How many kinds of sweet flowers grow in an English country garden?
I’ll tell you now of some that I know
and those I miss you’ll surely pardon…

This song, and many others, I learnt by heart and sang at school, with the result that I know
more English children’s songs than Estonian ones. We started learning English on our second
day at school, when we still could not read or write. So we learnt by heart and sang, basically
the same way children learn their mother tongue. And so English is not a foreign language
for me. We learnt, among other things, the map of London by heart in our English classes;
we knew where Piccadilly Circus was, and Trafalgar Square, and London Bridge. When I first
visited London, it was a strange feeling—like coming to places from my childhood.
When we grew older and our English was already good, we read the Polish magazine
“Murzilka”, which was sold in the Soviet Union. Since the socialist countries did not pay for
copyright, they could publish whatever they got their hands on, including excerpts from
modern books and magazines. Thus we knew how young people in the free world lived; we
knew the everyday details of their lives, the films they watched, and the music they listened
to. We had read about it, and we knew that if we met them, we would be able to speak to
them and understand what they said.
From time to time, visitors from those countries came to our school, and we were
introduced to them, with our marvellous English.
Why did the Soviet system allow it? I presume that it started in Moscow or Leningrad. The
state needed a limited number of people who could speak foreign languages, for example,
diplomats. Estonians seized the opportunity. The person behind the special teaching of
English at our school was our headmistress of English, Leida Vahtra. As a young girl, she had
visited England when Estonia was still a free Western country. She had lived and worked
there for some time as an au pair.
We had many English lessons every week throughout our school years, and different
subjects were connected to English. We even learnt geography in English. We studied Old
English literature, Beowulf and Deor’s Lament. We had to recite Hamlet’s monologue and
know several of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart. We had a Linguaphone laboratory at our
school where we listened to the proper pronunciation of the Queen’s English. It was not
American English; it was British.

Many who graduated from our school went on to study English philology. But all of us could
read and understand English texts. The Iron Curtain no longer had any power over us.
It was, at least, one decisive reason for me to decide to leave the Soviet Union in the only
way possible, burning the bridges behind me.
When I hear English, when I speak English, I do not feel that I am speaking a foreign
language. It feels natural; it has felt like mine since childhood.
The language of my writing is Estonian, without any doubt, but English is my second
language, even after so many years of living in Germany—even though I apparently know
more German words and understand every style of German.
The part of my life before English came into it was very short in comparison with the whole
of it. Now that I am learning Latin, it is exciting to dig into the roots of English. It opens up
the depth and breadth of our Western civilisation.