(from the diary)
Fourth. "Yesterday dad started working, so now I am the 'boss' in the house. I am executing the last preparations for departure to school, into fourth grade."
"Executing the preparations" sounds like a good reason to execute the person who invented the execution of the phrase into the language.
"Departure" is not literally that, it's the "start of going", but I can't find a better expression in english.
Dad was the manager of the landworkers' cooperative* in Elemir, so when the village had its slava, he of course had to appear there and he took me with him. Fair as a fair, all those village feasts look the same. It rained a lot that day, so we spent most of the time under the big tents. The roof filled with water and became dangerously heavy, so the guys got some poles and started pushing it up, to pour over the edges, into the rain ditches (most of the villages have them). Unfortunately, I was sitting under a frayed hole, so when they lifted it, several tens of liters fell on me. I couldn't sit so wet for long, so soon a car was found and we were taken home. I remember that it was a Moskvič, just like the one aunt Milica and her husband had, and that the road was full of holes, and the holes full of water. Every third hole one of the front wheels would splash the water out of the hole and the water would hit the windshield. Not quite clear how that succeeded, must have been some special combination of exact speed and hole.
Some time this year I started learning english. Another set of private lessons, by a neighbor. Sofija was the young student in the neighborhood, probably in her sophomore year (which would be the final year, she may have completed the other two years much later), so she wanted to try her luck with actual teaching. I guess we were each other's guinea pigs. I did have some encounters with the language already, as mom's schoolbooks were still arround, and the pre-war manual for reporters, by some guy Vukadinović, who used to be a correspondent from London for Politika. The textbook used the IPA, while he developed his own typographics (putting th for theta and dh for its sound pair, so "the" [dhe]). Then the first order of business was to learn all the dozen vowels, the w, both of the ths, and the whole tragedy of divorcing spelling from phonetics.
This lasted until late spring 1967, with her brother (an interpreter for a shipping, and I mean literal ships, enterprise in Rijeka) jumping in when she was cramming for exams. It seems to me that they both liked me, and I liked them. By next summer, I was at decent conversational level.
Initially this piece was put into the following year's september, but no, it had to be this year, because I clearly remember that 1) during the next year's vacation (july 1966.) I already got my chance to use that english, some lady asked to take a snapshot of her and hers; 2) when we started learning russian in the fifth grade, the grammatical differences between languages came to me as a normal thing, a matter small and not surprising.
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* zemljoradnik - soil worker - whoever does the soil, i.e. who's practicing agriculture. The word "farmer" comes reluctantly to mind, because there weren't any farms (except the salaš, of which there may have been a hundred altogether in whole Vojvodina) because the agricultural household lived in the village and the fields were around the village; what cattle they had they held behind the house. Cows would be led to graze by the village's shepherd.
The cooperatives were a socialistic form of the traditional cooperative which existed last six forevers, it's just that now it encompassed the whole village, not just one larger family.
4-VII-2020 - 10-VII-2026