My favourite teacher was in fact my Russian teacher. She was a French teacher who was married to a very old Russian émigré. I was the only one studying Russian, so everyone used to call me “Vivien the communist”, but it was good because it meant I had private classes. However, this made it more demanding because I always had to do my homework and there was no excuse.
I had some other very good teachers, but I’ve noticed that teachers are really different in Hungary. In England they’re not nearly as tactile, or affectionate with the students. They’re very formal and quite strict. When I was sixteen, we went on an exchange trip to the States for a month. We went to a high school in Massachusetts, and it was interesting. In fact, it was quite an eye-opener. It was quite amazing for me really, as there were signs all around saying things like “No guns” and “No drugs”, and it was quite violent. Also, I noticed that the students didn’t have any respect for the teachers and would just shout at them and, coming from a strict school that was quite a shock. They would shout back at the teachers, call them names and hurl abuse at them, and they rarely listened to anything the teacher said. They weren’t very interested in learning.
So, at the age of sixteen we took “O” level exams, and then some people left after that. That was one option, or we could go on to a technical college or “Tech”, and maybe study some kind of vocational subject like nursing, or some kind of technical or computer studies, or we could stay on for another two years, as I did, and take “A” levels, which are Advanced level exams. I took “A” levels in English Literature, Russian and Spanish, which, in retrospect, wasn’t a very good idea, because I had to read so many books. I had to sit and read Tolstoy, Dickens and Cervantes.
At the age of about eighteen, in August, everybody in my year was waiting for their “A” level results to see if they got high enough grades to go on to university. We had to apply for five universities, which we put on a list, with the best one at the top. If you want to go to Oxford or Cambridge, of course, you have to put that as number one, and then it goes down, so Oxford and Cambridge would have to be first, and then maybe Bristol, Manchester, Leeds and the rest.