Over 30 years ago an English teacher’s experience
di Konrad Brodzinski
Immagine di copertina, fonte immagine
I was curled up uncomfortably across two seats, trying to get some sleep on the Air Georgia flight from Tbilisi to Frankfurt. We’d been airborne for about 20 minutes when I was woken by shouts from my two German colleagues, sitting several rows behind.
‘Kon-rad!’
I opened my bleary eyes. The shouts intensified.
‘Kon-RAD! Look behind you!’
I clambered up and looked. In the aisle seat of the row behind was a middle-aged woman in a head scarf. To her right sat a T-shirted boy, perhaps ten years old. And to his right was a cabin door marked, in Russian and English, EMERGENCY EXIT. Under the door’s window was a handle, which should have been covered by a protective metal casing – but wasn’t. The casing had fallen off, and the boy’s right hand was tugging at the door-handle. In an instant, my left hand was reaching over and clamping down on his wrist. Immediately, his mother shouted something in Georgian. I didn’t understand it, but I sensed it was directed at me, not at him – something along the lines of ‘Let go of my little darling!’
Finally, the flight attendant arrived, and remonstrated with the mother, to no effect. Then one of the pilots turned up. Some sort of understanding was reached, and the mother and son grudgingly agreed to be moved to another row. The rest of the flight I spent wide awake.
Old Georgian, fonte immagine
Why was I on this plane anyway?
The two Germans were consultants in Finance and Marketing. I had been recruited in London to be – fancy title – Business English Expert. We were in Georgia on a European Union training project, and after an eight-week stint in sub-prime conditions – example: constant power cuts, until a noisy diesel generator was procured on the black market – we were ready to go back home for our first break. That morning, we’d hardly slept; missing the flight would have entailed another week in Tbilisi. But when the driver picked us up in the early morning and was dodging the pot-holes along the road to the airport, we had an unwelcome surprise – a roadblock.
Two policemen approached our Lada, exchanging a few words with the driver. We were anxious.
‘What’s the problem, Irakli?’
‘Cannot go. Grachev. Must wait he go.’
Pavel Grachev was the defence minister. Not of Georgia, of Russia.
We began waving our EU passports. ‘We have to go! European Union!’
The policemen weren’t interested.
Eventually Grachev left. We got to the airport, and at the departures desk there was a further delay: money was apparently required, ideally in the form of U.S. dollar notes. How Irakli played it I don’t know, but we did finally board our plane, and, after only one other adventure – the fight over the emergency exit – we touched down happily in Frankfurt.
My two companions and I exchanged ‘auf wiedersehen’s. ‘Well Kon-rad’ – they enjoyed pronouncing my Germanic-sounding name in a Germanic-sounding way – ‘We are home! We are on terra firma!’
We parted our ways, as they went on to catch their train connections and I sought out my onward flight to Heathrow.
Fonte immagine
The watchful reader will have guessed that all this happened some time ago – over 30 years ago, in fact. Grachev has long been replaced as minister of defence. Air Georgia is now Georgian Airways, and there are plenty of flights to Europe every week. When our EU team was in Tbilisi, we were warned on no account to venture out of the capital. Today, solo tours are advertised in the Caucasus mountains.
But ‘terra firma?’ The received wisdom in the post-communist 1990s was that history is coming to a liberal, democratic and free-market end and that a few ex-Soviet colonies just have a bit of catching up to do. But today, in mid-2020s Europe – indeed in London, where I was brought up in the belief that this, if anywhere, was a safe haven – I find myself trapped in a pincer of hostilities between East and West. Nato is under threat, not so much from Moscow’s aggression as from Washington’s indifference; allies of Putin raise the prospect of reducing central London to a pile of rubble. It’s not quite The War of the Worlds, but it’s certainly a war of the words. To switch literary references, George Orwell in 1984 posited a tripartite world order where two powers always ganged up on a third. Today’s situation is more complex than that, though its rudiments can be found in the Orwellian model. But where the 1984 paradigm completely runs out of traction is in its guarantee that a fossilised stability will prevail: four decades after that symbolic year things are increasingly volatile and unpredictable. On my Air Georgia flight the situation was precarious, verging on perilous; that, unexpectedly, is how Europe feels now. And Georgia, which since independence has been at least partly setting out its stall in the Western camp, is today enmeshed in the same precariousness. Will the West, no longer a clearly defined entity, continue to support it in its aspirations? Will Moscow, currently tied up in a war of its own making in Ukraine, later find itself free to pursue its earlier goal of turning Georgia into a Russian satrapy? And in that case, will Georgia’s ‘patriotic’ wing, hitherto apparently trusting Moscow to ensure the nation’s best interests, pivot towards a different, genuinely Georgian kind of patriotism?
Let’s go back for a moment to 1994, when Georgia is struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of its own bloody conflict. Thousands have died in a protracted civil war. A coup d’état has ousted Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a popular democratically elected president, and he has just been killed in unexplained circumstances. The breakaway province of Abkhazia has expelled its Georgian majority. A ray of hope glistens somewhere on the horizon: it offers the prospect of a secure and prosperous Euro-American future. Meanwhile, much less dramatically, four ladies, local teachers of English participating in a European training programme, have invited their Business English Expert for coffee in the centre of town. They say there are some questions they would like to ask him. To his surprise – alright, to my surprise – the café they have chosen is below ground level, accessible by stairs leading down from the street. It is chic, windowless, with black and white décor and a smartly dressed youthful clientele. We are secluded in this small elegant cavern from the bustle above, where a few hundred metres along the main street lies the Intourist Hotel. That name is still displayed on the front of this elongated Soviet building, but the clothes hung out to dry on its rows of balconies tell a different story: it is now home to hundreds of refugees from Abkhazia. And I think as I sip my coffee and take a bite of my honey and walnut cake that I know what this is going to be about: these teachers want to be refugees too, voluntary ones, gaining experience and hard currency in the West while waiting for the turmoil in their home country to subside. They hope I will point them to people, institutions, useful contacts. Right?
Wrong.
They want to know about ‘good English’. Not Business English – that was back in the training centre. Good English. For example, what is the correct way to say ‘director’? Is it die-rector or d’rector?
Well, I reply, both are correct.
Yes, they nod their heads wearily. That’s what the dictionary says. But which one is more correct?
I frown, I blink. ‘It depends on the speed with which …’
They are professional teachers, dealing with a child that is slow to learn.
‘Alright, not “more correct”. Which one is better?’
I’m nonplussed. ‘Better?’
But I’m not that slow a learner. A few more exchanges, a few more clarifications, and I’m beginning to see where, as the cliché has it, ‘they’re coming from’.
Abkhazia in the Map of Caucasus with the borders 1801-1813, fonte
Il designo della prima parte delasia… / Giacomo di Gastaldi; Fabio Licinio f. (Venetia, 1559-1564), fonte immagine
Ah, the hypocrisy of the English educated classes!
No, I haven’t left Tbilisi entirely, I’m just fast-forwarding to my home in London, where I’ve written up my meeting in the stylish depths of Georgia’s capital and sent the piece off to a couple of newspapers.
The telephone rings. Success! The speaker introduces herself as being from the Times Educational Supplement. ‘We found your piece very interesting. But its first-person style doesn’t quite match our requirements, so I’ve re-written it in the third person, as a report about you and your experience in Georgia …’
Well, in my telling of it there were a few instances of humour, I suppose they’ve gone now. But I can’t complain; I’m pleased the story is going into print in whatever form.
‘May I read it out to you?’
Email is still rather a niche tool, so OK, go ahead …
She reads it out. The new version is predictably dry, so dry in fact that I let a crucial part go unchallenged:
‘Mr Brodzinski was surprised …’
Surprised? Yes, I was – initially. But then – .
It’s only when I see the article in print a few days later that the sheer effrontery of what’s been done hits me like a boxer’s front jab in the face. I’ve never been hit by a front jab in the face, boxer’s or otherwise, but I imagine it takes a few moments before you fully realise what’s happened. Here, it’s taken me a few re-reads to fully absorb the shock:
There is no ‘But then – ’. There is no correction of my initial attitude.
The whole point of my story has been turned upside down. I’m portrayed as smirking at the benighted products of a Soviet / post-Soviet education which has brain-washed the poor saps into thinking there is a better way of speaking. Or indeed a best way.
How enlightened of us British to have abandoned such socially harmful ways of thinking.
Except we haven’t. Socially harmful or not, they persist. The editor who read me the text over the phone had a pronunciation that was very much ‘correct’. I once attended a presentation by an Oxford professor in which she celebrated the ostensibly equal status of different accents and dialects; while her own accent was not cut-glass aristocratic – that’s definitely passé – it conformed to the British gold standard of Received Pronunciation. A working class candidate applying for a prestige job in a City firm will modify his or her accent to fit in with the expectations of the employers. And those are just examples from the UK.
This was the state of play thirty years ago, and it has not really changed today. Those in the educational establishment who claim otherwise are being disingenuous. Or they are just deceiving themselves.
The conclusion I came to in Tbilisi was that these teachers had every right to expect norms – norms which would give them an edge or at least an equal start in interviews, presentations or just social conversation. Of course – a reflection I shared with them later – such expectations come with a health warning: striving for some ideal of accuracy could obscure, or perhaps even eclipse one’s identity, individual, social or national. People should be listening to you, not to an automaton. To draw an analogy: it is said of some concert pianists that they are too brilliant, too technical, and some of the music’s soul gets lost in the performance. There needs to be a balance.
The ladies who’d invited me for coffee accounted for less than half of my cohort of teachers, but they were probably representative of the group as a whole, and indeed of the whole body of participants on the training project, which totalled nearly 40. For me, the main task was to get my group to view English not so much as an academic subject but as a tool for professional communication – and here, following that coffee session, I had to review my own thinking. The other thirty or so participants were specialists in their own fields – finance, law and so on – and were upgrading their know-how. Then, the theory was, these forty people would travel to high schools and institutes around the country and disseminate what they knew to maybe a total of four hundred others, who in turn would pass this on to a further … you get the picture. I recall someone once quoting a French scholar, perhaps not so apocryphally: ‘That may work in practice, but does it work in theory?’
Well, mon ami, this particular idea didn’t really work in either theory or practice, at least not as envisaged by the project’s masterminds in Brussels.
When I predicted, prior to our coffee session, that I would be talking to prospective voluntary ‘refugees’, events proved that actually I was not totally wrong. One of my teachers got herself a scholarship with the British Council in the UK; a lawyer whom I’d befriended found a post-graduate place at an American university. There were surely some others. But the real flood of defectors did not leave Georgia: they left the project. There was simply no structure in place for the nationwide proselytization of knowledge; and there was every incentive for people to plough ahead on their own. Thus when I returned to Georgia briefly on another assignment, I found that two my old cohort had set up an English language school – and the credentials that they most prominently displayed in their brochure stated in bold letters: ‘Trained by the European Union’. I learnt of others in the business groups who had swiftly got lucrative jobs with Tbilisi-based companies (not all of them perhaps the acme of transparency). The whole EU programme had been predicated on weaning Georgia off its dependence on a centrally planned economy. In its small way, it was successful. In its attempt to deploy centrally planned training, it was a fiasco.
Two boxers, Guildhall Library blog, fonte immagine
‘Arrre you English?’
I’m deliberately exaggerating the rolled ‘r’: the question comes from a Scottish woman who, like some others of her kin, harbours a centuries-old antagonism towards her southern neighbours. I’ll come back later to what occasioned this particular enquiry, delivered in a rather hostile manner. Right now, I’ll just say this: I’m not a social anthropologist, but I have a hunch that animosities between neighbouring tribes (or communities or nations) are lodged deep in our collective DNA and that civilisation has only occasionally managed to bring harmony to the strife. When the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky began his campaign warning that the European Union might be going the way of the Soviet Union it seemed absurd – it still does, to me – because the two were born out of diametrically opposed forces. One was bottom-up, peaceful and well-intentioned; the other was top-down, ruthless and imperial. But the deep cracks they were both papering over were similar: century-long fissures, festering wounds, resentments not forgotten from generation to generation.
There are of course many examples of this, and in these dispatches I’m limiting myself to places I personally know: so my only excuse for unexpectedly bringing Canada and Ukraine into the picture is that the incident I’m about to describe took place in a restaurant in Tbilisi. With my ex-pat team we were joined for dinner by two members of a Soros Foundation Open Society project: she was Canadian, he was from the States. Conversation and Georgian wine flowed smoothly enough, until for some reason towards the end of our meal my surname came up. ‘Brodzinski,’ the Canadian lady repeated slowly, as if trying to ease a piece of chewed meat from between her teeth. ‘Is that Polish?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re Polish.’ Well, I explained, I was born and brought up in the UK. But yes, I have strong family connections. I don’t know when, as I spoke, I sensed the froideur setting in.
‘Why are you asking?’, the American stepped in.
‘Because I’m Ukrainian.’
‘Your parents are Ukrainian.’
‘Well, I’m Ukrainian-Canadian.’ She was across the table from me, and I saw the hostility deepen.
I knew practically nothing about Ukrainian-Polish relations; I had only a vague idea that there had been bloodshed in Ukrainian-Polish struggles after the First World War and during the Second. I do know that for the Ukrainians I’ve met since – Ukrainians from Ukraine – all that past history hardly exists. But for my Canadian-born 30-something dinner companion, this was the legacy she had inherited with her grandmother’s borscht, in one of the world’s most open and democratic countries.
I don’t remember if in her view I, or my grandparents, or whoever, were actually responsible for atrocities against her forebears; I do remember trying to say something along the lines of look, we were both born in free countries and we’re here to help people enjoy freedom as we have done all our lives, so why all this harking back to a time we had nothing to do with? But she obviously felt we did have something to do with it.
I had been caught on the back foot: I could not have predicted such a turn of events. If I had, I might have asked her if she knew that some Georgians regarded the town of Gori, 80 kilometres by road from Tbilisi and birthplace of Joseph Stalin, as a place of pilgrimage; why was she happy to provide aid to the mother country of a tyrannical mass murderer, while practically walking out of the restaurant because a companion at the dinner table had roots in a nation which she believed, because her grandparents had said so, was a violent oppressor of another nation in which she for her part had roots? But I didn’t have the time to think of that; nor would I have had the opportunity to say it, because yes, she was urging her colleague, who was trying to smooth things over, to get the bill. She was not practically walking out: she was walking out.
So we all paid and walked out with her. Tbilisi’s old quarter was a quaint maze of narrow streets; its cosy-looking houses were adorned with ornate wooden balconies. The evening was warm, but it was as if a frost had descended. The two teams exchanged polite goodbyes.
‘Welcome to the open society’, muttered one of my colleagues, sardonically echoing the name of their project. But of course, that was their project, and we had our project. They were similar projects. We were allies, but we were still rivals. True, on one reading the remark was made with regret. But atavistically underpinning it, I think, was more than a hint of tribalism.
Which brings me back to ‘Arrre you English?’ This experience was related to me not by an Englishman but by a Scotsman from the lowlands, who’d been on a hiking trip in the Scottish highlands. This by the way is not a joke, it’s a true story. He walked into a pub, and his accent was sufficiently different from that of the local villagers for the landlady to suspect him of being a ‘Sassenach’, as the English are sometimes referred to in those parts. After a struggle, he convinced her that he was Scottish; he was finally allowed to have a drink.
What would my Georgian teachers have made of this? How does it square with the Oxford professor’s categorical assurance that all accents have equal status? They don’t, when social or ethnic prejudice enters the equation. Especially when it’s fed by generations of ‘Scotland the Brave’ mythologizing or repeated servings of Ukrainian borscht. Which, by the way, has been a favourite Polish dish – barszcz ukraiński – since at least the 19th century.
6 April 2025
Tbilisi old town, fonte immagine
Konrad Brodzinski is an English Language consultant and a translator from Polish into English. Born and brought up in London of Polish parents, he graduated in Modern Languages and English from Cambridge University and completed a post-graduate year at the University of Warsaw. He has reported in the British press on Italian judicial matters, worked as a trainer on European Union programmes in former Soviet republics, and translated film screenplays and subtitles as well as socio-political and historical projects and books related mainly to 20th century central Europe.