I asked Takis about school. "In spite of the late nights listening I never missed a day at school. My father was the Chairman of the School Committee and I couldn't let him down. But I had to earn some pocket money to pay for the bits a pieces I needed. Particularly a decent pair of headphones; I had to hold the army headphone to me ear with one hand which gave me pins and needles. For some years I had kept goldfish and pigeons, so I sold them. A friend of mine had gone to sea as a cadet and his ship went abroad, so I asked him to get me a pair of headphones. "I must explain to you that it was no easy matter for a Russian seaman to serve on a vessel which visited foreign ports. First one had to go through the Communist Party sieve and then he was told that if he jumped ship his family would suffer for it. "Anyway, he bought me a lovely pair of Telefunken headphones when the ship berthed at Constantinople (Istanbul) which I have to this day. But not on his first trip, when he was not allowed to go ashore. And it was not the captain who decided who could go ashore. A trusted member of the Party would pick out a group of seamen who could land but they had to stay together the whole time. "I never managed to go abroad. At the Club I had obtained a morse test certificate for 40 letters a minute (8 wpm) in Latin characters and 90 letters (18 wpm) in the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian). To go abroad one had to up-grade to 80 Latin and 120 Cyrillic letters. (16 & 24 wpm). I was put on a small coastal ice-breaker which cleared the river estuaries in the Black Sea. "The Black Sea is one of the most treacherous inland seas in the world. During the winter its northern shores are frozen whereas the coast of Asia Minor keeps the southern shores relatively warm by comparison. This results in gale force winds and rough seas. Waves follow each other very closely as opposed to the long swell one gets in the Pacific. Ships have to leave port to avoid crashing into each other. "I was about 18 when I first went to sea as a cadet W/T operator. One day when we came out of an estuary the sea was so rough that the captain decided to turn back. As we turned to starboard we noticed an American freighter behind us heavily laden with wheat and very low down in the water. To our horror it was caught between the crests of two enormous waves and broke in two roughly amidships. Although we were only about half a mile away the freighter sank before we could get to it. We saw a few survivors in the water, but it would have been impossible to put a boat into that treacherous sea. Apart from which a man cannot survive many minutes in a water temperature just above freezing. It was all over in a flash and we returned to Odessa in deep shock.