Soviet Contact

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I visited the Soviet Union in about 1973 under a treaty promoting an exchange of visits to look at what was being done in schools. A year or so later I was in York to give a talk and, surprisingly, had to line up in the station to buy a ticket to London. I heard my name being called and recognized someone I had known as a headteacher in Surrey - now working in York. After buying my ticket I spoke to him. He told me that he was to visit the Soviet Union as a tourist and wondered whether there was any chance of visiting a school. He could not have known that I had been there. I told him I thought it very unlikely but, as it happened, I had the card of the Director of Education for Leningrad in my pocket, and gave it to him. Some months later I met him again but in London when he was representing a primary education group. He told me that he had asked the tourist guides at each stop if he could visit a school and was told no. When he got to Leningrad he decided that he would ask at the hotel reception desk, where there were two young women. He showed them the card and was told that that Director had died a year ago. He asked them to look at the back of the card where there was some writing in Russian script. Immediately the two women chatted excitedly. One then told him that the writing on the back was by her mother, currently in Moscow. She phoned her and, yes, he could visit a school. The mother had been the Leningrad inspector who showed me round local schools.
Total votes: 372
Date submitted:Sat, 14 Jan 2012 10:33:04 +0000Coincidence ID:3852

Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 14/01/2012 - 10:47am

In about 1968, as one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools, I visited a primary school in West Sussex as part of a study we were doing of school/parent relationships. I asked the head, as usual, for the names of the teachers. One was Miss G who, he told me, had taught in north London and was now nearing retirement. I decided to see her first, knocked at her classroom door and went in. I told her that I had been talking to a group of teachers the preceding week about here and her earlier colleagues. She was surprised. I explained that when, in 1926, I was a 5 year old in Raynham Road School, Edmonton, I had taken home a page of my writing, all written backwards. My family sat in front of a mirror and read it. I thought how clever I was that I could do that (and still can) and they could not. What I was telling the teachers the previous week was how clever Miss G and he colleagues were not to make me feel stupid. I remembered Miss G as an elderly lady. We worked it out and she was 19 at the time.

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 14/01/2012 - 10:59am

Having lived in Middlesex, various parts of London and Hertfordshire, in Lincolnshire and Kent we moved to Watford in 1975 to be near our daughter who had moved there for work reasons. Like me, my mother was born and brought up in Edmonton, Middlesex, but her family came from west Hertfordshire and into Buckinghamshire. A cousin had lived in Watford all her life. After we had been in the house we bought for a couple of years, my cousin asked if we knew that the house we lived in was built by a cousin of ours, surname Puddephat. In 2003 we moved, at the invitation of the same daughter, to live next to her in St. Michael's village, St. Albans. She has since discovered that a Redding (my mother's maiden name) and a Puddephat signed a petition to Parliament from St. Michael's Village in 1641.