English Teacher Dimy

Before becoming a teacher: the bet that changed my life

Some journeys begin with a map, a carefully chosen date and a suitcase packed well in advance. Mine began with a challenge between two friends.

—You haven’t got the guts to go to London with me —my best friend said to me one ordinary day.

I accepted the challenge.

A journey that was meant to be shared

The idea was that the two of us would travel together. However, when the time came, for reasons I would rather not explain, my friend decided not to go. It affected our friendship deeply and turned a shared adventure into a journey I would have to face alone.

I could have given up. London had never been a plan that was mine alone, but something inside me had already been set in motion. Perhaps it was pride, curiosity or the need to prove to myself that I was capable of doing it.

I decided to carry on.

I sold the only valuable thing I owned: my motorbike. With the money, I bought an open return ticket for six months, travelling back via Greece. If anything went wrong, I could return through places I already knew and where I would find someone willing to help me.

That was my safety plan. My little way back home.

Those six months eventually became almost three years.

17 April 1997

I arrived in London on 17 April 1997. I was 24 years old, just a few weeks away from turning 25.

I had studied only one year of American English and knew very little. Enough to imagine that I might be able to get by, but not enough to understand what was really waiting for me on the other side of the ocean.

My flight had come from Brussels and was full of impeccably dressed businessmen. They all wore dark suits, smart shoes and carried briefcases.

And there I was among them: denim jacket, ripped trousers, a black rucksack and a 23-kilo suitcase. The way I looked made me an easy target for the immigration officers.

They pulled me out of the queue.

My own version of The Terminal

A police officer began asking me questions that I could barely understand. I tried to answer, but I couldn’t find the words. They opened my suitcase, went through all my belongings and continued questioning me while I tried to work out what they wanted to know.

Many years later, when I watched Tom Hanks trapped in an airport in The Terminal, I recognised something of myself in that character.

Eventually, they let me through.

No one was waiting for me. I had no room booked and no address written down. All I had with me was my luggage, some money and the desire to discover a different land.

And what did I know about England?

That it was the land of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Sex Pistols and Queen Elizabeth II. Little else.

Any road will do

I took the Piccadilly line, the blue line on the Underground map. I looked at the names of the stations without knowing what they meant or where they would take me. I changed lines at Earl’s Court and eventually got off at Ravenscourt Park.

I didn’t know whether it was the right place, but then again, I didn’t really have a destination. I felt like Alice in Wonderland when she asks the Cheshire Cat which way she should go. If you don’t know where you want to get to, any road will do.

And I was completely lost.

Perhaps getting lost was, in fact, the only way to begin discovering something.

A coat that already knew London

The city greeted me with a grey sky and fine drizzle. I was wearing a second-hand coat that the father of a friend had given me. He had lived in London and worked as a doorman at a luxury hotel in the city centre.

Ironically, the coat already knew the London air and weather. I, on the other hand, was a young man who barely knew what he was getting himself into.

I walked until I found a building that looked like a hostel and decided to go inside.

At reception there was a young black man with two marks on his cheek. He began talking to me, but I couldn’t follow what he was saying. That was when I truly realised that I was on the other side of the world.

Images from my youth suddenly came rushing back: my family, my friends and the places that had been part of my life. While the receptionist waited for an answer, one question crossed my mind:

What am I doing here?

I desperately searched for a word in English and found only one:

—Room.

A thousand dollars in my underwear

The receptionist understood and tried to explain the price to me. If I remember correctly, it was about £175 for one week, including breakfast.

Perhaps that was a normal price in London, but to me it was a fortune. Every pound I spent shortened the amount of time I would be able to stay if I failed to find work.

As I didn’t understand how I was supposed to pay, I took out, right in front of him, the roughly one thousand dollars I had hidden in my underwear. The man reacted with complete calm and explained, very patiently, that they did not accept dollars. I would first have to exchange them for pounds.

He kept my suitcases behind the reception desk.

That made me uneasy. A Brazilian learns from a very young age not to take his eyes off his belongings. Brazil had taught me that. I left the hostel, but part of me stayed behind at reception, mentally keeping watch over my rucksack and suitcase.

My first mission in English

The receptionist tried to explain how to get to the bank, but I understood almost none of his directions. I had to ask about five more people and simply walk in the direction they pointed.

It was 1997. There was no Google Maps, no smartphones and no screen showing me the way. I didn’t even have a map of London. All I had were incomprehensible words, a few gestures and fingers pointing towards some street or other.

Finding the bank was an adventure. Exchanging the dollars for pounds was another.

I had to make myself understood using isolated words, hand gestures and the improvised English I had brought with me from Brazil. I don’t know exactly how I managed it, but eventually the person serving me understood what I wanted.

I left with pounds in my pocket and the feeling that I had passed my first small test in England. Then I hurried back to the hostel.

My suitcases were still there.

A window onto Pink Floyd

The room was small: a single bed, a wardrobe, a washbasin, a mirror and a large white window. There was carpet on the floor and along the corridors. Everything seemed old-fashioned and a little tacky to me. Against the wall, a radiator was switched on.

I felt hot and opened the window.

Beneath the grey sky stood industrial buildings and chimneys sending smoke into the air. Suddenly, I had the feeling that I had stepped into the cover of a Pink Floyd album.

That album had been a very special gift. I received it when I completed primary school as the best student in my year. I used to spend hours staring at its psychedelic cover while listening to the songs and travelling through my imagination.

I also tried to sing along by following the lyrics, although I used an English language entirely invented by me. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but that didn’t stop me from feeling the music. Long before I learnt the language, I was already playing with its sounds and creating a language of my own.

Now, years later, the image I had looked at so many times from Brazil seemed to have materialised outside the window of a London hostel. It looked like the power station on the cover of Animals: chimneys, smoke and an intensely grey sky.

All that was missing was the pig flying between the towers.

Perhaps that child who sang in an invented English had already begun, without realising it, the journey that would eventually bring me there.

The end of an endless day

Exhaustion finally got the better of me. I closed the window and the room fell into semi-darkness. I didn’t unpack my suitcase or get ready for bed. I took off my coat, threw it onto the carpet and collapsed onto the bed.

I would bet that coat had already felt a London carpet beneath it before. Unlike me, it already knew the city.

I fell into a deep sleep.

When I woke up, for a few seconds I had no idea where I was. It was still the same day, around lunchtime. In Brazil, it was five hours earlier.

I lay still, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of everything that had happened.

It all felt like a dream.

And yet, from that little room, with its tacky carpet and a window that transported me to the covers of Pink Floyd albums, I realised that it was real.

I was in London.

The real plot twist of my life

Over the following weeks, every pound I spent would give me the same uneasy feeling. To save money, I avoided taking the bus and walked across London instead.

Walking was not only a way of getting to know the city. It was also a way of buying myself time while I searched for my place in it and, although I didn’t yet know it, my place in life.

I didn’t go to London to become a teacher. I didn’t even know who I wanted to become. I travelled because of a bet, driven by curiosity and by the need to discover what existed beyond the world I knew.

That young man in a denim jacket and ripped trousers was searching for answers. He needed to prove to himself that he could survive far from home, understand other cultures, learn another language and rebuild himself in a place where nobody knew his name.

London didn’t give me immediate answers. First, it forced me to walk, get lost, observe, listen and confront my own limits.

It taught me that being afraid does not always mean we should turn back. Sometimes it simply means that we are entering a part of ourselves that we have not yet discovered.

That journey did not begin a profession. It began a transformation.

Six months became almost three years. The only word I managed to say when I arrived gradually became a new language. And that language would eventually open doors that, on the morning of 17 April 1997, I did not even know existed.

There, in that hostel room, the real plot twist of my life began.

God save the Queen!