Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  So why then were we born English? Following rapidly upon the heels of anxieties about identity framed in terms that assume a mother country, a father land, a homeland, and unquestionably a mother tongue, came statements that implied the coincidence of the nation’s interests with our own, so as to feel confident about who or what we were, a confidence which, since essentially insecure, must rest upon nothing more nor less than faith. And, as anyone who has thought or felt seriously about faith will tell you, it’s groundless. Yet I too had felt with my native land, felt at one with my kind, as Tennyson put it hearing ships in the Solent gathering to depart for the Crimea, or, as we had, for the Falkland Islands, and, whatever kind that might be, being one who has also believed that the values of humanity have to be separable from those of national interest, I had also, I admit it, felt ashamed and lonely.

  That Sunday Mum and Dad had come over for lunch. This was why I’d taken the flight from Pisa for a weekend at Mike’s. But now my big brother was in full flood.

  ‘Didn’t you see that great dent in the washing machine?’ he was saying.

  ‘No, why?’ Mum asked. She was helping herself to a little more wine, Dad looking suspiciously over towards her in case she became a bit tipsy.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get them to admit responsibility. The delivery men just pushed it off the back of the van.’

  ‘I’m surprised it works at all,’ said Sally.

  ‘But would they believe me? Would they heck! They said we must have done it. So I wrote back and told them that I’d take them to court, and they wrote washing their hands, as it were, and blaming the whole thing on the delivery firm.’

  ‘Well, it was them that did it,’ said Mum.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mike, warming to his theme, ‘but the manufacturers should be responsible for the behaviour of their distributors, and for the product’s delivery; I mean, the satisfaction of the customer involves all of them.’

  ‘Could I have some more carrots?’ I asked, to derail the conversation. Mum passed me the plate and I helped myself.

  ‘Anyone else want any?’ I offered. ‘They’re delicious.’

  ‘I had just the same problem with the paint job on my Renault,’ Mike was continuing. ‘They simply could not get the colour right.’

  Handing Dad the serving dish, I noticed him chuckling to himself.

  ‘Oh yes?’ he said, as if to encourage his first son to explain.

  ‘But it was your fault in the first place, Mike,’ said Sally with a frown. ‘I mean you did brake far too sharply when that earthmover just juddered by the kerb. I don’t think the car behind had any chance of stopping.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Mike, his voice rising, ‘the law states quite clearly that it is the duty of the car behind to be in a position to stop, whatever the weather conditions or state of the traffic.’

  ‘Well, that’s as maybe,’ Sally returned and, turning to me, ‘but the real tragedy is that he’d just that morning collected it from the showroom and, there it was, the back end with an enormous bash in it. That’s where all the trouble about the paintwork came from. He just wanted to have the car brand new again.’

  ‘Yes, all right, I admit it, but what’s so wrong in that?’

  ‘It must have been very irritating,’ said Mum, ‘but you’d never think anything had happened now, would you, Tom?’

  Dad straightened his face just in time as the eyes of the table turned to him.

  ‘Actually,’ he said with a glint, ‘I’m not sure your mother is right. If you look closely I think you can make out a faint change of tone in the metallic grey, wouldn’t you say so, George?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Dad. You know I know nothing about cars.’

  Mike continued to look irritated.

  ‘I don’t believe you’ve even looked at the back of the car,’ he was saying to Dad, and, to his wife, ‘I’m sure you’re right. And that’s the whole point of getting them to do the job properly, even if it meant having the re-spray done three times.’

  Perhaps he’s worrying about his work, I thought, imagining that the accuracy required in experiments with microscopes and infinitesimal distortions in the surfaces of metals would inevitably aggravate my brother’s obsession with perfect order and appearance.

  We had finished the main course and Sally was clearing away the dishes when Mike’s conversation took a yet more technical turn. He was explaining to Mum, who had asked a polite question, exactly what his latest research involved.

  ‘The team I have working with me now is top class, and we’re beginning to produce results that could be directly applicable to industry,’ he was saying. ‘The sensitivity of the microscopes is such that the slightest oversight can produce unreliable data, and that would, of course, be disastrous when I’m approaching a private company. So what the interfrometer does is register the precise fluctuations in the wave patterns of atomic particles under stress, and we can transfer these particle messages into visual form to report on the behaviour of metals subjected to structural fatigue, right down to the minutest divisions of millimeters. Its applications are everywhere: aviation safety, George, for one.’

  As Mike continued to specify what the problems and the challenges were, I caught Mum’s eye and smiled. I was concentrating on the plate of ice cream Sally had placed before me, wondering when my brother would stop. Then at that instant Dad began to laugh out loud. It was not a wry chuckle or smirk, but a loud and rising hilarity. He was wearing a light striped shirt with a broad maroon tie, his short soft neck folding slackly from the top of the collar, the tie falling roundly across his rounded stomach. As he began to laugh, under the influence of the glasses of wine and plates of food, his usually pallid neck and face began to flush pink.

  Where was it coming from, this uncontrollable laughing? As it continued and turned his cheeks and forehead to an apoplectic plum-colour, Mike kept trying to explain his explanation, apparently unable to comprehend his father’s attack of what seemed hysterical laughter. It was as if Dad were about to burst a blood vessel or suffer a massive heart attack or choke on his food – I didn’t know what. He had turned such an odd bright colour. I pictured the local paper’s headline: ‘Father Dies Laughing at his Son’s Profession’. The most glorious of glorious deaths, someone had said, to die laughing like Sir Thomas More.

  Then just as suddenly the laughter died down to a purple gasping for breath, and Mike had merely to endue the chagrin of Dad’s reason for this momentarily strange behaviour, once he’d recovered himself enough to explain.

  ‘But I don’t see what’s so funny,’ Mike couldn’t help saying – which only seemed about to start another attack of the giggles from Dad.

  ‘Really, I don’t see what’s so funny.’

  Language Schooling

  It didn’t bear thinking about. He would have to get through it nonetheless. So were the Russians coming or not? The school had arranged two weeks of classes, with study visits to Stratford and London. After their acclimatization course, the twenty-four student teachers with their two leaders would divide and go to training colleges in different parts of England and Wales. It was an annual occurrence, arranged in conjunction with the British Council. But were the Russians coming this year? Were they coming or not?

  Peter had done little of this type of work before. It seems you only begin to know your native language when obliged to teach it. Coming to the end of a General English course that Easter, the first he’d ever taught, Peter’s nerves were fairly in shreds. Besides, out of school, he was engaged in a war of attrition with the retired brigadier who lived next door. The dispute had arisen over the old soldier’s ancient lights and Peter’s planning permission to rebuild his bathroom. Good fences make good neighbours. Peter had ended up with a black eye and his photograph in the Evening News.

  In the staffroom on that last day of the Easter course, Ed Robbins, the school principal, asked Peter if he would be willing to take on the Russians.

  ‘What would that
involve?’

  ‘Oh, hand to hand fighting, mainly,’ Ed returned. ‘I’m sure you’ll cope well enough. Not to worry, Rod’s in charge of strategy and tactics. He’ll put you through your basic training – nothing to worry about – you’ll do it? Fine.’

  Solipsism and Self-knowledge: that was the submitted title of Peter’s doctoral dissertation. It was also the year he’d been trying to draft an early chapter called ‘Must We Know What We Do?’ He was expected to complete by the end of September, but had run out of grant money and was running out of time. With Sylvie and baby Anna to support, living on what part-time teaching he could find, he’d put the thesis on hold to concentrate on their survival. So, naturally, when Ed offered a few more weeks’ work, Peter said, ‘Yes, of course, I’d love to teach the Russians a thing or two.’

  Peter’s mother’s maiden name was, after all, Belinsky, and as Marina Belinsky she’d enjoyed a distinguished career as an actress on the London stage: little wonder, then, that she had kept her maiden name after marrying Anthony Smith, an engineer by profession. Peter, named, as he liked to imagine, after the victor of Poltawa, had been reminded all through childhood that his family’s claim to compensation for property lost at the time of the Russian Revolution was still outstanding with the Soviet Authorities. Marina Belinsky had been left a widow when Peter was entering sixth form. As her only son, he felt himself heir to that claim, and, naturally enough, when their baby daughter had come along, Sylvie had accepted the inevitable and bowed to christening her child with a name that would make her husband’s ailing mother happy. Yes, Peter had his reasons for wanting to teach the Russians a thing or two.

  A letter arrived from the school a few days later confirming Ed’s offer. It invited Peter to the first briefing session with Rod Moody.

  Rod had spent years as a petty officer in the Royal Navy and was a good organizer. Stocky, with curly brown hair, greying around his ears, and lines on a forehead that was firming into middle age, Rod seemed unable to prevent himself ogling the pretty students and younger women teachers alike. What was worse, his innuendos all seemed for Peter’s benefit, for the male camaraderie. Prudishly dismayed, he would be left with nothing to say. From the unease of those silences, Peter imagined Rod didn’t trust him, just thought him trouble, or stuck-up perhaps.

  ‘I’ve got your number,’ said Rod one day, slapping Peter on the backside as he went striding by.

  The school’s Director of Studies was required to offer literature lectures and seminars to the Russians. That was why, like it or not, he needed to get along with what, in Peter’s hearing, Rod described as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals’. And so it was that on a blustery morning in mid-April, Peter sat watching the branches sway between their staffroom and the office windows opposite. The trees were breaking into leaf. Loud birds were making themselves understood above the muted traffic noise. Rod and his two charges began by furnishing themselves with plastic cups of the school’s poisonous coffee – used by harassed teachers to top up their nerves between lessons. There were a few unbroken biscuits left in the tin. This meeting had been timed to fall between breaks; the staffroom was empty but for the Director of Studies, Linda Wright, and Peter himself.

  ‘Linda has agreed to take on the bulk of the specialist language teaching,’ Rod explained for Peter’s benefit, then, shifting his eyes to the pair-teacher: ‘Actually, I had to wrestle her for it, but you won, didn’t you, Linda?’

  Linda nodded, indulging him, but Rod had already swivelled his eyes away.

  ‘Pete, here, will cover the literature slots. They’re doing Romeo and Juliet at Stratford, very popular with the Ruskies I’m told. You’ve heard of it, I expect. Give us a lecture on the plot, and another on the theatre in Shakespoke’s heyday. You know the drill, the Globe and all that. There’s a good lad. Oh, and by the way, we’ve decided we’re going to pay you.’

  Peter smiled. Linda did too. She was a solid person, plump and broad. Linda had taken the Berlitz course, got the qualification, and from her calm demeanour must have done plenty of classroom time too. The pair-teachers exchanged friendly looks. Theirs would be a two-week working acquaintance, and each knew it instantly. Since Rod had organized the course to the last detail, they had little reason to do more than exchange impressions of the students and the weather. But Peter later discovered from Rod, as if from within the services and with a peculiar awe, that Linda was actually a police sergeant’s wife.

  ‘Here are the lesson plans I’ve typed up for you,’ Rod was saying. ‘As you can see, the teacher-training sessions have been organized for the afternoons with the permanent staff. We’ll be doing General English for the first period in the morning, covering the four skills, but concentrating on speaking and listening; then, after the break, we’ll have two forty-five-minute sessions when you exchanges classes. I’ve worked in some lab slots and activities where you can bring the two classes together.’

  ‘What will the levels be like?’ Linda asked.

  ‘The students vary from upper intermediate to advanced, sometimes practically fluent. You might have some problems with the leaders though …’

  Rod paused a moment and was duly asked why the leaders might prove difficult.

  ‘Because it’s the trusted old Party members who get to come on these visits to the wicked West – by way of a reward. Their only job is to keep an eye on the students, make sure no one defects or anything like that; but they aren’t going to become teachers and don’t have to know much of the language. They only follow the lessons to monitor them – make sure you’re not corrupting Soviet youth with your pop music lyrics and that … and you sometimes find the students turn out to be embarrassed by their leaders too. That said,’ Rod added with one of his characteristic qualifications, ‘a few of the leaders we’ve had coming over have turned out to be quite nice people.’

  The pair-teachers had already started glancing over the timetables and lesson plans when Rod brought the meeting to a close.

  ‘A couple of words of advice before we look at the materials,’ he said. ‘Among the students, there’s always one male and one female Party member. They can be nuisances. You must try not to let them lead and dominate the classroom discussion. They’ll probably try to monopolize the answering; you mustn’t let it happen.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Oh I’m sure you’ll think of something,’ said Rod, helpfully. ‘It’ll be interesting to see how quickly you can spot them.’

  ‘No politics, I assume,’ said Linda – merely reinforcing, perhaps for Peter’s benefit, what would obviously be the case.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Rod, ‘and especially not now. We’re still not one hundred-per-cent sure they’re coming, and whether the school should accept them for that matter. We thought the invasion might mean cancellation this year, what with the sanctions and all, but the regular visit was sorted out too early to be affected, apparently, and the school has reluctantly agreed to continue with the exchange programme – for this year, anyway. But the temperature has definitely dropped. There could well be difficulties, so all I can recommend is caution. We don’t want an international incident now, do we, Pete.’

  ‘Do you actually think there might be defections?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ the Director of Studies returned in all seriousness. ‘Remember, we’re dealing with privileged people – the elite. They wouldn’t be letting them out if they weren’t. They’ll be the children of KGB men, or that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter, his attempt at humour crushed.

  ‘And one last thing: don’t, whatever you do, and however chilly it happens to be, forget to open the classroom windows at the end of each lesson!’

  ‘Why so?’ asked Linda.

  ‘Because, you won’t believe it; but Russians smell some-thing awful. I don’t know why, but they do, and after an hour you’ll find the air’s actually unbreathable … unbearable.’

  The young pair-teachers must
have appeared in-credulous.

  ‘Look, I’m telling you,’ said Rod, ‘they really stink.’

  Amongst the staffroom’s piled class-sets of text books, the teachers’ bags and folders, the magazines, bagged tape-recorders, stray photocopies, and other general clutter, Peter sat struggling to keep the chopped egg and mayonnaise inside the bread roll he was biting into – with just twenty minutes left in his first lunch hour.

  ‘So far so good?’ asked Peter between mouthfuls.

  ‘That woman, the old leader,’ Linda frowned, ‘she’s driving me spare with her totally irrelevant questions, breaking up my lesson. It’s so exasperating!’

  ‘You mustn’t let her,’ Rod joined in from the far side of the room, ‘mustn’t let them damage your authority.’

  ‘It’s not easy to get them talking, is it?’ Peter put in, under his breath, for Linda’s ears only. ‘Did they ask you about the cheapest shops for buying clothes and presents? They did me. A bit embarrassing … I gave them directions to Woolworth’s and the British Home Stores.’

  ‘You know their allowance of currency is severely restricted,’ Rod wanted to explain. Now he was speaking from behind his staffroom desk, where, as often in the lunch break, he was signing study visit forms, company reports, teachers’ pay claims, and generally making sure things were running smoothly. ‘I hope you’ve left the windows open!’