“Remembrance of Things Past”
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“Remembrance of Things Past” (William Shakespeare: Sonnet 30) Mary Mason Page Contents 1 Dedication 4 Junior arrives and the past comes back 4 How did you come to get a teacher’s job in Bulgaria? 5 What was your first impression of Bulgaria? 6 How did you see Plovdiv in the sixties? 8 Were the Bulgarian students different from the British ones? 9 In the Socialist time, especially this period, what kind of people did you meet in Plovdiv? What did they tell you about life there? 12 A police state 12 Bulgarian friends 14 Zlatyu Boyadjiev 17 Life in the villages 18 The Zaria 21 Why don’t you marry a Bulgarian? 23 1 Visas 23 What happened to you after you left Plovdiv – work, private life, adventures? 24 Sofia English Language School 1963-1964 24 Matthew Boulton Technical College 1965-1968 26 Battle for comprehensive secondary education 26 City of Birmingham College of Education 1968-1982 28 Applied Linguistics 30 Early retirement 1982 34 University of Birmingham 35 Africa 36 The Wigan Language Project: theory 39 OPTIONAL: Concrete and abstract language 40 The Wigan Language Project in action 1984-92 42 Shevington High School 42 Success …… 46 ……. and failure! 46 National Curriculum 47 Picking up the pieces 48 Bordesley Green Girls’ School 1994-97 49 2 OPTIONAL: Variables 1994 40 Soviet teachers 1989-91 54 Africa 1991-1994 55 Breakthrough to Learning in Further and Higher Education 1997-2007 58 University of Central England Faculty of Education 59 National conference 1996 59 Solihull College of Further Education 1997-99 60 UCE: Widening Participation 61 The Language of Ideas 63 Using the web 2010 64 Matthew Moss High School 2013 64 Aldridge High School 2016 75 Envoi 76 English Language School, Plovdiv: sixtieth anniversary 76 The main headings were suggested by Vesselina Bozhilova, to whom I am indebted for getting started on these memoirs. 3 Dedication This memoir is written on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the English Language School, Plovdiv, Bulgaria. It is written principally for the students and staff of that school, especially the first and second intakes, whom I had the privilege of teaching from 1959 to 1963. We live in turbulent times. Much has happened since 1959 and there have surely been many changes in the School. Of one thing I am confident – the present school continues the tradition of excellence which we established sixty years ago. I am proud to have been a part of those early years, and I wish the staff and pupils of the School success and happiness in the years to come. Junior arrives and the past comes back I am now a very old lady of 88, living in a comfortable flat near the centre of my home city of Birmingham. Maybe former colleagues and students who visited me here will remember it. I am lucky enough to be in good health and fairly sensible. I have good friends who share my life and take care of me. No-one looks forward to their eighties but I have found that, as some good things get out of reach (like foreign travel and driving and staying awake), there have been unexpected pleasures. None is more surprising and delightful than this reconnection with Bulgaria. Here’s how it happened. Junior is a six month old Staffordshire bull terrier, who does not like being left alone. He raises heart-rending howls of protest when his owners have to leave him in the flat. I spend most of my time in my flat and, when one day I heard these pathetic cries from 7.00 in the morning till 1.00 in the afternoon, I checked that they were coming from the flat below and resolved to complain to the occupants. A neighbour happened to meet Juno and his owners that afternoon and urged them to speak to me about it. A bit later they rang my bell full of apologies and explanations. They were an attractive young couple, speaking good but foreign English, so I asked them where they were from. I was so pleased when they replied “Bulgaria”. And not only Bulgaria but “Plovdiv”. We agreed that Plovdiv is the most beautiful city on earth and they showed me up-to-date photos of the city on their i-phones. My newly acquainted Bulgarian neighbours are Bozhilo and Ivan Bozhilov and Ivan’s wife, Dessislava. They told their mother, Vesselina Bozhilova, a journalist, of their discovery of me and she contacted the Old Students’ Union of the English Language School and sent me some old photos and pages from the School archives. She suggested I write this article and helpfully provided me with a number of 4 questions as guidance. The title of this section is her comment from our first emails. Her questions form the headings of the memoir I have written as a contribution to the sixtieth anniversary of the school. I hope to hear what has happened to some of my former students during the tumultuous years of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. How did you come to get a teacher’s job in Bulgaria? My reason for applying for a job in Bulgaria in 1959 was purely political. The Cold War was at its height and it was impossible for people in the West to learn what life was really like in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The wall of hostile propaganda on both sides was impenetrable. I was born in 1930 and my parents were passionate Socialists. I was brought up to think it was normal to spend every Sunday morning canvassing for the Labour Party and one’s evenings in smoke-filled school rooms arguing for left-wing causes. My earliest political memory dates from about 1937, when I was sent home crying. People were being nasty to my Dad, who was asking for money to support the Spanish Republicans. Then came the Second World War and the air raids, which sent us into a shelter in the garden every night, stopped abruptly when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The Russians ceased to be agents of the devil and became our glorious allies who were bearing the brunt of German aggression. We all rejoiced in the triumphs of the USSR in industrialisation and collective farms, universal education and health. This happy alliance did not survive long in peacetime. The Soviet Union, struggling to re- establish itself after the unimaginable suffering of the War, was once again vilified in “the West” and the Cold War brought down an iron curtain of ignorance about life in the Socialist “East”. It was impossible to gain access to the Soviet Union or the countries of Eastern Europe. My family remained in the Labour Party but joined every “Communist Front” organisation in an attempt to gain balanced information about the Communist world. I was lucky enough to be born in the generation that extended higher education to increasing numbers of working-class children. Under the post-war Labour Government, I received free tuition and a grant to enable me to get a degree in English Language and Literature at London University, and in 1959 I had a good job teaching in a grammar school in Birmingham. I was ready for a change, so I scanned the job advertisements in the educational press and spotted a tiny paragraph inviting teachers with my qualifications to apply for teaching posts in the English Language Schools in Bulgaria. After a perfunctory interview at the Bulgarian 5 embassy in Kensington, I was offered a post and I accepted it. (There were not many applicants, I think!) I was allocated to the newly opened school in Plovdiv. I was surprised to receive a letter from the British Foreign Office, inviting me to their offices in Whitehall. Here a charming man advised me on no account to go to Bulgaria. They could not protect me there, he said, and warned me that I might go the way of Gary Powers, who had recently been imprisoned by the Russians after being shot down in an American spy plane. I said I was going to Bulgaria not as a spy but as a teacher. This encounter with my own Government gave me a glimpse into the systematic disinformation peddled by the capitalist world about communism. I am very glad I ignored his advice. What was your first impression of Bulgaria? There were two of us appointed to the English Language School, Plovdiv, in September 1959, myself and Ann Slater. The Bulgarian Government paid for our journey from London to Sofia by first-class wagons lit – the only time I’ve ever travelled in such luxury. After two days’ travel, and in an almost empty train, we arrived at Sofia Station in the evening. We were tired and dirty. (The brown coal burned in the East European train sent clouds of smoke through the windows of even the wagons lit!) Above all, we had no idea what to expect. The platforms on Sofia Station were amazingly low but somehow we clambered down on to the track with our mountain of luggage. Then, to our huge relief, someone was looking for us. A dapper little man in a suit led a little group of people hurrying down the track towards us, all with huge bunches of flowers. The man introduced himself as the Director of the Plovdiv School and the others were from the Ministry of Education. They welcomed us, took care of our luggage and helped us carry the flowers. I think only Lyuben Christov, the Director, spoke English.