by Frank Kusy
Yes, my mother really had it in for the Russians. In later life, when I brought home the German girl, Andrea, I wanted to marry, I remembered feeling very grateful she had not been born in Stalingrad. Okay, the Germans – despite Hungary’s claims of neutrality – had invaded my mother’s country in 1944 and forced her beloved brother to fight for them, but that was chicken feed compared to what she felt about the Russians.
‘So how was it after the war?’ I questioned my grandfather. ‘And did you find your son, Hunor?’
He sighed. ‘When I come back from the war – without position, without home, without anything – I was given the job of managing a factory for repairing vehicles, mainly lorries, for the Russians. The founder of this factory was a very clever man, an inventor, who invented the first engine running from benzene. I had looked after him when I was in the Ministry, now he look after me. But it was very hard work for very little money, and worse, it was great inflation in Hungary at this time, after the war. And my son is coming home wounded and ill. He had luck – he was not sent to Siberia.’
Yes, I knew about Siberia. My own Polish father had been plucked out of university and sent to an icy gulag there for four years. It was more than half the reason he had died so young.
I could see my grandfather was getting tired, but there was one last thing I wanted to know from him. Had he been present at the 1956 revolution in Hungary, when a mass of disgruntled Hungarians, beaten down by a decade of Communist repression, rose up to throw off their shackles? I thought he might be reluctant to talk about this touchy subject, the uprising had been put down with such brute force, but no, he seemed surprisingly eager to share.
‘Yes, I remember the revolution,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was in Budapest at this time. Yet there were few televisions in Hungary, and I had no radio, so I had no knowledge that the Russians had arrived. I did not hear the news. So, in the morning after the invasion, I wake up, I eat as normal, and I am going to the factory. I am walking out of the building into Baraszda Street, and all the other people in the other rooms are calling: “Where are you going?” I said, “I am going in the factory!” They cannot believe this. “You are going in the factory? Do you not know there has been a revolution?’ I said, “No. I had no idea.” So they said “Look!”...and point. And at this moment are coming the Russian tanks, at the end of the street.’
‘Wow,’ I said, suddenly proud of my grandfather who could singlehandedly face up to a street load of Russian tanks. ‘Weren’t you afraid?’
He sniffed. ‘What am I afraid of? They will shoot a single unarmed man in the street? I wave to them “Hello!” and then I am going in the factory. And it is good, because everywhere else, there is no opportunity to get food, clothing or to buy anything. In the factory, we had lorries which went out and came back with provisions and goods to eat. They brought back many chickens!’
‘But you had seen this coming, hadn’t you, dad?’ chipped in my mother. ‘You knew the Russians would come. I’d been here in England a few years by this time, and was now working as a cook for Lady Astor, and you had written me a letter, just days before the revolution, saying it was only a matter of time. It’s so funny you never knew about it when it finally happened!’
My grandfather permitted himself a wry chuckle. ‘The revolution could never succeed,’ he said. ‘We had no army. But afterwards, the Russians gave all the factories back to the Hungarian state. They had to, because the Communists were not ready to run our factories. They needed old engineers with skills like me, so I get a leading position...and five years later, when I retire at the age of 63, a very good pension. So yes, the revolution was very good to me!’
‘Your grandfather is being very modest,’ my mother informed me in a whisper. ‘He practically rebuilt all the factories in Hungary in that short time, along German lines.’
I looked at my grandfather with new eyes. Survived shipwreck, struggled through the Depression, shrugged off two world wars, faced off Russian tanks and became a captain of industry. Wow, what a man!
‘Why can’t he stay with us permanently?’ I asked my mother, suddenly anxious at losing the first male role model I’d had in my life.
She gave me a stern look and ushered me into the next room. ‘That can’t happen,’ she told me in a low whisper. ‘It would have been okay a few years ago, when he could see and wasn’t half deaf. But his last illness – and the operation on his prostate gland – I think broke him. If anything happened to me, he would be lost. He doesn’t know anybody over here in England. He would have nobody to talk to. Worst of all, he couldn’t have a wireless. At least, not one with a Hungarian station. It would be worse than being in solitary confinement. And there’s no way I could place him in a private home, because I couldn’t afford it. He’s only over here on a temporary one-year visa anyway, and I had to produce bank statements to prove I could support him financially without him becoming a burden on the state. If I ever ran out of money, he’d be sent back to Hungary immediately. His situation is very difficult. Here he can communicate, he has his radio (even though it gives him only depressingly anti-communist propaganda on the ‘Free Europe’ channel) and I can look after him. But his heart is back in Hungary, and so are all his friends, and this is where I feel sure he wishes to spend his last days.’
I looked at my mother, and made a silent determination.
If I couldn’t help my grandfather, if I soon had to say goodbye my new battle-scarred hero, I would help others just like him.
Chapter 4
Pocket Money Day
Thursday was pocket money day, and my first chance to meet the home’s residents. I wasn’t looking forward to this: if Old Bill and his fencing partner Mr Keogh were anything to go by, this particular collection of old people were going to be nothing like my grandfather. To make matters worse, despite my well-practiced veneer of confidence, I was crippled by a shyness that went back to my adolescence, to a time when I was a tall, thin geek with thick National Health glasses and a stupid, pudding-bowl haircut. A target for ridicule in the classroom and in the playground, I was wary as a thief around total strangers.
It was with some apprehension that I trudged down to the post office with Mr Bragg, the home’s grim-faced handyman, to collect the residents’ weekly stipends. Then, ignoring Matron’s snippy advice – ‘Don’t spend too much time with them, dear. They do talk a lot of twaddle!’ – I prepared to visit them one by one and give them their money in neatly-sealed brown envelopes.
My first port of call, fortunately, was the Chairman’s mother, Mrs Duff. I say ‘fortunately’ because she was nothing like her truculent son and seemed genuinely happy to see me.
‘You must be Winnie’s replacement,’ she said with a big smile. ‘It’s so good to have some young blood in here!’
‘Winnie?’ I smiled back. ‘Oh, you mean Mrs Gregory. Yes, I’m the raw recruit. But what’s this I hear about you crying into your porridge? That’s been bothering me since I first arrived.’
Mrs Duff downed the doily she had been sewing and struggled to recall the event. ‘I wasn’t crying into the porridge,’ she said at last. ‘I was crying about the porridge. I hate porridge!’
‘Can’t you get something else?’
‘They won’t give me anything else. Matron says it’s good for my bones, but it just makes me sick. Can’t you stop them keep giving it to me?’
I wondered briefly if this was Matron’s way of defying Mr Parker’s tyranny – taking her spite out on his poor old mum – but then dismissed it. No-one could be that cruel, surely. I also wondered who had rung in the complaint about the porridge. Someone with a genuine beef against the Chairman?
Next up was a spindly little thing called Betsy, and she had a definite naughty side to her.
‘Ooh, you’re a sight for sore eyes,’ she informed me, grabbing both my hands. ‘You’re gorgeous, you are. Will you be my new toy boy?’
‘Err...what does it involve?’ I asked her helplessly.
Betsy gave a loud cackle. ‘What does it involve? Well, if I were twenty years younger, I’d have had your trousers off by now. As it is, do you mind if I just massage your thighs?’
‘Oh, don’t mind her,’ observed Mrs Winch in the neighbouring chair. ‘She’s sex mad, she is. Only way to get her off topic is to talk about the “good old days”.’
‘Were they that good?’ I enquired curiously, detaching Betsy’s wandering hand from my right knee. ‘Here, hold on a minute, I’d like to tape this, if you don’t mind.’
Several pairs of eyes observed me as I leapt manically to my feet and dashed back to my office to collect my trusty Sony Walkman. Ever since I had interviewed my grandfather, it had rarely been far from my side.
‘Yes, they were good,’ recalled Betsy when I returned and repeated the question. ‘Things are too fast nowadays...you can hardly breathe!’
‘Everything’s made for speed today!’ chipped in Mrs Winch. ‘Except Betsy!’
Betsy’s hand strayed back to my thighs. ‘I can move when I want to,’ she said with a wink. ‘Though I’m not as fast as I was...’
This time I took hold of the hand and held it. I had just noticed that Betsy was nearly blind. Touch was obviously very important to her.
‘So what’s your story, Betsy?’ I asked her. ‘You must have seen a thing or two.’
Betsy gave a hollow cough. ‘I was born in 1903, not far from here. And we had to walk everywhere, ‘cos there were no buses or trams or even bicycles. We walked three miles to school and three miles back...and of course the cows used to walk up the street with us. It was all fields and farms and open spaces then. Ooh, it was lovely, really.’
‘We didn’t have cows,’ intervened Mrs Winch, ‘But we did have horses!’
‘Oh yes, Lady Muck,’ sniffed Betsy. ‘You probably had a horse of your own and rode it all the way to Buckingham Palace. Me, the only horses I saw were the ones who took the mail. When I lived in Bloomsbury – it must have been 1922 – all the Royal Mail from Mount Pleasant was taken up to King’s Cross at night, drawn by two huge dray horses. It was so dangerous at King’s Cross, because there was so much horse-drawn traffic. I mean, everybody complains about all the cars nowadays, but it was much worse then. It was harder to stop a horse than a motor car! They went along at a cracking old pace, and once they’d got up steam it was a devil of a job for the driver to pull them up. I mean, my mother wouldn’t let me out anywhere near Guildford Street when it was mail time. It was suicide trying to cross the road with all those horses bombing down it.’
‘So,’ I laughed, ‘life was fast in at least one respect!’
‘Ooh, did you hear that, Ethel?’ said Betsy, clapping her hands together in joy. ‘“In at least one respect”. Don’t he talk posh!’
Mrs Winch, aka Ethel, nodded approvingly. ‘Good education. Plus a bit of parental discipline, I bet.’
‘My father was a bricklayer,’ said Betsy, apropos nothing. ‘There was six of us and his word was law. He never hit us or nuffink. But if he said no, he meant no. We couldn’t have wished for a better father, really.’
‘Did you ever cross him at all?’ I asked.
‘God! I was sent to bed. Without my tea. Though my mother used to sneak it up to me. That’s the problem today, there’s no discipline with children.’
‘It’s got to start early,’ agreed Ethel. ‘When I was young – I was 17 and still at school – I bought this lipstick at Woolworths. I shoved it on in the dark of the house, and my mother said “You’re not going out looking like that!” And we argued, and she went off into the scullery and returned with something, I couldn’t see what it was. And she sat down and said, “Well, I shan’t let you!” And I replied, “Hmmm! How can you stop me?” And she whipped out this large jug and said, “You open that door, and you’ll have this jug of water over you!” Well, I only had one frock, and I wasn’t about to see it ruined. But I challenged her and said, “You wouldn’t!” And she smiled and said: “You just try me, if you don’t think I would!” But I knew that she would – even though we had no money and she’d be spoiling that good frock. And she wouldn’t have thrown just a trickle of water over me. I would have got the lot! So I went back and removed the lipstick. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? Parents nowadays make a lot of threats, but don’t do anything. But parents then did. They meant exactly what they said.’
I thought of my mother. She never hit me either, but she knew how to keep me under control. If relentless nagging in a Hungarian monotone didn’t make me mend my ways, she would simply break down and cry. She knew I hated seeing her crying.
‘What about schools?’ I asked next. ‘Were they very disciplinarian?’
‘In our day,’ ventured Betsy. ‘You got the cane. If you did anything you shouldn’t.’
I thought briefly back on my own school days, in particular on the leather covered whalebone called a ferula which did far more damage than a cane. Six strokes of that was enough to have you weeping into your sleeve the rest of the day. Twelve, which was reserved for persistent offenders like me, could split your hand open and require medical treatment.
‘Or you were put behind the blackboard,’ added Ethel.
‘Yerse, you were punished!’ said Betsy with more than a degree of ferocity.
‘Doesn’t sound so bad to me,’ I said, rather puzzled. ‘What went on behind the blackboard?’
Betsy’s brows furrowed. ‘Nothing. That was the awful thing. You didn’t know what was going on, which was very annoying.’
‘I went to a “good” school,’ said Ethel. ‘The cane was rarely used. If you got the cane, it was a very big thing. It was the ultimate deterrent. But the teachers were always in charge. There was no question about the kids ruling the teachers. Our big punishment was, we sat with our hands on our head.’
‘That’s right!’ piped up Betsy.
‘When your hands started to flag, the teacher would say: “Elbows up!” And you try sitting for five minutes with your elbows up like that! Then she would say: “Right! You can let them down again now. Any more noise and disruption, your hands will be back! The teachers don’t do that anymore...’
‘They’re too young,’ said Betsy. ‘In our day, teachers were older.’
‘Rot!’ snorted Ethel, leaning heavily forward in her chair. ‘They were just as young. I mean, they didn’t all come out of teacher training and sit around for 20 years and then start teaching, did they? I can remember one of my teachers, Miss Hunter her name was, who came into school each day on a motorbike. We thought she was smashing. But she didn’t stand for any nonsense. I was very bad at maths, and I was a naughty little girl, and she used to say: “Have-you-got-it-into-your-head?” And she used to dig a thick marker pencil into my head with each syllable, just to make sure I did get it into my head!”
I looked at my watch. I knew I should be moving on – there were 30 more residents just as keen to talk to me because nobody else seemed interested – but I was warming to my task. These two lively old souls had more pluck, spirit and humour, than anyone I knew half their age. It seemed incredible to me that Matron and the other officers paid so little attention to such colourful characters – they were missing out so much on their rich life histories, which I was personally finding quite fascinating.
‘What about holidays?’ I ventured a last question. ‘Did you have them?’
‘Yerse, we had our holidays,’ said Betsy. ‘Not many, but we had ‘em. But we never went anywhere much. I mean, all round here was country. Wherever you went, for miles, was all country.’
Ethel nodded. ‘We used to go on the Sunday School “treats” as we called it, we always brought something home for our mum and our dad. We might go to the seaside, either to Brighton or to Margate. And we always brought something back. We were the first generation to do that. It was only in the 1900’s that the railway started taking people places. Before that, they hardly went anywhere.’
Betsy’s face had settled in a look o
f dreamy recollection. ‘We used the tram,’ she murmured happily. ‘Went on a tuppenny tram ride...that’s how our parents took us on outings. And you could go all round about London, you know. It was a big treat to go into London. You’d only go once in a blue moon.’
‘Though many people never went out of their district,’ said Ethel in conclusion. ‘I know people now who have never been out, have never been to Central London in their lives.’
I rose out of my seat and clicked the Walkman off. That could have been me they had been talking about: I had hardly set foot in Central London except to track down rare old comics in dusty Soho book shops. As for holidays, I had inherited the travel bug from my mother – she had taken me to a different place in Europe every Summer – but then she had married old Bert and he’d taken her, me and my step-brother to the same dull place – Mevagissey in Cornwall – for as long as I could remember. Yes, I had managed few ‘safe’ foreign holidays since then – to Rome, Athens and Israel – but part of me craved something far more free and adventurous, where I could live out the heroes of my childhood: as a dashing rogue of the sea from one of Rafael Sabatini’s novels, perhaps, or as an ‘into the wild’ explorer in the style of Jack London. Many were the times I would wistfully look through travel brochures and think of far off places with exotic sounding names like Bangkok or Kathmandu, but doubted whether I would ever have the money or the courage to go there.
‘Thank you ladies,’ I said as I prepared to move on. ‘That was very interesting. I’ll be back for more on another occasion, if you don’t mind?’
‘Ooh, he’s got manners, don’t he?’ said Betsy, snapping out of her trance.
‘Yes, indeed,’ agreed Ethel. ‘You can’t buy good manners.’
*
About two hours later, I came to the end of my rounds and stared at the single remaining brown envelope in my hands. It belonged to Old Bill.
