This is another in a series of excerpts from my new book How the Future Worked, available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk or on Amazon.co.uk. Here I talk about my university life and a few colourful freinds.
The most agreeable lad in the bunch, Tolia Dostenko, was in the same class as I. Unlike the others, he always showed up every morning, toting his ubiquitous guitar and a tattered briefcase containing two bottles of red. He’d sit in the back row, quietly plucking the silvery strings, taking the odd pull from the bottle, not bothering anyone and being seldom bothered himself, except by our conscientious phonetics instructor.
Of the six periods of practical English we had every day, four in that first year were devoted to phonetics. We had to learn pages upon pages of English texts by heart and enunciate them as closely to the received pronunciation as we could manage. Most texts featured as the principal character a fictitious Mr Sanford, the local rep for the communist paper The Daily Worker, as The Morning Star was then.
‘I say, Mr Dixon,’ we’d intone dutifully. ‘Do you receive TheDaily Worker at all?’ ‘No, I can’t say I do, old chap, can’t say I do.’ ‘Oh, what a shame! Surely you wouldn’t mind trying it for a month or two, what-what?’ ‘Not at all, old chap, not at all. Oh bother, it looks like rain.’ ‘It does indeed, it does indeed. Terrible nuisance, that.’ ‘Well, the English climate isn’t at all changeable, is it, Mr Sanford? Ha-ha-ha…’ No one told us that people who employed the diction we were trying to emulate were unlikely to flog The Daily Worker door to door, although they were perfectly capable of funding it behind the scenes.
The phonetics instructor faced the tall order of reshaping our speech-producing organs, inured to throaty Russian. To that end this pleasant, blue-haired lady would stick her nose into our mouths, making sure our tongues were properly retracted in the direction of our hard palates. She attempted that trick with Dostenko a few times, only to be thwarted by the industrial-strength smell of good vodka and bad teeth.
Before she gave up on him she once asked if he could recite Text Five by heart. The question was posed in English, but the reply came in Russian: ‘Fraid I can’t.’ ‘Well, Text Four then.’ Galina Stepanovna wasn’t getting the message. ‘Can’t do that one either.’ ‘What can you do then, Tolia?’ demanded Galina Stepanovna in a Russian as pure as Dostenko’s own. ‘I can sing you a song,’ he offered. ‘Please do, by all means,’ said the instructor with what she thought was devastating sarcasm.
Undevastated and undaunted, Dostenko strummed his guitar and went into a hoarse, drunken rendition of the Russian folk song At the river, the river, the o-o-o-other bank, Marusia was washing her darling white feet. He knew it in its never-ending entirety. Galina Stepanovna, who had never heard anything quite so surreal in her 40-year career of hard-palate searching, was so stunned that she stopped the song only after four verses, each followed by the eponymous refrain.
Petia Shuruyev, the fifth musketeer, once made a pass at another phonetics instructor, a beautiful girl who had just taken her degree and was several years his junior. When rejected, Shuruyev, a wayward offshoot of a good family, took revenge by employing his rare talent of being able to vomit at will.
Every time the comely Liudmila Nikolayevna demanded some kind of performance from him, be that reciting a text or pronouncing a phrase, he’d gag theatrically and throw up his daily intake of red and white wine into the aisle. As the girls in his class knew he was going to perform that charming trick, they’d sensibly take their seats as far away from him as the smallish classroom allowed.
Before long Shuruyev was summoned to the dean’s office and asked to account for his behaviour. ‘I can’t help it,’ he explained in his refined Moscow accent. ‘It’s an involuntary reaction, comrade dean. Every time she calls out my name, it just happens. Hard as I try I can’t keep it in.’ The dean dismissed him, saying it was more than high time something was done about him and the other four degenerates who belonged in front of a firing squad, not in a university auditorium.
To their credit, the Alkies never got drunk unless there was an important occasion to celebrate. It was just that in the Russia of my youth there was at least one such occasion every day. All one had to do was open the calendar.
Some, such as May Day, November 7 (Revolution Day), February 23 (Red Army Day), March 8 (International Women’s Day) were huge national holidays when no one worked. Some were less important: Printers’ Day, Railway Workers’ Day, Scientists’ Day, Teachers’ Day, Steel Workers’ Day and so forth, ad infinitum.
And that wasn’t all. For we also had anniversaries: of every battle in the war, of every speech Lenin ever delivered, of every important Party Congress (such as the Tenth in 1921, when all opposition was banned), of – well, you get the gist. There was a pecking order to the anniversaries, and there was a sacrosanct protocol involved in the festivities.
Once our university’s Party Secretary ordered that on such and such day we were to present ourselves at the conference hall to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1905 revolution. An occasion of that magnitude clearly called for a rally, not just a piss-up. And no rally of that type could have been complete without at least one eyewitness of the glorious event, proudly displaying himself in the presidium on the stage.
That was the tough part: what with the average life expectancy for men stuck at 57 and declining, finding a superannuated veteran was no mean task. But, according to Lenin’s well-known pronouncement, ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks can’t storm.’ Impressive detective work by the Secretary tracked down a senile octogenarian Cossack. The veteran swore he had been an active participant in the 1905 revolt before covering himself with glory in the ranks of Budyonny’s cavalry during the Civil War.
When the hero staggered onto the stage, even the Party Secretary’s face showed some doubt. The man had a vacant look that suggested he wasn’t in complete command of his faculties. That impression was enhanced by the saliva dripping out of his toothless mouth and onto his already dirty tie.
But beggars can’t be choosers. The Secretary braced himself and got the ball rolling by delivering a formulaic half-hour speech at the end of which he introduced the veteran. ‘So let’s give a warm welcome to Maxim Ivanych!’
We clapped enthusiastically, anticipating some good fun. Maxim Ivanych didn’t disappoint. He got to the microphone, tottered a bit but then straightened himself up.
‘I remember that day azh if it wazh yeshterday,’ he said and tottered again. ‘There wazh a rally in the shquare. Lotsh of red flagzh, all shorts of people, shtudentsh, workerzh. They wazh all shouting, one Jew climbed on top of a shoap boksh to give a shpeech.’ He smiled apologetically for having inadvertently identified the orator’s ethnicity.
‘Then the shquadron commander yelled “Shabresh out! Charge!!!” And,’ he ended on a triumphant note, ‘we chopped’em all up to ribbonzh!!!’.
In the ensuing tumultuous ovation Maxim Ivanych was whisked off the stage by the despondent Secretary whose face had turned beetroot-red. The poor sod had made a career-ending mistake: he hadn’t checked the facts, having satisfied himself that the Cossack had indeed fought with Budyonny. It escaped his attention that Maxim Ivanych had only seen the Bolshevik light in 1917, not in 1905 when he had been doing his normal Cossack service in the imperial security troops.