questions of grammar and onto more general ones about my educational background. I was terrified that one day Iâd be exposed as a fraud.
I simply couldnât look bad in the staff room. There were rumours going around that I was an âexpertâ and so I was somehow put on a pedestal. The fact that I only had a BA degree and had legged it over there with a half-written Masterâs thesis was a constant burden that I often felt compelled to confess. It was probably a good thing in the end, since it forced me to complete that thesis. It filled those dark, lonely hours when winter came tapping on the window and the mind needed any kind of food it could get its hands on.
To become a teacher in Poland you have to have a Masterâs degree in your chosen subject. On top of that, teachers have to spend several years at the bottom of the salary ladder, until theyâve earned their stripes. So, to instil a further sense of guilt, I entered the school passing myself off as a fully qualified and experienced teacher, with a Masterâs degree and in receipt of a full salary.
The salary was actually paltry, about one hundred pounds a month. Pay day, though, despite the humblepay packet, was still a day of high spirits for us all. The last Friday of every month, all the teachers would file down to the bursarâs office and be handed a huge wad of money, about five million zloty. I was paid about two hundred pounds a month extra by APSO, so the school cash, which we termed âMonopoly moneyâ, would all have finished up in the bar tills of Warsaw by that Sunday. But when I thought about it, there were teachers there with families, who had to feed kids and pay bills out of that measly wage. Poland was cheap, sure, but it would still have been a great struggle to stretch that money out.
The English teacher was, however, an exceptionally kind woman and anxious to see that I settled in, both around the town and in the school. In the beginning, I donât know what I would have done without her, as I was, quite frankly, lost. This was a town that had no means of coping with a foreigner. The general response when trying to purchase something in a shop, for example, was either benign confusion or an abrupt grunt, unless you had something at least written in Polish to indicate what you wanted. If truth be told, for every question this woman had for me, I had about five in return. And by the time a couple of weeks were out, I had a list of things that I badly needed but had no idea where to find. Books for school, painkillers, a few new shirts, a slice for the frying pan, a toilet brush, a welcome mat for myself at the front door â those smallitems that would make life a little bit easier. I approached her with this list and she immediately arranged a day to bring me around parts of the town that I hadnât yet discovered, beginning with the local market.
The market in the town was clearly the place to go. A great big bustling funfair, you could hear it long before it came into view. Here you could get everything you wanted, provided fashion wasnât on your list of priorities and, when it came to the derivation of foodstuffs, curiosity wasnât in your nature. Shirts and trousers that would have struck smiles of nostalgia on the faces of the Bay City Rollers were sold from the backs of trucks and carts. Giant, muddy vegetables in cloth sacks were heaped into huge weighing scales. In what seemed nothing more than primitive sheds, lumps of meat were being severed and split by an intimidating array of weaponry in the capable hands of the Polish butchers.
It was a lively, colourful place, but we had picked a bad day to go. Being muggy and wet, the ground beneath was a sea of mud. Occasionally a horse would invigorate the cold air with a rasping fart that mingled with the smells of feet, rotten vegetables, wet muck and alcohol. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of ogling, we began to barter with a
I simply couldnât look bad in the staff room. There were rumours going around that I was an âexpertâ and so I was somehow put on a pedestal. The fact that I only had a BA degree and had legged it over there with a half-written Masterâs thesis was a constant burden that I often felt compelled to confess. It was probably a good thing in the end, since it forced me to complete that thesis. It filled those dark, lonely hours when winter came tapping on the window and the mind needed any kind of food it could get its hands on.
To become a teacher in Poland you have to have a Masterâs degree in your chosen subject. On top of that, teachers have to spend several years at the bottom of the salary ladder, until theyâve earned their stripes. So, to instil a further sense of guilt, I entered the school passing myself off as a fully qualified and experienced teacher, with a Masterâs degree and in receipt of a full salary.
The salary was actually paltry, about one hundred pounds a month. Pay day, though, despite the humblepay packet, was still a day of high spirits for us all. The last Friday of every month, all the teachers would file down to the bursarâs office and be handed a huge wad of money, about five million zloty. I was paid about two hundred pounds a month extra by APSO, so the school cash, which we termed âMonopoly moneyâ, would all have finished up in the bar tills of Warsaw by that Sunday. But when I thought about it, there were teachers there with families, who had to feed kids and pay bills out of that measly wage. Poland was cheap, sure, but it would still have been a great struggle to stretch that money out.
The English teacher was, however, an exceptionally kind woman and anxious to see that I settled in, both around the town and in the school. In the beginning, I donât know what I would have done without her, as I was, quite frankly, lost. This was a town that had no means of coping with a foreigner. The general response when trying to purchase something in a shop, for example, was either benign confusion or an abrupt grunt, unless you had something at least written in Polish to indicate what you wanted. If truth be told, for every question this woman had for me, I had about five in return. And by the time a couple of weeks were out, I had a list of things that I badly needed but had no idea where to find. Books for school, painkillers, a few new shirts, a slice for the frying pan, a toilet brush, a welcome mat for myself at the front door â those smallitems that would make life a little bit easier. I approached her with this list and she immediately arranged a day to bring me around parts of the town that I hadnât yet discovered, beginning with the local market.
The market in the town was clearly the place to go. A great big bustling funfair, you could hear it long before it came into view. Here you could get everything you wanted, provided fashion wasnât on your list of priorities and, when it came to the derivation of foodstuffs, curiosity wasnât in your nature. Shirts and trousers that would have struck smiles of nostalgia on the faces of the Bay City Rollers were sold from the backs of trucks and carts. Giant, muddy vegetables in cloth sacks were heaped into huge weighing scales. In what seemed nothing more than primitive sheds, lumps of meat were being severed and split by an intimidating array of weaponry in the capable hands of the Polish butchers.
It was a lively, colourful place, but we had picked a bad day to go. Being muggy and wet, the ground beneath was a sea of mud. Occasionally a horse would invigorate the cold air with a rasping fart that mingled with the smells of feet, rotten vegetables, wet muck and alcohol. Eventually, after a couple of rounds of ogling, we began to barter with a
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