One of these days I will tell you all about my office at BluSky Services, the place from which we run all the operations of the group. But not now. This story is about something totally different. It is about a memory that was triggered by the 1965 edition of the Collins English Gem Dictionary which I came upon while trying to put some order into the books filling the shelves here…
It was in December 1964 that we arrived in Cairo, Egypt and I was all of 14 and a half years old. I spent the next 5 months as a home student, learning stuff from which I would have to take an examination next Summer, upon return for a short holiday in our home country. Come September 1965, I was thrown into the deep water. At Cairo’s St.George’s College I was the first Hungarian they had ever seen… and also probably the first student ever whose command of the English language was just a tad below zero… Father Melody who was the head-English teacher and Josef, the Egyptian headmaster were both very understanding and they even explained to the other teachers why they should be understanding too when I just stared in their eyes in response to even the simplest question. I did not understand a word!
Of course in a situation like this, you learn quickly and within a few weeks’ time I started to catch on and soon could easily differentiate between commands like stand up, sit down and shut up. I owe an awful lot to those great, understanding teachers but the fact that to-day I have a fairly good command of Shakespeare’s language was due to an English gal who was of my own age group and also the only hopeless love of my life.
Cherchez la femme you will say. Indeed…
Susie lived one floor above us and she and another girl sailed past our noses several times a day, ignoring us boys like gals usually do when they are 14. She was smashingly beautiful (to me anyway) and I was convinced that she would just laugh if I ever said a word to her. Words like “I love you” (words which I think I would not have dared to utter anyway).
This was the time in history when mini skirts first appeared… And when Susie and friend next came in skirts that were as mini as they get, I was knocked out for days. That wonderful sight, thighs exposed to an hitherto unimaginable height (bathing suites excepted but those did not count, you never walked on the street in bathing suites), was printed forever in my mind. The impact was not diminished at all even when I learned later how they “created” those mini skirts. Cairo, with its customary modesty, was not a place where shops sold such apparel… but the girls solved the problem and bridged the situation until they could get the real stuff shipped from England. They pulled their old skirts all the way up to their armpits and wore a pullover to hide all evidence of the cheating. As you have seen, cheating or not, the effect was absolutely stunning.
In time I did manage to get a little closer to her and we even talked occasionally. She was amused by my broken English but she was also surprisingly helpful and never tired of correcting my mistakes. Of course I felt rotten… appearing dumb in front of the woman you love is not exactly a teenager’s dream and I certainly experienced this period of my life as heaven on the one side (talking to Susanne) and a nightmare on the other (forgetting for the hundredth time the past tense of a verb…). But she never did anything to make me feel rotten. On the contrary, she helped and explained and corrected like the best teacher in the world.
One of the points she kept repeating was her disapproval of my use of an English-Hungarian dictionary, a little book that was like the Bible to me, a source of vital information and the last resort when I had to go back to the source and check the meaning of something in Hungarian. You will never learn English properly she announced week after week, suggesting that I buy myself an English-English dictionary, the only type that, in her view, made any sense.
This was a strange idea to me and to be sure, I balked every time the subject came up and come up it did with increasing frequency…
When next Christmas came, I found a small package under the tree that was wrapped in paper completely different from what my parents used. When I asked them about the odd little package, my mom said only that Susie had given it to her to put under the tree for me.
When I opened it, I found a reddish little book, the Collins English Gem Dictionary, 1965 edition. First published in 1911, with new editions in 1936, 1954 and 1963, it was the latest reprint available a the time. A palm sized little book, the English-English dictionary she was talking about so often and it was now there as a Christmas present, totally unexpected but so wonderful I could almost cry.
There was no escaping it now, I had to lay my trusty English-Hungarian dictionary to rest and switch to the Collins gem… which I did. It did not take long for me to realize that she had been absolutely right. With the need to understand not only the words I heard but also their explanation in English, my vocabulary grew at an exponential rate and just by applying the proper grammar to that vocabulary made a world of difference. Soon I was able to actually converse instead of just reacting in broken sentences to things others said.
Susanne’s dad transferred back to the UK soon afterwards and so she had no opportunity to see yet another miracle her little book had given birth to. With my confidence hitting new highs, I went to the local English book store and invested in a paperback book which was very attractive primarily on account of the small aircraft on its cover. I read it, haltingly at first then with increasing ease… Those were the first steps towards opening a whole new window on English literature for me and I never looked back.
The sudden improvement of my English did not go unnoticed by Father Melody but I think he never guessed what had caused the transformation. Cherchez la femme…
Over the years, my command of the English language had been one of the most important elements in my CV and it led to great jobs and great people in about equal proportion. But had it not been for Susanne and her little book, things might have been totally different and not for the better, that is for sure.
All this took place some 45 years ago this coming Christmas and the memories came rushing back as I held the precious little book in my hand.
I have never heard from Susie Barker after they left Egypt. Back then there was no email, no Facebook, not even easy international direct dialing telephones. But if by some miracle you read this now Susie I want you to know that my everlasting gratitude goes out to you, wherever you are!
This is a sweet little story. Happy 2011.
Now that Steve has all this out in the open, I guess it’s not out of line to add some additional bits from my personal memories as the “younger brother”.
Those 4 years in Cairo were no less determining in my own future life-path than what Steve told you about his, and even our mutual interest in flying have some common roots dating back to those golden years in the mid-sixties when a BOAC VC-10 on approach to Cairo Airport was a commonplace sight. In fact, my early interest in airplanes was soon a well-known fact among my pals at Al Hourreya Primary School. Hence the highly-treasured Christmas present I received from my classmates in 1966: The Longacre Book Of Flying, its publishing-house, Odhams Press Ltd., no longer existing.
But let’s keep to the topic at hand: I myself was (am…) 6 years Steve’s junior, and 6 years can be a LOT of years when you’re just 8 instead of 14 and you’re just beginning to discover that the most interesting difference between boys and girls is hidden behind textiles… Having said that, I of course also perfectly noted all of Susan’s attractive feminine features that Steve mentioned, but I was too embarrassed to openly admit this even to myself. Susy also had a younger brother (Ricky, 2 years younger than me) and a sister, Helen (my own age) with whom we were the best of friends, and the 3 of us spent many a great hours in the lush garden around our home in the residential suburb of Cairo near the Gezira club.
Of course, the teenage romance that was developing between Susy and Steve didn’t go unnoticed before my eyes. Who knows, maybe this gave me some inspiration, but I do remember having a passing thought now and then about trying to get closer to Helen behind a scrub of bush in our garden – but of course at the age of 8 you think twice (or 3, 4, 5 times…) before embarking on such an adventure, so I quickly dismissed these ideas and managed to limit our relationship to participating in the respective roles cast on us by the rules of the classic hide-and-seek game. My decision was based not least on the fact that Helen’s parents seemed to be exceptionally strict and I had no intention to test their tolerance in this high-risk area. So I just kept envying Steve that he now had a REAL GIRL and his target-oriented approaches were (so to say) not missed ones at all.
So, as a complement to Steve’s entry, I can only confirm his message: if Susy, or, for that matter, any of the Barker family stumbles on this piece, it would be more than fabulous to receive some sign that they, too, remember us. Unfortunately, we have no clue whatsoever about their whereabouts, and we only know that Mr Barker at that time was working for the English Electric Company’s Egyptian representation.