Chapter 6
School in a Country Town
I finished elementary school in 1955. I did not want to learn for a manual trade and in my family it could not have been possible, either. My late brother had always wanted to become a mechanical engineer. After his death I have been automatically promoted to his place in my parents’ ideas and it would have been in vain to come fore with any different thoughts. I have sent my application to two places, both far from our village as it has not had any secondary school at that time yet.
The first application has been sent to a comprehensive school in Debrecen, the eastern part of the country that has been a state school, but which could have retained the Calvinist religious education. They accepted me, only there was no place for me in the dormitory and so, I have had to take a private room and it has not been for our pocket.
The other application has also been accepted and I became a student of a comprehensive school in Siofok, a town 42 km away along the lakeshore in the direction of the capital. Every day I got up at half past four, caught the six ten train and rode to school. In the evening I did not get home before half past eight.
Until that time I had never taken food other than given me by my mother. As the school expected a small portion of the students to fall out during the first two months, the management accepted more of them as it was possible to provide everybody with catering. For a month I have not been allowed to take my lunch there, I have had with me a pair of sandwiches. It meant at the same time, I had my afternoon free and could return home by an earlier train. Provision of food in the school meant having to stay there in the afternoon and prepare for the next day.
My poorer results in school might have come from the sudden higher stress, too, but I think its roots went back to the leisurely way I did my home-works earlier. To the end of my first year in secondary school I climbed back being at maximum scores in every subject, but as there were some local boys in the class from the town, they knew the teachers and were given some advantage. For us "from the country” it has been much harder to get a good reputation.
The school had 3 classes for every grade. Ours was a pure boys’ class, there was one for girls only and one co-educational. In our class there was only one boy that could not find his place. He courted all the girls, he could dance as nobody else and was always up to the ears in some business not allowed. Once he blew up himself in the boys’ toilet by white phosphorus. He has been a great actor and teachers have always been sympathetic with him.
During the first months of my first grade in that school I fell in love with a girl. For about six weeks I could hardly find any occupation that could distract me from her. Slowly from boys who came from the same village as she did, I got information about her "past” and it helped me to eliminate the magic. Her former partners were in the same school with us and I have got my self-respect already at that time.
It is strange how nature can make fun of people. At the same time when I was in love with that girl, another one fell in love with me. No need to say she has not been my favourite genre in any way. I was almost sorry not to be able to comfort her, but conditions made it impossible. Fortunately, love is no mortal illness and, as I met her in the capital about ten years after, she seemed to me to have got rid of her whim about me.
In my class there were some very interesting mates. Alas, I left that school a meer one year after and have lost traces of them since. Only one has remained in my circles for a short time, but he has also vanished. Another one we have met on our honey-moon with my wife.
During that first school year and the one and a half months of the second one I have met some interesting types of teachers. Let alone a young man and an equally young woman who have been partners outside school there were two men worth mentioning.
Physics and chemistry have been taught to us by an old bachelor. He has been the clown of the school for everybody except himself. He has helped us to get useful information from every field of life, but, as he has not been energetic and could not keep order, physics and chemistry have not been our strong side. For a couple of lessons at the beginning he let us acquire the precious knowledge how to soften cork plugs. He could have been the arch-type of absent-minded professor of world literature.
Our form-master was another bachelor who has used the same trains as we students and so, he has always been a great menace for those who smoked on the train or pairs who let their feelings flow free. He has lived together with his sister, also a single woman, and has had chronic arthritis from the Russian front. For curing the latter or at least minimizing pain he has been consuming such a quantity of lemons that has almost been impossible to purchase at that time of shortage of anything imported. Lemon has been his only luxury as one pound of it cost officially two percent of his monthly salary.
His subjects were history and Russian language. His methods of teaching has been fit for me, because his access has been to establish fix basics for the mass of knowledge poured later into the skulls of the students. I must be very grateful to him about my interest of history. He had his own way of preparing fine maps by coloured chalks on the blackboard that had to be copied into our sketch books in school hours and copied again during the afternoon hours into our final exercise books. His instructions have been strict and understandable. Through these maps and diagrams containing all information about the topic, only the very dull could not learn the essence of history.
During the first grade we had to learn world history of ancient times, up to the end of the Roman Empire, as well as national history up to the loss of our independence in the 16th century. When we were dealing with Greeks, I took my father’s book about Greek mythology with me and showed it to him. With it has started a big fight between us that came to an end with my victory only 14 years after. He took the book with him and it has been his firm decision never to return it. When I left the school for another in the capital I forgot to ask him to give it back and I had to write many times, always to get an answer of avoidance.
When I became married and we were shuttling frequently to my aunt Elizabeth for week-ends, we took once with us my younger sister-in-law and, as I was working for a transport company, I had the possibility of using trains almost free, we visited my old alma mater town. I decided there and then to see my former teacher living on pension and to get the book back. I have succeeded. The raid must have taken him unawares.
His way of teaching language has been the same comprehensive one. Russian is not very unlike German, the only difference is vocabulary, but its grammar and specialties – I call them sometimes follies – are the same as in German. You can say that Russians are Russian-speaking Germans and vice versa.
Before the new era he had taught Latin and German. During his years in the Soviet Union as P.O.W. he has learned to speak Russian. After homecoming he polished his linguistic skills and so, he became the best Russian teacher being no born Russian I have ever seen. He has been very successful to make us acquire grammar first and grow up our vocabulary only after that by reading texts.
However, he did not seemed to know it either, that in Russian there is such a thing as expressing future happenings by using present perfect – that is completely different from present perfect in English.
Recollecting my memories about that secondary school I dare say that, when I moved to the capital to another school there, I changed for easier. The standards of the school in the country have been higher than that in the capital.
We had to keep our knowledge up-to-date, especially linguistic knowledge. He was always ready to put us questions about topics dealt with some days or weeks before. And his questioning resembled processes in the court. He looked up his notebook and those two students questioned longest before were summoned at the side of the schoolroom facing the door, windows behind their backs. There was no possibility of helping them as the teacher was in the same distance from delinquents and other boys as those from each other. And even so, I cannot say he has ever been rude with us. He did everything in our favour.
He had a big Doxa watch on chains. He measured time from question till answer came. The chain had a big ring at the end and he was keeping it with his finger and thumb and wound up the chain on his finger by orbiting the watch. Once, when it was me who stood at the window and guessed hard about the right answer, the watch made itself independent and was flying to the open window behind me. My reflexes were fine, so I caught it in the air. There was no need for the answer any more, I got highest score.
In the year, when I finished my elementary school, during the summer holiday it was already necessary to take on a job and make some money to contribute to the family finances. But that time I did not succeed to get the job. I was born in September and when I started my education it has not been a custom to reject admission because of two months. But eight years later it was a big obstacle that I have not been 14 yet. Below 14 nobody was allowed to work. This way it has been my last summer spent leisurely.
After the first grade in secondary school I could not be dissuaded from taking a job. First I wanted to stay in the village. I went to the railways to get employment as a weed killer boy. It would mean to draw out weeds along the tracks. Somehow I have been rejected, I think it was, because I carried spectacles and, as there were more applicants than jobs, the man in charge considered it dangerous to employ a spectacled youth. He said: "It is not probable that you have a spare one with you always. What will you do when your glasses will be broken?” Well, he had to find an excuse somehow.
Then I turned to the school. They helped me to get a place as an unskilled hand on construction sites. It has been a very lucky business. The exact place where I was to work was a series of sites on the lakeshore, as after years of pending, the local tourist agencies began to have the concrete breaker walls of the beaches repaired. They had not been repaired for about 20 years. The lake destroyed them by sending its breakers against them in the summer and even more by ice during winter. The big square areas guarded originally by the walls became closed bio-systems growing reed and bulrush and giving fine mating and nesting places for toads, frogs and birds. During my solitary walking in earlier years I have visited these places many times.
The work has made it possible to me to become acquainted with tasks of making concrete, preparing its place and casting. In the nearly three months, when I have been working there, we repaired about one mile of breaker wall in a complete shore length of about ten miles.
There was a pleasant surprise at the start: our foreman was the father of one of my class-mates, with whom I had a good relationship. We started work in the neighbouring village about 10 miles from my home. Six times a week it meant catching the same train as if I had been going to school and in the evening, as there was no train at that time, walking home on the highway, sometimes being offered a lift from a vehicle. Later we took into work other places much closer to home.
Our foreman liked me, as I took into account that discipline comes first when work is concerned. That was formulated much later by one of my bosses that first you play the fiddle then get the money. This made me unpopular among the boys, but at that time I knew already how to guard my back from bad guys.
As our task has been fulfilled, we had some spare time to use for discovering the lakeshore from the side of water. There was a barge that took us construction material and it had a paddle boat. It was then that I learned how to use the rudder paddle sitting in the back of the boat. It was a very pleasant time, these last few days of that summer.