a teacher of French and that was what she was going to teach after she had finished with us. Smiling slightly artificially, she tried to tempt me with her future French group, but I replied firmly that I would prefer to study English. It was impossible, of course, to learn a foreign language at an ordinary Soviet school. The whole school programme, it seemed, was created to prevent people from learning it. But I didn't know that at the time and was looking forward to my first English lesson without my first teacher anywhere in sight. It's lucky I couldn't know then that I would become more or less good at English only in my mid-fifties. Still better late than never.
As for my last year at primary school, by that time I began to feel much more comfortable there. Now I spent more time at my lessons than at home with a nasty cold. After studies I used to come home tired but cheerful and spent an hour or two telling my mother about everything that happened during the day or about something interesting that I discovered in books. New insects or plants, or Solar system – there were a lot of things that I found utterly exciting. My mother in return would tell me about something funny or dramatic that happened in her school days.
To be continued...
(c) Anna Shevchenko
