His whole life was given to school and to his family. He was an authority at school. He would always find a simple form of expression for the material. The children loved and respected him. One time he taught geography in the 6th grade. I saw how he tried to help the pupils even if they hardly knew the material. He did not let them know their marks. At the end of the lesson they would come up to him to ask about their marks for the lesson, but he first put dots in the class register and then would say either “a satisfactory” or “learn better”, but he never gave a “two”
At the next lesson he would simply ask, for instance, Andrei Yancher, whether he was ready to answer or not. If Andrei could answer the new material then he would not ask him about the old. He did not ask me until I raised my hand. I would come to the blackboard and answer the questions. He would listen to me without interrupting and then say: “Well, Filatov, you know the lesson, I’ll give you a “five”. But I felt confused: he was my father, after all. Of course, I did my best not to let him down in order that others would not think that I got “fives” because I was the teacher’s son
When father lectured on the material, he never looked at the pupils, but if anybody made a noise, he, without looking at the pupil, would call him by name, and it was effective, the pupil stopped immediately. Father would go about the classroom, leaning on the pointer
If the noise continued, father would glance once at the pupil and silence fell immediately, because the look of his eyes was special. He gave the pupil a piercing glance – and he would shrivel up. When Father brought films on geography and showed them, many pupils from other grades would come to see the films. For instance, a film about the conquest of the North he showed in the assembly hall during a long break. Father did everything himself, like the projectionist
He would come home very tired. He would change his clothes, go to the kitchen, have dinner, then go to the room where the desk was, sit down and read the newspapers, and listen to the radio. In the evening we would come home having had plenty of running about the fields where the steppe tulips bloomed in the spring, the grasshoppers chirped, butterflies flew the in summer, and gophers often ran about. We spent our time on the river Gusikha, on the first lake. When we came home we first drank milk and ate wheat-bread which had been baked in the oven which stood in the street. We baked bread from our own flour. We ground wheat in the mill which had stood in our village from the times of Catherine II. Our district was famous. Tatishchevo was close by, where Suvorov had captured Pugachev. The environs of Tatishchevo had been described by Pushkin in his “Captain’s daughter”. During the Civil war the Strekotin brothers, Tsesarevich’s rescuers, had fought there. Kashirin headed the Urals army march to Perm, to the Kungur coves. Chapaev, my father showed me his death place, located there. They were virgin lands in the 50’s and 60’s. All those years, the years of Khrushchev N.S., we lived at Pretoria
It was the time when the world was on the brink of nuclear war, the time of changing the way people thought
At that time father read the newspapers attentively, listened to the radio and told me much about the presidents of other countries and about the international situation
We were children then and all these problems did exist but without our participation. Besides it was the time of the first space flight of Yuri Gagarin
In the days of Khrushchev, father suddenly felt drawn to the memorable places in Leningrad. It continued till our sudden movement to Vologda Province in 1967, nearer to Leningrad
Those years we had lived within our own peculiar dimension. A lot of events were shaking the world of which we were witnesses. Father crammed us with information on all fields of knowledge. He read much and rapidly. In the evening he read aloud to us. He was in a hurry because each day could be his last day. He tried to be among the people and took me along. I often asked for his permission to go to the drivers who lived in our club-house in the summer. They were mainly from Leningrad. They would take me along to the field, to the combine, where the trucks were being filled with grain. Then a truck would go to the barnyard where women tossed grain up to the transporters with wooden spades. Boys of my age worked as combiner’s assistants, as, for instance, Yasha Kliver, but I could not – father forbade me, he was concerned for my health
At that time father was a Village Soviet deputy and therefore he tried to be everywhere. He helped the Board to accommodate people who had come from other cities to harvest
In those distant years mother mainly looked after us. In the summer, when it was posible she would work as a tutor in the Young Pioneer camp. During the days my sisters would be on the lake or in the gardens with the other children of their age
When we lived in Pretoria, we did not have a garden of our own. His entire spare time father would spend fishing. He tried to disconnect himself from the political environment in which we had to live
In the evening he would go to the kitchen garden, dig out rain-worms, then go home, check his fishing-rods, mainly of bamboo, and choose one. At about 5 o’clock in the morning he would go to the river, first investigating the weather-forecast, he looked at the barometer, at the sunset colours, and checked the wind. On the river he would usually choose a place on the lee side, near the stones. If the fish were biting, he would catch 10—15 red-eyes, and some chubs, go home and gave his catch to mother, “na zherekh” – (to frizzle), as he would say. Usually it was already 7 o’clock, and the distance to the river was 1.5 km, so father, apart from his callisthenics, kept in training by walking, and he splashed himself with cold water. It should be emphasized that walking to the river required special skill, because in some places near the river Gusikha the land was marshy, with tussocks, and one ought to jump from tussock to tussock. The bog was about 100 m long, but father did so. I wondered how he managed it despite his physical deficiency. His one leg was bad, but he covered the distance there and back, and with a load. The load was a 3- or 5-litre can with water and with living fish. Father would wait impatiently while mother fried the fish, then he would sit down at the table and rapidly eat them up. When he was eating, it was better not to ask him anything, he would never answer. He followed the rule: “When I’m eating, I am a deaf-mute”. When anyone of us did not follow this rule, he would get a blow on the forehead with a wooden spoon (not powerful, though). Part of the catch was left for a fish-soup for dinner. Father was the single constant angler, on the river. Many other teachers had cars, three-wheel motorcycles, they bred cattle, had poultry, and cultivated gardens with vegetables and fruit. They did not go fishing often. Neither did the collective farmers. Partly because they worked in the field, partly because there was no need. But we had neither garden, nor cattle, nor poultry or a car, though father all his life wanted to get an invalid’s cart. For this purpose it was necessary to go to the medical commission. But he never went to doctors. When possible we would have hams usually hanging in the passage. But it was later, when I was about 9 and we got our own house
It was a three-room house. The house was of saman brick. This brick had been made at our place. It was made of clay and straw. It was all made in a large pit filled with clay, water and straw/ Then it was mixed up. A horse was driven into that pit and it trod and mixed up the mortar till it became workable
Then the mortar was poured into rectangular boxes 30x20x10 cm in size. Then the moulds were taken out and dried in the open air. The resulting bricks