Several years of exposure to this way of life probably implanted in my mother the desire to rise on the social scale. Her rapid transition from a relatively naive provincial to a metropolian sophisticate was prompted, I think, by what she saw—or fancied that she saw—while under the care of the Ursulines with their elegant quarters, their wireless sets, their important visitors, and their tennis courts which were made to freeze over each winter so that the nuns might go skating in their billowing black habits. They set my mother, wittingly or not, on an upward trajectory which was to crash painfully to earth in Epping in the forties, when she was obliged to learn to use an industrial sewing machine and seek employment at the tyrannical Miss Melville’s clothing factory for a wage of seventeen shillings and sixpence per week.
Miss Melville’s sweatshop lay, however, in an unimaginable future. My mother’s road to social and economic advancement took another step when, while still at school, she met my father, at that time the manager of a textile-mill in Sopron. After a long engagement, bitterly opposed by their families (he was eight years older; she was considered a pauper), they were married in 1935 and established themselves in a modern apartment block in a fashionable quarter of Budapest. They were to have seven or eight golden years. My father’s business prospered. In 1937, instead of emigrating to Australia, they purchased the villa in which they gave large parties that always came to an end with animated games of poker lasting until the first light of morning. They acquired at this time the most sophisticated of novelties, an electric record-player that plugged into a menacing radio-set with a complicated dial and a sinister green eye. A small espresso machine—another treasured possession—exploded at one of these parties, almost blinding my mother, and leaving an indelible brown stain on the ceiling. On New Year’s Eve they used to melt the lead seals of champagne bottles and drop the molten metal into a vat of icy water in order to discover, from the complicated shapes that formed in those vats, what the coming year would bring. Around this time my mother went through a Spiritualist phase. She organised séances at which various notabilities, especially Marie Antoinette, caused the legs of a spindly table to tap. That obsession returned in a much grimmer form in the last months of the war when these shades were summoned to answer despairing questions—‘Will we survive? When will it end?’—to which they always gave riddling answers.
It was a charmed life, perhaps a silly and self-indulgent life, but it was also pathetic in its brevity. It may have lasted a little longer than the good life enjoyed by people like them in other parts of Europe; Hungary remained relatively untouched by the war until 1942. Yet even after the bombing began, even after rumours were heard about people being rounded up in odd pockets of the country, my parents’ nightclubbing and theatre-going continued, interrupted from time to time by my father’s being called up, at first for military service, later on to join gangs of road-builders and ditch-diggers. Each time he came home—on one occasion as the batman of a monocled ‘Excellency’ who carried my father’s kitbag to the front door of the villa, clicked his heels and kissed my mother’s fastidiously manicured hand—the parties, the high time, began once more. Even so, their golden time was very short—by 1944 it had all vanished.
Yet these few years, with their echoes of the real or imagined splendour of the Ursuline way of life transferred to a brittle metropolitan setting, set the benchmark, the standards whereby my mother measured the rest of her life. In retrospect it seems a venal and shallow outlook. She possessed few intellectual capacities or ambitions. The apparently aimless life that took her from dressmaker to milliner, from morning coffee to lunch, from an afternoon at the cinema (or rather at one of the cinemas where it was fashionable to be seen) to meeting my father and several other couples for dinner was sufficient to satisfy her needs. Though my parents went regularly to the opera I do not think that she had ever attended a concert or a recital. Even the opera bored her, unless it was Carmen, La Bohème or at a pinch La Traviata. But she enjoyed sitting in the box every Wednesday night during the season, casting a critical eye over what the other ladies were wearing, just as she always attended performances of long-running plays whenever notices appeared in the papers announcing that the leading lady had been fitted out with an entirely new wardrobe of costumes.
She may have been a less than ideal mother. I was left largely in the care of a succession of German nannies (all of them answering to the no doubt generic name of Tante Anna) with my maternal grandmother, a rather sour soul, acting in a supervisory capacity. I would see my mother briefly in the morning before she went into town, and in the afternoon as she was about to change for dinner. Yet my parents were neither uncaring nor basically irresponsible, and certainly not vulgar—although it may be that I am too partial to be reliable on that last point. They had a measure of style and elegance—even though it was newly acquired and thinly applied. Again, I must be scrupulous in declaring possible partiality, but my mother seems to me to have avoided, then and later on, the crass vulgarity of those Hungarian ladies of Double Bay, with knuckleduster diamond rings and bracelets like the wristbands of a heavyweight wrestler, who talked at the tops of their voices in a barbaric tongue, or else slaughtered Australian-English in a way which was easy to parody. My parents were no doubt nouveaux riches, but they carried their new-found (and sadly temporary) wealth with some taste and discrimination.
I know much less about my father’s family. This is so partly because he was naturally reticent, not a born myth-maker like my mother. It may have had something to do with a reluctance to speak about my grandfather’s defection, though in his last years my father mentioned it quite frequently. He seemed to bear his father no grudge, only a regret, perhaps, for my grandmother’s distress. The fundamental reason, though, why a mythology had not been elaborated in that family—apart from the half-jesting tale of Goethe’s friend and factotum—was their ordinariness. They were absolutely typical of a very large element in that Central European bourgeoisie which was already beginning to disappear by the time the war saw to their extinction. Apart from my grandfather’s peccadilloes, nothing remarkable seemed to have happened to them for generations. Nothing had disturbed the pattern of their commonplace and predictable lives, in sharp contrast to the fortunes of my mother’s family, who had suffered grievously during the disintegration of the Habsburg world.
I did not know my paternal grandfather. After his death a few months before my parents’ wedding, his widow remained in the family flat in an unfashionable part of Budapest where she had always lived as an abandoned wife, consoled by my uncle, her unmarried son, and my aunt, who was married to a wholesale dealer in horseflesh. Though I have no clear memories of my uncle or of my aunt, I remember vividly the dealer in horseflesh. He was very tall and fat, with a shaved head. He terrified me—entirely without cause—and consequently the anticipation of pleasure every time we set out to visit my grandmother was tarnished by childishly irrational fears. Of my grandmother’s flat I recall no more than her china cabinet and collection of silver bibelots, and that the polished floors were covered with rugs. I still have some of her rugs, and much of her furniture—but not the fabled china cabinet—though I have no recollection whatever of these pieces in their original setting, where I must have seen them every time I was taken to visit her. One tiny scrap of memory fits somewhere into this sparse picture. There was a coin-telephone in the flat. You had to insert a coin and push a button before the telephone could be used. My father used to say that it entirely failed as an economy measure because each time members of the family wanted to make a call, they opened the container, extracted the single coin it invariably harboured, and fed it again to the hungry machine.
My grandmother owned or at least had a major interest in the small block of flats where she lived. This was the source of her income and also the centre of her social life. Most, perhaps all, of the other apartments were occupied by members of her extensive network of family and close friends. Her own apartment was the venue for gathe
rings of elderly ladies—sisters, cousins, widows of cousins, cousins of the widows of cousins and so on. Her flat was also the location for less frequent but larger gatherings of what must, I suppose, be called the clan. Once more, my memories of these celebrations are indistinct, except that I still bear the stigma of one of those occasions, when I crashed head-first into the china cabinet and had to be rushed to hospital for stitches. The accident seemed to have left me unscarred, until in middle-age a vertical furrow suddenly appeared above my right eye, a revenant from a dead world, a living memento mori.
One of the established members of this clan, that spread beyond immediate family ties to encompass intimates and associates linked by friendship or marriage, was an elderly bachelor, a meticulously dandified gentleman who always wore spats. He was a retired town clerk, and had been, on his retirement, granted some honour appropriate to civic functionaries. He insisted on being addressed, even by people like my parents and grandmother, with the full honorific, and would fly into furious rages if anyone dared to omit the ‘Excellency’ to which he was entitled. He also had very pronounced views concerning propriety. I recall one terrible scene during one of his visits to our villa in which he berated my mother because she painted her nails. I could not understand at the time why my parents were so upset by this incident, why they severed relations with this gentleman for many months until he offered a grudging apology, for in that world people constantly criticised each other openly and with considerable verbal violence. His behaviour seemed to me no different from everyone else’s. Much later, I learnt that his offence was to stray beyond the strict boundaries that this society had imposed on such acts of reprobation: he had said that my mother looked like a whore. That was beyond the pale. Had he not said that, he would have been permitted to continue with his reproaches, growing increasingly more strident and even insulting, without anyone’s turning a hair.
Such were the anomalies of that world—on the one hand rigid probity, on the other licence for considerable vehemence and even for a degree of coarseness which would not at that time have been tolerated in Australian society. The small gatherings and the larger celebrations in my grandmother’s flat would display the two contradictory poles of this social phenomenon: ceremonial and at times openly hypocritical politesse and violent, often quite coarse, invective. His bespatted Excellency, the retired town clerk, would gallantly kiss the hand of each dumpy crone, complimenting her on her beauty and youth. The company would then proceed to indulge in delicious gossip, slander and innuendo, with liberal use of the scatological richness of the Hungarian language, tolerating considerable vulgarity of expression in what was regarded as polite society. The only instance of such a mixture of urbanity and indecency I have encountered in English culture is in the patrician world depicted in the comedies of Congreve and his contemporaries. This social mode, which flourished among the bourgeoisie of Hungary, and may still be heard in public places like the foyer of the Sydney Opera House, though it is notably absent in the Budapest of the 1990s, was probably the remnant of a former way of life where the rural gentry lived in close contact with the peasantry. But that is sheer conjecture on my part.
My grandmother’s flat formed the centre of her life—at least in the years that I knew her—in a way completely opposite to my parents’ gadding about from restaurants to nightclubs during their golden years. She rarely went farther than visiting friends and relatives who lived in the same building or in nearby streets, except for those frequent and highly ritualised trips to the cemetery that played an essential role in her life. Domestic duties occupied a great deal of her attention—she had after all three adults living with her—but these were of an exclusively supervisory nature. There was a live-in servant who, in the manner of these bourgeois households, was combined cook and chambermaid. The laundress came each Monday. A dressmaker would call from time to time and sew on my grandmother’s treadle machine (which she herself never used) that succession of black dresses with white spots, in cotton, silk and wool, which my grandmother wore each day. A lesser creature would attend to such mending as was not trusted to the maidservant. The corn-cutter (no fancy terms like chiropodist or podiatrist were then known) would come whenever necessary, as would someone with leeches or cups for those minor medical matters that did not require the services of a doctor. If a doctor were needed he (for no woman doctor could be trusted) would also call—a visit to the consulting-rooms was reserved for the gravest of maladies, when the opinion of a specialist, inevitably a Professor, was called for. My father used to say that when he was a child, a person (some sort of minor, possibly untrained dentist) would be summoned if a tooth needed extracting.
I do not remember a piano or a radio or a gramophone or any books at all. Yet my father was relatively well read, and he was very musical indeed, though entirely as a listener, despite several agonising childhood years at the violin. I suspect that he acquired these tastes when he left home after finishing his schooling. He spent some years studying to become a textile engineer, first in the Czech city of Brno, later in Aachen in Germany. It was during his years in Aachen that he used to travel all night in a third-class compartment to cities like Dresden and Leipzig to queue for most of the day for an opera ticket, only to return to Aachen by the late train, sleepless and exhausted. His musical interests were restricted to opera; he spoke of some legendary singers he had heard. He would occasionally mention the odd conductor, principally Strauss, whom he had heard conducting a performance of Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden or Leipzig. He never spoke about orchestral concerts or chamber music recitals. Nevertheless, his cultural horizons were wider than my mother’s. He had seen something of Europe. After he had finished school his mother stood him a trip to Venice, where he stayed with a reliable and respectable Hungarian family who fed him proper and decent food. A few months later, before beginning his studies, he used his meagre savings for a visit to Paris—a three-night journey in third class—where unfortunately a reliable Hungarian family could not be found. To my grandmother’s dismay he slept in an hotel and ate goodness knows what muck in cafés and restaurants.
In this account of the two sides of my family I may have stressed the differences in the way each looked at the world. But such differences are probably more striking in retrospect than they were in fact. They each remained fixed within fairly clearly defined boundaries, the boundaries of a bourgeois world where certain proprieties were carefully observed, even though people of my parents’ generation often exercised greater licence than their elders thought proper. Though my parents enjoyed in their few years of relative peace and prosperity the amenities of a ‘fast’ way of life, there was little if any sexual indiscretion among their friends. Indeed, men of my grandfather’s generation were much more likely to succumb to a ‘woman in Prague’ than those of my parents’ nightclub-going, relatively hard-drinking circle. Divorce was almost unheard of. Children were generally cherished. Their welfare was a constant preoccupation, so much so that many were smothered by a possessive and over-protective love.
My mother’s leaving me largely to the mercies of nannies and governesses was quite normal according to the custom of the time. It did not necesarily imply lack of care, though it may be deemed irresponsible. I did not feel unloved or unwanted; I accepted my life as perfectly predictable and ordinary. There was a genuine bond of affection with almost every one of the women who had been hired to look after me, yet it was not a surrogate, as far as I can tell, for parental love. Though in early childhood I saw my parents much less frequently than Australian children see (or used to see) at least their mothers, my memories of my early years are on the whole pleasant—family picnics, summer holidays at a mountain resort (accompanied, it is true, by a retinue consisting of maid and nanny) and various outings to the city which always came to an end in a gilded café filled with mouth-watering delicacies.
I recall only one episode of brutality, and that had a swift and significantly predictable consequence. I was scared of moths an
d beetles (and still detest them when they fly into our bedroom on summer nights). One of my German nannies decided that this childish fear had to be cured. I remember being carried into my room after my bath; I remember the white sheet on the bed; I remember black beetles crawling over the snowy sheet; I remember the crunch of those carapaces as I was lowered into bed; I remember screaming in terror; and I remember that this particular nanny had disappeared by morning. My parents were outraged by her gratuitous cruelty. They were also dismayed, I think, at what they saw as their own irresponsibility. Though the allure of the good life was strong—perhaps too strong—they saw clearly what their responsibilites were, and those responsibilities were fundamentally indistinguishable from the standards of my paternal grandmother’s bourgeois dedication to the family and the clan.
The war and, later, life in Australia were to confirm the strength of those responsibilities, decencies and obligations. My parents, but especially my mother, the flightier and the more romantic of the two, rose splendidly to the demands of a harsh life. Those charmed years when money was plentiful, when the menace of the great world seemed very far away from the comfortable safety of Budapest, were in truth no more than a sport, a vacation from their essentially conventional and family-oriented view of the world. Their difficult and in many ways dreary life in Australia was in essence no different from the difficult and dreary life their parents often had to endure. The dismalness of Hurlstone Park or Epping was no worse than the dullness of that plebeian quarter of Budapest which my father’s family considered home. Life in Sydney was harder but in essence no different from the life into which they were born. It was only that its details—I am tempted to call them accidentals—the stage-setting for their difficulties were very different. And there had been those golden years, which a brutal and horrible war swept away relentlessly. Those could not be easily forgotten.
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