Chapter 3
Boyhood
With the passing years it became harder to live on our limited funds and my father accepted the offer of a local cooperative for an accountant’s job. It became him even harder to keep on farming after a whole day’s work, but I did not notice any problem with him. During summers my mother had been employed, too. Being a lakeside settlement the village had resorts even from before the war. As the new government stabilized its economy the large state companies were provided with recreation homes throughout the country. These homes were originally built before the war by wealthy new capitalists or the few remaining aristocrats. After the war the latter left the country or a few of them accepted jobs of the lowest kind. The wealthy became poor or ordinary by nationalization and they either used their brains as accountants or the like or left the country and returned only lately as millionaires.
Our village had at least ten of the big recreation homes and in a year at least two thousand strangers were spending their holidays in them. It meant also that the formerly clean and silent lakeshore became crowded and polluted.
My mother took the job of chef in one of the homes and, as it was a children’s home of one of the big factories in the capital, I also had the possibility to spend my time there. Well, I soon became fed up with the company of children who, however came from the centre of the country, were much less educated than me and at the same time they thought the opposite. As an only child that time – my sister has been my senior by eight years and she was already forming her own life, soon to marry and so on – I spent my time reading, listening to the wired radio and helping my parents, listening to them in the evening, especially when we had some guests or we ourselves were in somebody’s home. At that time it occurred, at the beginning of the fifties, that one of the old buildings in the village has been turned into Cultural House, half of the building a cinema to make performance twice a week, half a library. For me the latter was a great thing, but to see films twice a week was also a big chance. It was really an important event, as before the opening of permanent cinema we had only an open air one in summer.
My capacities made it possible to prepare for the other day in school very quickly: I completed my homework, but it has never been needed to sit down and memorize anything, except poems. I could recite everything by hearing it during school hours. It has made me, of course, a lot of inconvenience, too, as it was very dull to me to listen many times to the same sentences, when less capable pupils were to understand what I knew already. I cannot but admire most of my elementary teachers for understanding the situation so quickly and letting me do my other business under the bench-cover.
Besides, I have always been a person who likes being left alone. In good weather I went walking and discovered the numerous fine things nature can provide someone with. The village lies on some hills, one of them is protruding to the edge of the lake basin. It means, the ground on the hilltop suddenly comes to a perpendicular fall that is seen from the lakeshore below as a sheer wall of loess. There are foxholes in it, some of them are even bigger, almost caves. It was a great fun to discover these caves. First I had some difficulty with my walks, as mother could not forget what happened to my brother. She put me in an invisible cage and I could not have my freedom. Later on, as she was taking the job every summer and I was left alone with some food, I would go as I wanted.
The lake is a fine body of sweet water and the village lies on its best shore. For years after the tragedy in our family I had hardly seen anything of the lake. Once, when I was 7, my relatives took me to the beach and then and there I discovered my born talent of swimming. Never before to have been in water, I went in and swam. None of my relatives noticed it, of course, but I remember the fun of being one with a completely new element. Some years later I could convince my mother about my ability to guard myself and she allowed me to descend and take a swim. From that time on, I could go as I wished, but to tell the truth, I have always been very careful not to destroy her confidence in me. Apart from summer swimming I tried the lake-water once in winter. With one of my schoolmates, to whom I went after school hours to do our homework together, and who lived not far from the port of passenger boats, we were walking on the wharf and descended to the edge of frozen water. When we tried to walk on ice it suddenly let me sink through a cracked hole. I came out quickly, but, until we reached their home, all my cloths up to waist were hard and cracking. Mother have never got any hint of my winter bath.
When I began to frequent the lake during summer time, the number of vacationers and recreation home dwellers has already been growing steadily. Some boys from the village, including me, spent almost all their time scavenging on the lakeshore, discovering the big jungles of reed and making fishing rods from thin twigs, lines and wine bottle corks. As there was no mass sports fishing, pollution was unimportant and reed occupied vast territories on the shore. It was a very good period for the fish to multiply. Of course, from this life my skin became tanned and I was so healthy I had almost never had any sickness.
Slowly fishing turned worse. People from the village rented certain places, built there stands in the water to fish from and it hindered us to continue our scavenging. Anyway, evenings I still tried and was often successful.
Roving the lakeshore has been an interesting occupation not only during summers, but as weather turned cooler and the lake became grey with breakers I often walked hours along the shore and collected things thrown up on the sands. Mainly they have been mussels and snails, but once I have found a badly damaged toy boat made of wood. It has been the first of my model boats in a long line. That time Robinson Crusoe and The Mysterious Island were fresh in my brain and I wanted to try, at least in miniature, how to build a boat. This first one I have repaired and decorated in every possible way and until our moving from the village it has been an item to decorate my room.
Launching a hobby of model building has not been a very expensive task. We had a lot of old pine boards that have been quite good in the middle, only I had to saw, plane and polish them to get the right building stuff. It goes without saying, the first one or two have not become models, but their fallen parts have got into the following models. My love for modelling has not died out, until now it can make me a good pleasure.