English Conversation classes with members of the Russian Secret Service (2006)

I wrote this piece in early 2006 for www.thewritingcentre.com. This is the second piece of life writing I've done and I've developed a specific tone of voice for this kind of writing, taking care not to embellish or exaggerate. The previous piece - ‘Talisman’ - was written as a part of my Masters degree and was briefly posted on www.laurahird.com but had to be taken off due to its mentioning of real people.

For the first half of 2001 I was an English as a Foreign Language teacher in London. I wasn't very good at it, so it didn' last long. I worked first in a school at Notting Hill Gate which had overheated rooms with windows that didn't open and Chinese delinquents who brought cold McDonalds in to eat during lessons. I later worked at a cramped, hectic beehive of a place behind Oxford Street with very effusive staff and very strong coffee and whilst I taught there, I started working for the Russian Secret Service. I was first approached at my Notting Hill school by Dmitry and Nikolai who both wanted conversation classes. They made it quite clear who they worked for. They weren't at all secretive about it. After two lessons, we agreed they were paying the school too much and I was being paid too little and so we agreed to meet - in secret - at the Russian Embassy, on the edge of Kensington Gardens, as soon as I moved jobs to Oxford Street.

Every Wednesday lunchtime, as winter expired and spring took hold, I took the Westbound Central Line form Oxford Circus to Queensway. If I was early, I bought a chai latte from Starbucks and sipped it as I walked along Lancaster Gate, four lanes of traffic roaring past and huge London plane trees shaking the skies above. I then walked down the quiet, impossibly wide Kensington Palace Gardens, past the security lodge at the top end and past all the other vast, ornate embassies. The Russian Embassy was neither the shabbiest – Nepal's looked particularly in need of a lick of paint - but neither was it the best groomed - that honour belonged to the United Arab Emirates, its well-scrubbed stonework and glistening bay windows surrounded by small, manicured box hedges and Mercedes Benz.

The lobby was worn, but also spacious and clean. It had dark wood panelling, dark blue carpet, a coat rack, a couple of uncomfortable dining room chairs and a long glass cubicle where the security guard sat, bored and suspicious, watching Russian soaps or flirting with the female staff who came in to tease and gossip. If the guards came to recognise me, they never showed it. I'd wait a few minutes for either Dmitry or Nikolai to finish off whatever important things the secret service do on a Wednesday lunchtime and usually spent it editing chapters of my novel, which was all about drugs and raves and magic and made me feel subversive. I would be greeted warmly, my hand firmly, diplomatically shaken and we would go into the library, my student nodding to the guard to arrange for tea and biscuits to be brought in for us.

The library of the Russian Embassy! The room was huge and flooded with natural light and so clean as to be almost odourless, as if the dirt and decay of the outside world had somehow been kept out. As I sipped my tea and nibbled on the dull, cheap biscuits, I imagined the friendships of dictators courted from the same black leather armchair I perched on the edge of. I imagined frenzied, icy debates in the mid sixties, Stalin striding up to the huge windows to stare out at the same trees that were just starting to turn green. The room had absorbed all of this, learned from it and developed its own consciousness. I felt it watch me. Weigh me up. I tried not to think too much about it.

Each lesson - and I use the term loosely - lasted two hours and differed wildly according to who I was teaching. If it was Dmitry - who was corpulent, rotund and carried himself with the dignified confidence of a man who knows a thing or two - we would just chat. We talked often about literature and he introduced me to many names in the Russian canon that I promptly forgot. We also discussed the times we lived in and I struggled to protect the less legitimate of my pleasure pursuits and the politics of my friends. I imagined Dmitry as equally self-censoring and, though it was never acknowledged, this mutual telling of half-truths put us on an uneasy but equal footing. The boundaries were clearly drawn. I liked these lessons very much and they went best when Dmitry told stories of his travels. He told me once of being taken to dinner by the Moldavian mafia and this story has stayed with me in particular.

Nikolai took his lessons very seriously. Nikolai was, in general, a very serious and intense person, who spoke fast and moved nervously. I was surprised when I found out he was Dmitry's boss. Nikolai always ensured I had a newspaper article to read for each lesson, always some highly involved political piece from a major English language newspaper, such as The New York Times or The Telegraph. I think Nikolai believed our lessons were based around comprehension exercises, which was a laugh, as I never understood the articles he gave me and just nodded, nodded, nodded as he explained them and the finer points of political theory to me. I always left Nikolai's lessons feeling drained and dehydrated, in spite of the bad tea and biscuits. The only flicker of warmth I ever felt was when we talked of walking in London, a passion we both shared. Nikolai had recently discovered the wide horizons at Richmond and Primrose Hill and was hungry to discover more of the city's special places. So I lent him my London walks book and he took himself off one Sunday through Aldgate and Wapping's dark cobbled streets and along the river to Docklands.

In June, I returned from a particularly hard'drinking Arvon course to discover I had no teaching work for the foreseeable future and so went back to my previous incarnation as one of those irritating charity fundraisers with clipboards who were then clogging up every street in London. At the same time, and after an agreed month's break, neither Dmitry nor Nikolai returned my phone calls when I asked about restarting our meetings. In some ways I was glad, as I was keen to put a disastrous period of work behind me, but I was also sad not to be walking down Kensington Palace Gardens to the Russian Embassy every week. At the time, Putin was making a lot of waves in the international community with what Russia were doing in Chechnya, so I imagine Dmitry and Nikolai had enough on their hands. But, looking back, I can't help but wonder if I hadn'€™t been recruited for some obtuse research - like being subtly prompted to give away the soft underbelly of my generation.

There are times in everyone's life when you find yourself so far beyond the realms of what you expect to encounter, that when the period passes, you feel that it happened to someone else. This was, for me, such a period.