Distractions

‘Then why, four weeks before your wedding, have you signed for a vasectomy’, asked the Sister triumphantly, waving a sheaf of paper in my face. She turned to the man in the adjacent bed, ‘And why have you, sergeant, signed for a double hernia operation?’

By the time my Russian course started I already knew all the Russian letters in their various printed and handwritten forms and, thanks to my part-time study with Vera, I could read out loud Russian texts quite well. I was fascinated to discover that once you've learned the Russian pronunciation rules there are virtually no exceptions to those rules. Russian children from the age of 3 or 4 years can, it seems, read any Russian text perfectly. They probably don't know what the words mean but they do know how to pronounce them correctly.

There were about eight of us on the course - all officers. Separate courses were run for airmen and officers for reasons which were never explained. We were a motley bunch: a wing commander pilot destined for an Air Attaché appointment (but not in the Soviet Union) and half a dozen or so flight lieutenants from various branches, several like me expecting postings to 26 Signals Unit in Berlin on completion. None of us had a Moscow appointment, which surprised me. However, we had been briefed by the RAF wing commander who commanded the school that we were not to discuss appointments with anyone, including our fellow students. After the first couple of weeks we were joined by another flight lieutenant who had studied Russian at University and really needed only a refresher course to bring him up to interpreter standard. For quite a while we were wary of him. He too ended up in Berlin but not at 26SU.

Our instructors were a mixture of British civilians, headed by the one we always referred to as ‘Headmaster’, much to his amusement and the disapproval of all the other instructors, and a group of splendid people who hailed originally from various eastern European countries and who spoke Russian as their first language. For all I know they were naturalised British citizens but the need to enquire into that never arose and they did not encourage questions about their past. One of them was the delightful Oleg Grigorievich Kravchenko, a large gentleman with a ready smile and endless patience - and he certainly needed the latter when teaching us. The first thing he taught us was how to pronounce his first name properly. Most English speakers pronounce it as 'oh-leg', with the stress on the 'oh', whereas the correct Russian pronunciation is ‘a-lyeg’, with the initial 'a' pronounced very faintly but the 'y' sound all important. That was our introduction to unstressed vowels, and the two different 'l' sounds in Russian! Oleg Grigorievich did not see the joke when we, rather cruelly, suggested that perhaps he spoke pre-Revolutionary Russian. Incidentally, we always had to use both his first name and his patronymic when speaking to him in Russian; to miss off the patronymic would have been very rude.

Because of my pre-course study, I started with a slight advantage but that didn't last long. I have always, even in French and Latin lessons at school, found it difficult to learn vocabulary. The school method back in the late 1940s had suited me - learning paradigms of conjugations and declensions by heart from written tables (amo, amas, amat, bonus, bona, bonum, and all that). At North Luffenham most of the teaching, and all of Oleg Grigorievich’s, was done entirely in Russian. I could not get on with that. I must see a word written down before I have any chance of remembering it. I need to know the grammar rules. Simply listening to Russian didn't work for me. In the evenings I had to resort to my Linguaphone tapes and the associated text books - although the staff did not approve. I bought myself a large, and expensive, Russian – English dictionary which accompanied me to every lesson.

My method of learning mystified most of the other students on our course. With the exception of the wing commander, their schooling had been long after schools stopped teaching English Grammar properly, let alone foreign language grammar. Talking to them, especially in the early stages of the course, about the accusative, dative, instrumental or genitive cases, or the difference between the perfect and pluperfect tenses, for example, was a waste of time. I continued to use my Linguaphone tapes right up until the end of the course and beyond, and I firmly believe that without them I would not have passed the course.

I delighted in Russian verbs, just as I had delighted in the Latin Ablative Absolute at school (eg 'Having won the battle, Caesar returned to Rome'). The English sentence ‘I went to London’ is capable of several interpretations which have to be inferred from the context. The Russian form, or aspect, of the verb ‘went’ precisely indicates whether I went yesterday, a long time ago, regularly, or infrequently, and whether the visit was completed or is still ongoing. Think how useful that is! I was also fascinated by the 14 or so special Russian verbs of motion. The same English sentence, ‘I went to London’, merely tells the listener that I went to London. In Russian, different verbs indicate how I went: on foot, by train, by sail, in a car, on skates etc. Incidentally, we learned that one has to be very careful using the Russian verb of motion кататься, 'to skate'. Changing the first 't' in the Russian word to 'k' (какаться) changes the meaning to 'to soil oneself' (to put it politely), which is an entirely different sort of motion. We giggled like teenage students when we learned that. Fortunately I've never had the need to employ either verb in English or Russian - except here!

A slight digression here. When I eventually arrived in Berlin I started having private German lessons from Frau Emmy Lempfuhl, a truly delightful lady who had suffered great indignities at the hands of the invading Russians in 1945. I found to my delight that she taught the language my way! She believed that it was essential to learn grammar before vocabulary and I progressed rapidly. I also very quickly learned not to mention Russia or Russian in her presence.

Halfway through the year long Russian course I had three important distractions in quick succession which made it even more difficult to concentrate on learning Russian. First of all, I got engaged to be married; that's enough to distract anyone. Shortly afterwards I developed glandular fever, an insidious complaint apparently correctly called infectious mononucleosis. Its well known effects left me mentally tired, physically drained, and unable to concentrate on anything much. I endured it for several weeks before I also developed a sore throat and swollen glands in my neck. Quite worried by this time, I went to see the RAF station doctor. She almost instantly diagnosed what was wrong and confirmed it with a blood test. The trouble was that there is no real cure, just complete rest to help reduce the symptoms - not easy to do on an intensive language course whilst preparing to get married. I didn't tell anyone else that I had glandular fever because it seemed such a silly complaint.

When I started to lag behind and day dream in lessons, the staff and my fellow students presumably thought that I was getting lazy or losing interest. A few weeks later there was a third distraction when I had to see the same doctor again, this time with a suspicious lump in my right groin. That was instantly diagnosed as a hernia, large enough to require immediate repair. I was sent to the excellent RAF Hospital at Nocton Hall near Lincoln where the surgeon decided that there was also a lesser hernia in my left groin. He concurred that an early operation was required to fix both.

While I was awaiting my turn to be wheeled into the Operating Theatre the Ward Sister, who vaguely resembled the wonderful Hattie Jacques who played the fearsome Matron in the film 'Doctor in the House', came to me and said sternly, ‘Squadron Leader Cunnane, what is your operation for?’

I thought this might be a test to see if I was compos mentis. ‘You know what I’m in for – a BIH – bilateral inguinal hernia repair,’ I said, repeating the surgeon’s description of what he was going to do.

‘Then why, four weeks before your wedding, have you signed for a vasectomy?’, asked the Sister triumphantly, waving a sheaf of paper in my face. She turned to the man in the adjacent bed, ‘And why have you, sergeant, signed for a double hernia operation?’

Of course it was quite possible that the nurse had given us the wrong consent forms to sign shortly after she’d administered the pre-med injections, but I was too sleepy by then to suggest that.

Whether there was any connection between the three ‘distractions’ I have no idea, although they told me Glandular Fever is also known as ‘the kissing disease’!

When I came round in the hospital recovery room I was a little put out to be told by the senior surgeon I'd dealt with earlier that the two grinning flight lieutenants with him, who looked to be still teenagers, had carried out my operation. Working at the same time, one had done each side to give them some practice. I need not have worried about their skill because the repairs they made lasted until 2005 when repeat surgery was needed - although the NHS made me wait for nine months after diagnosis.

The glandular fever still recurs from time to time, even 30 years after the first attack, but it is less troublesome.

The wedding was cancelled.

For an excellent, amusing and very readable book about learning Russian in the 1950s as a National Serviceman and subsequent service in West Berlin, I can thoroughly recommend "My Life as a Spy" by Leslie Woodhead, now one of Britain's most distinguished documentary film makers. The book is published by Pan Macmillan and can be obtained from Amazon  and probably many other sources. Enter "Leslie Woodhead My Life as a Spy" into your favourite search engine.

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