My Summer as a Pioneer

The Friendship Strategy

Spring was rushing towards summer, and it was nearly the end of my first year at school.

Most of my friends looked forward to the holidays.

I dreaded that.

I knew the summer Pioneer camp was approaching.

I was far too young to be a Pioneer.

The honour began at ten, which meant I still had three years before I could officially devote myself to the construction of Communism through extensive marching.

Unfortunately, summer camp had no such age restrictions.

My mother, who had grown up attending Pioneer camps, was already making plans to send me.

She admitted that she had hated them too, but believed strongly in discipline, fresh air, and exercise.

And, as far as I could tell, marching.

I wanted to stay home and read books.

Not because I was a dissident. At seven, I had no political opinions whatsoever. My concerns were far more serious.

I had recently discovered books and found them vastly superior to discipline and organised recreation.

As usual, my mother was winning.

So that summer I was sent away to a Pioneer camp.

To help me overcome my underdeveloped social skills, my mother explained the science of friendship.

The system was surprisingly straightforward.

"You have to be the first one," she said.

"The first one to ask."

According to my mother, the bus ride was my critical window of opportunity. If I asked someone first, I'd have a friend for the rest of the summer.

The logic seemed sound.

The responsibility was enormous.

I spent the bus ride under considerable pressure.

As soon as I found a seat, I began scanning the kids for potential friendship candidates.

Unfortunately, the situation around me was not ideal.

On one side sat a fat boy whose opening question was whether I had a sandwich.

On the other sat a crying girl who had lost her glasses.

Neither appeared emotionally available for long-term friendship commitments.

While I was still evaluating my options, children all around me began introducing themselves to one another.

My opportunity was slipping away.

The social psychology was moving faster than I was.

The Second Graders

After a long journey, the buses pulled up beside a barbed-wire fence.

I could see small, uniform buildings without any distinguishing features: long grey rectangles punctuated by identical windows. They were carefully positioned as if master-planned military installations, designed to ensure operational efficiency for children. 

Nature, however, had ignored the master plan. Pine trees of every shape and size surrounded the camp, making the neat architecture look even more out of place.

In the camp, there were children of all ages. Some looked old enough to drive tractors. They didn't concern me.

The Year 2 girls concerned me greatly.

They knew multiplication. I heard them on the bus.

I was assigned to their group.

To me, they seemed impossibly mature.

At night, after lights out, they would share stories about the challenges that awaited me at school.

The most terrifying of these was the times table.

Nobody, they explained gravely, had ever mastered it on time.

Year 2 was not for the faint-hearted.

I believed every word.

That summer, I learnt that there are three categories of people:

Children.

Year 2 children.

Cosmonauts.

Everyone else was simply waiting for their turn to fail mathematics.

As for me, I approached the coming school year with the anxiety of a soldier preparing for deployment.

 

The Bookworm and the Whistle

Every morning at exactly six o'clock, a whistle exploded across the camp.

This was followed by an optimistic Pioneer song at full volume.

The Year 2 children, worldly and mature, appeared to accept this as normal.

I could not.

Before breakfast, we were assembled into uneven rows. With school uniforms on, we were marched to the compulsory morning assembly.

On the first day, I went looking for the library.

At seven years old, I knew — every respectable institution was supposed to have a library.

School had one.

The local Palace of Pioneers had one.

Even our neighbourhood House of Culture had one.

A summer camp full of children surely had one too.

It did not.

I spent several days hoping this was an administrative oversight.

It wasn't.

This came as a profound disappointment.

I had brought a single book with me — a Polish story about Carolinka and her friend Petrik, who spent their days running freely around Warsaw.

By comparison, I had been placed behind a fence and issued a schedule.

Every activity had a whistle.

Even swimming had a whistle.

One whistle meant get in.

Another, which seemed to arrive about thirty seconds later, meant get out.

Everyone climbed out again.

I never understood the point.

If you are going to take children swimming, why not let them swim?

The camp administration clearly disagreed.

Who Can Survive on Once-a-Week Meal Plans

Food presented its own difficulties.

I missed home so much that I gradually stopped eating.

The camp administration viewed this with surprising calm.

My mother did not.

Once a week, she arrived by bus carrying enough food to survive a minor siege.

There were roast chickens, meat patties, apples, cottage cheese, pastries, and things wrapped in newspaper that seemed to multiply as she unpacked them.

I ate with the determination of a camel preparing to cross a desert, consuming enough food to survive until the following Sunday.

Breakfast Duty

Camp life offered other dangers.

During week three, my group was on kitchen duty, a compulsory weekly assignment.

At seven years old, this apparently qualified me to assist with breakfast service for an entire camp.

To get the dining room ready for 200 kids, we had to wake up at six in the morning.

One day, I was running late and sprinted toward the dining hall.

The doors were made entirely of glass.

They were so clean they appeared to be open, sun streaming through them without any reflection.

Unfortunately, they were not.

I ran headfirst into them at full speed.

The glass remained completely unharmed. I spent the day in sick bay.

My forehead developed a bruise that grew even more spectacular towards the end of the camp.

The unidentified plush animal

The camp also offered various crafts and activity clubs intended to help children develop useful skills and hobbies.

I chose plush toy making.

Not because I possessed any talent for sewing.

It simply involved sitting down.

With hours of marching, singing, whistles and organised recreation every single day, some plush toy making felt like a much-needed reprieve.

For the rest of the camp, I devoted forty-five minutes each afternoon to sewing an animal from a collection of materials that appeared to have been assembled from several unrelated species.

There were strips of tiger-like fur, patches of yellow plush that resembled the skin of an African leopard, and a quantity of thick black fabric that looked suspiciously like hair.

I stitched everything together with heavy white thread.

At no point was I entirely certain what species was emerging.

To eliminate any remaining ambiguity, I attached a fluffy white tail.

It was obviously a cat.

At least according to my understanding of biology.

I returned home half my original size, carrying a spectacular bruise on my forehead from breakfast duty and a giant plush animal of unknown origin that refused to fit into my suitcase.

Of course, my mother considered the camp an outstanding success.

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