Chapter 11
First English Course
I have been very lucky with my first English group and teacher. In the group there was nobody with a high knowledge of the language, and we could promote at a good pace. The teacher was a girl, I think my junior, and she has just returned from Finland, after an intensive on-the-spot course of the Finnish language. Her English was good with no accents, and she had a good ability to transfer her knowledge to us even about the most special vowels and consonants.
Our text-book has also been excellent for the study of the language from the beginning. It was the four-volume Eckersley text-book, in use for about fifty years at that time. Ours has been an umpteenth edition from Bulgaria.
My promotion in English has been quick and, as I was interested in the language, I wanted to speak and understand it as soon as possible. I took the advice of a former teacher in my elementary school to refresh my vocabulary every day with the new words. Another advice from my Russian teacher in the country secondary school has been, to learn the words in one order and to check myself in another. For this I would see other methods later, but I think I have chosen the best one that time. I prepared my vocabulary so, that on the left side I listed the words in the English order, and on the right side in my native language. It meant to list every word twice. But I could memorize them on the left, and check myself on the right. Since that time in every language I was studying I did the same.
Chance has also helped me: in English there are so many fine books and periodicals, that it is almost impossible to avoid temptation of reading. I began to buy books in second-hand bookshops and, after reading resold them. Some of them I kept, e.g. one of my favourite is by James Hilton Knight without Armour.
My first encounter with this novel came, when I was 12. From before the war a lot of books of the cheaper editions by newspaper companies have remained in the chests of my parents. Mainly they were translations of English and American novels. Edgar Wallace’s Bosambo books, unavailable lately, or love stories and the one from J. Hilton.
In the world of Soviet juvenile novels it has been an astonishment to read something from the opposite view about Russia during its Civil War. Very similar experience, as reading Dr. Zhivago by B. Pasternak decades later.
I have found it by chance. As I was leafing through dozens of Penguin books I took out one. I have always liked the novels of J. Hilton, as his Lost Horizon, but I did not know, that this favourite book of my childhood had been written by him. Trying to read some lines here and there, the initials A.J. caught my eyes. I remembered this abbreviation from that book. It has been sold cheaply, because of its condition. I have been right, it has been the same novel, and it gave me the same satisfaction to read it in English as in my own language.
My English study has helped me in my work from the beginning. For the freighter/push-boat, whose wheel-house lift has been designed by me, a Kelvin-Hughes radar device has been ordered from England, and to install it properly I had to know all about it. The instruction has been in English, and it explains all.
My English has developed so fine that to the end of the course in the next summer I was reading continuously in English. I have also read through the 1st and 2nd volume of the text-book, and even started to study its 3rd book. It has been my intention to go on with the same teacher and group, but something made it impossible.
One of the extra jobs done by our design office had resulted in a contract for our repair yard. The customer had accepted the project and wanted to make us build the object for them. It was a self-propelled floating gravel elevator equipped with a conveyor belt. The customer had been the national gravel mining company, and the object was to receive and unload gravel, dredged from the riverbed – an old method of deepening the navigational route this way, alas, not practiced any more –, from self-unloading gravel barges to the bank. The gravel was taken out by bucket dredgers and loaded into elevated holds on barges. Surplus water could flow out and gravel was let to fall gradually on the conveyor belts of the barges, which would load it onto the conveyor belt of the elevator. The elevator’s long belt would have a slant and so, the gravel would be put high on the bank.