NOVEL
WOODY PAUL GREY
CHAPTER FOUR. DESTROYING ONE`S OWN FAMILY LIFE
It soon came clear that no matter that they both were school teachers still they were very different. My dad was a very intelligent, sophisticated, hardworking, dedicated and committed person. My mum, on the contrary, wasn`t so smart as he, quite lazy, as a teacher, and not committed to anything in this world. So, very soon the began to quarrel without any solid reason, but later their fights happened more and more often. A bit later came my dad`s jealousy. He even started to bit her now and then.
Then came the time to use physical force against me, as his son, though I always had been so obedient, both in the family and at school, my father did it. Later came my stammering, as I was scared by the town bully and his gang late at night on my way home from school. This happened twice. Do you know what my dad did when I came home and couldn`t say a word? He had just beaten me, first and foremost. Only next day, together with me, he went to look for the bully. First we met with his mum, who just couldn`t do anything with her son and would rather agree to send him to prison. My dad wasn`t that sort of man. So, he was following me along the town streets until one day we found him. The young man was so huge that I was scared that he could easily kill my dad, who was way lower than my offender. I don`t know exactly, what my dad told him, but the latter never approached him any more. There was a different transformation about my father. At school he was an ideal teacher. The weakest kids had always excellent marks at his classes. At home he always was very good with me since I was a kid, telling me my sister and brother bedtime stories and fairy tales, but as soon as I grew bigger, I guess, enough to be bitten, he started doing it, notwithstanding my stammering, which bothered me seriously for years. Why didn`t he take me to the doctor to get a proper treatment. That stammering ruined my life/ At school I was very shy, faced real problems answering the homework at school, often been made fun of, because of that bad habit. And the school marks. I had been as smart as my sister and brother, but due to stammering I got much lower grades than they. The same problems followed me when I had entered the institute. So, both at school and at the institute I had to study much, much harder than the others, to get more or less appropriate grades. Then I started to smoke, later to drink alcohol. My dad because of misunderstanding with my mom left the family twice for nearly a year, but every time, because of us, kids he returned back. My mother didn`t change much. I was so surprised why she didn`t study English and German as we, kids, did - too busy, lazy, or, simply, stupid. My father was a very creative person in the literary point of view. During his life he had written 25 literary pieces- stories, plays and a big novel named :"Famine 1933-34 in Ukraine" based on the stories of witnesses. He was actually good at all school subjects. So, he not only conducted everyday classes at home for us, kids, first in German and later in English. He created his own method of teaching foreign tongues. He was also an adviser and consultant in all other school subjects. Besides he studied medicine and treated the family from different diseases, as well as, the villagers. once he really saved my life/
