Their story had a grim ending. The old lady did not kill herself on that or on any other occasion. She lived to a great age. Her sons, who had been totally worn down by her presence, sold the house after her death and parted company, each living in a small rented flat far from the other. They passed out of our lives.
The brothers, like my parents, belonged to that group of migrants who were young enough when they came to Australia to learn English with some measure of success, without, however, losing their awkwardness with Australian-born people, or the quaintness generated by their inability to adjust their open-vowelled, unaccented manner of speaking to the intricacies of Australian-English pronunciation. People like them lived, at best, a half-life; they belonged to no society, they were isolated from the world. They frequently seemed grotesque when their uncertain pronunciation, insecure grammar and very confused command of idiom led them into linguistic traps or dead-ends. Of course, they could manage to communicate up to a point; but subtlety and richness of nuance were completely beyond their capacities. They lived in a linguistic limbo. Even their native language came to be transformed in bizarre ways. Over the years all sorts of words crept into my parents’ speech for which they knew no equivalents in Hungarian. They subjected numerous English expressions—shopping centre, southerly change, septic tank, service station—to the phonological and grammatical rules of Hungarian, producing at length a private language, incomprehensible in important respects to Hungarian-speakers in other parts of the world.
The lives of these people demonstrated greater variety than the plight of those unfortunate older people who remained trapped within their homes, never daring or, indeed, showing any inclination to explore the society which had adopted them. They were waiting to die. My parents’ generation had to make a living. Some achieved this with spectacular success, eventually becoming considerable economic forces within the community, even moving on, in a few cases, to exercise a measure of political influence. They were, however, exceptional, just as the few people of that generation who managed to learn almost no English, remaining confined within their linguistic prisons, were exceptional. The majority, whatever their individual personalities, whether they achieved financial success or stability, or whether, like my parents, they found their life in Australia a constant struggle to survive economically, developed perplexing and ambivalent relationships with their new environment that frequently left them confused, driving many of them into rituals and ceremonies which were often parodies of the social structures of their former lives.
My parents learnt to communicate with some success. My father’s English was much more accurate and careful than my mother’s, but only at the cost of a slow deliberateness. He spoke in a carefully measured way, with frequent pauses that were often the cause of some embarrassment. I suspect that he translated for much of the time. By contrast, my mother’s English was chaotic, observing no known rules, haphazard, with a wild disregard for case, tense and gender. Yet it was a genuine though idiosyncratic language, capable of achieving a considerable range of tone and nuance. My father never really learnt how to communicate emotions, anger, irony or sarcasm; for that reason his English-speaking acquaintances thought of him as an amiable but somewhat dull-witted man. Few had the chance to recognise his ironic relish of the absurdity of life, which I see living on miraculously in my younger son, or the fatalism which generated, as is so often the case, a sombre gaiety—when you finally acknowledge that there is nothing to be done about the awfulness of life, you realise that you might as well laugh at it.
Neither my father nor my mother ever mastered written English. When my wife and I lived in London for a time, I had to translate for her the warm and loving letters they had written to her, in which only the beginning and the end were in English. During my father’s disastrous years in business, I was called upon to act as his secretary, amanuensis and typist. On many evenings, instead of attending to the intricate demands of Latin or Algebra, I would sit at a portable typewriter translating into English the best I could, as my father dictated, often at breakneck speed, elaborate business letters filled with jargon of his trade, and couched in a flowery rhetoric appropriate to Hungarian business-life in the 1930s. Fortunately, both of my parents learnt to read English with considerable competence. When my first book of literary criticism was published, they both waded their way through it with swelling pride, even though they knew nothing about its subject matter.
They achieved greater success in learning English or accommodating to their new life than many of their contemporaries, largely because financial circumstancs obliged them to spend most of their life in Australia in those parts of Sydney where there were no substantial expatriate communities. It was only in their last years, when they lived in a flat in Neutral Bay, that they were anywhere near a concentration of Hungarian people of their own generation. By then it was too late: age, ill-health and years spent in places like Epping, Wahroonga and Pennant Hills made their compatriots seem noisy, intrusive, often vulgar and, by the cruellest of ironies, strange and grotesque. They much preferred the few Australian friends they had made, even though such friendships were severely limited by barriers of language and custom. There was little room for intimacy in such relationships.
Their ambivalent attitude towards other migrants had begun to emerge many years before the time they moved to Neutral Bay. Its seeds were sown during those grim early years in Epping. At a time when several among their acquaintances were beginning to amass those considerable fortunes that were to bring them fame, notoriety and opprobrium, my parents had to contend with a harsh life made even harsher by the environment in which they were obliged to endure those hardships. Both worked very hard, often to the point of exhaustion. After the failure of his first business venture, when he had to seek employment as a weaver, my father worked on the night shift for several years. We would see him briefly in the morning, as he returned home, worn out and ashen-faced, just as I was leaving for school and my mother was setting out for Miss Melville’s clothing factory. We would meet again for a short time in the afternoon. Weekends were taken up with housework, but for my father sleep had to take precedence over everything else.
After a while he stopped snatching any more than an hour or two of sleep on weekdays. Having worked for several months at the weaving mill, he purchased from his employers three or four broken-down looms which they were about to sell for scrap. He rented a disused bakery at the other end of Epping and spent the daylight hours tinkering with and repairing that decrepit machinery in an attempt to get it into working condition. Eventually he managed to scrape enough capital together to purchase a small quantity of yarn as well as a machine (resembling a miniature ferris wheel) necessary for the preparation of the warp, and another for winding yarn onto bobbins, and attempted to follow his former calling as a manufacturer of fine quality cloth. He continued on the night shift for some time, getting hardly any sleep, looking more and more haggard and aged. We spent most of our weekends at the factory, as we now called the old bakery, my mother and I wandering aimlessly round its interior, or in the overgrown yard, while he adjusted the looms, turning a screw here, loosening a bolt there, trying to tease some life out of worn-out metal and timber.
At last the looms were ready. My father gave notice at the mill, employed a weaver and started manufacturing. My mother stayed on at Miss Melville’s for a while to provide us with money to live on, sewing the identical seam on an endless succession of garments, losing a few precious pence of her wages every time the forewoman found a seam unsatisfactory. My father’s business kicked on for a few years, but it was doomed from the start. The age of synthetics was at hand: his looms could only weave unfashionable and unwanted worsted cloth.
After my grandmother’s arrival, my mother left Miss Melville’s. My parents bought a couple of second-hand industrial sewing machines which they installed in the sleepout of the flat. The two women became dressmakers to the neighbourhood; their real income was generated, however
, by piecework—unfinished garments delivered twice-weekly by a clothing manufacturer, a dour compatriot, on which they sewed the hems and put in the zip-fasteners. It was terrible work—poorly paid, unutterably tedious, but they were able to work longer hours at home and so made a little more money. The former grande dame who used to point with a fashionably lacquered fingernail at the details of her Trench’ couturier’s designs, now worked with blunt nails and chapped fingers on ill-designed clothes destined for country stores, or painfully assembled dresses for her clients from patterns purchased at the local haberdashery.
Household chores, which had always been the preserve of servants, proved a dreadful challenge. In the years before my grandmother joined us, my mother had to learn to cook; when her mother took over those duties the standard of our cuisine declined sharply. Washing had to be done at a tub and a huge copper. My mother, a slight, diminutive woman who barely cleared five feet, had to do battle with an enormous cast-iron mangle of the kind that is nowadays seen fetching huge prices in ‘folksy’ decorator shops. Shopping had to be carried for miles in pelting rain or in blazing sunlight. And, always, there was the shortage of money to add worry and anxiety to fatigue. Often there was not enough to make ends meet. Quite frequently we would fail to hang our milk-can on the nail by the gate. When every child at school was expected to make a donation for some worthy cause, mine was invariably the lowest, sometimes a miserable halfpence. There was no money for luxuries. The Morris Minor, bought on hire-purchase at what were then deemed to be exorbitant rates of interest, was needed as a delivery vehicle—my father had toyed with the idea of buying a ‘ute’ but decided that he couldn’t sink so low. We had a car before we could afford a radio. The radio came only because a doctor ordered me to spend several months in bed with suspected rheumatic fever—which turned out to be flat feet. My parents knew that I had always wanted a radio, and since that incompetent physician had warned them that I might not survive the illness, they contracted into another hire-purchase agreement to lighten what might have been the last months of my life.
In such hard circumstances, there was little inclination towards social life. Nevertheless, my parents retained some contact with several acquaintances, and with one or two families whom they had known for many years. Keeping in touch with these people was neither easy nor pleasant. Most of their acquaintances’ economic means far outstripped theirs. Many had already settled comfortably into substantial houses or spacious apartments. Some had begun to develop by the early fifties the flamboyant way of life that was to draw the attention of the Sunday papers to their more outrageous extravagances.
By contrast, we lived in remote and unfashionable Epping. For some years we did not have a car. Visiting involved, therefore, a lengthy and often uncomfortable journey by public transport. And even when my parents accepted an invitation to visit Point Piper or Bellevue Hill, or even Dover Heights or Rose Bay, my mother was always acutely aware of her unfashionable clothes, pitted fingers, poorly-cut hair—in short all the signs of suburban penury. She resented bitterly the way some of these people humiliated her with the poisonous mixture of subtlety and crassness which is characteristic of many Central Europeans. This was to be a source of anguish for many years, the main cause of the terrible crisis in my parents’ married life, when my mother grew strident and vituperative about my father’s lack of success, his failure to achieve what every Tom, Dick and Harry (or rather Tibi, Frizi and Miki) had achieved so easily. I do not know if her bitterness was increased by the recognition that she was in a sense the biter bit: some of those people who humiliated her so effectively no doubt remembered their own humiliation at the hands of the haughty provincial upstart with her airs and graces, her villa, her servants, her furs and jewels, and were now handing out as much as they could in return.
These experiences embittered my mother to such an extent that in later years, when a slight improvement in our financial situation and the passing of time had ironed out some of the differences between her way of life and that of her compatriots, she remained resentful and suspicious in her dealings with them. Her preoccupation became to celebrate, instead, the superiority of her Australian friends: their modest, unassuming life, and their readiness, as she claimed, to accept you for what you were, rather than for what you were worth. There was considerable truth in this, of course. But she could not allow hereself to acknowledge the sad limitations of the friendships she had formed. People were kind to her, well-meaning, at times enchanted by her vivacity (not realising the depths of anger and despair it masked), but all relationships were necessarily circumscribed by insuperable barriers. My parents never progressed beyond a superficial understanding of Australian society. They had neither the skill nor the energy to attempt to learn its ways at all thoroughly.
Their contacts with Australians were, for most of the time, much hampered by their halting command of English and, often enough, by the narrow insularity of some of the people they got to know. In Epping in the late forties and the fifties, it was almost impossible for people as strange and alien as my parents seemed to the isolated and poorly educated inhabitants of that world to form lasting or satisfying relationships. They were strangers in that land, even though they regarded people of their own kind in smart houses and apartments on the other side of the water with a growing sense of distaste. In this way they too were the living dead, restlessly wandering between two worlds.
At length they were driven, despite their disinclination, to seek the company of other expatriates, with whom they did not have to pretend, at least, that all was well in this land of milk and honey. The range of their friends and acquaintances was naturally limited, yet even within that narrow scope they exercised curious and inexplicable choices. They shunned people of similar disposition and personality, often quarrelling with them over a real or an imagined slight, remaining inflexibly vindictive and unforgiving. My mother, especially, elaborated a terrible mythology of insults and betrayals she had endured. These would constantly torment her; she would demean herself by trying to involve others in her resentments. Yet my parents tolerated and forgave others whose behaviour had violated every canon in their code of social conduct, who had exploited them and mocked them behind their backs. One married couple stands out in my memory as representing the extreme effects of this alarmingly neurotic aspect of my parents’ behaviour during our Epping years, the blackest and most depressing period of our life in Australia.
The husband’s family had been landowners in the district where my mother was born. According to my mother, the extent of their holding had been quite modest but, as happened so often, in his accounts it had grown to vast proportions. They had been ennobled in his grandfather’s time through the old monarchy’s attempts to pacify as many as possible of its potentially unruly subjects. He went around Sydney aping, in a way he would not have dared back home, what he considered to be aristocratic ways of behaviour. Totally self-centred, rude, offensive beyond endurance, he treated everyone with an exaggerated hauteur which would have been farcical had it not been so disgusting. He never spoke but always shouted. He affected a slurring of the ‘r’s in what he thought was an aristocratic manner—except when, as frequently happened, he got carried away and entirely forgot about it. His every utterance was laced with scatological obscenities of the most revolting kind.
His wife was a meek, nervous woman, years younger than her appalling husband. She was the daughter of a Jewish banker who had managed to save most of his considerable fortune by transferring his assets to Switzerland in the thirties. Some years later, he even contrived to have his personal possessions—valuable paintings, silver, a priceless collection of Meissen figurines—consigned in a sealed railway wagon to Switzerland at a time when identical wagons were rolling in the other direction, towards Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their human cargo. She lived in awe of her frightful husband, who took every opportunity to shame and humiliate her.
They visited us on Sundays, arriving at lunchtime, but on most
occasions, despite his wife’s entreaties, the former grand seigneur decided to stay on for an evening meal which my parents, in their often difficult financial circumstances, found hard to provide. The whole day would be punctuated by his noisy demands—a glass of water; more of those pickled cucumbers; some coffee; more wine, but not the muck you’ve been serving. He treated us as his servants, without the least trace of politeness or consideration. Everyone was at his beck and call; he issued orders in a stream of the most distasteful obscenities. He would fart loudly at table, drawing everyone’s attention to his skill. He was a dreadful parody of Hofmannstahl’s Baron Ochs (himself a parody) without Hofmannstahl’s wit or Strauss’s captivating music to redeem him.
His performance usually reached its climax at meal-times. As his wife fiddled nervously with the food on her plate—she ate very little, and spoke less—he would mount a tirade against her stupidity, her sexual inhibitions, her pride. ‘She’s so proud of herself you’d think there’s a feather sticking out of her arse’ was his favourite expression. He would invite us to look at her closely; didn’t she have a dumb face? And her appearance—she was a mess. Everything about her drew a scathing comment. She would blush deeply, her head sinking lower and lower towards her plate. These execrations would sometimes give way to reminiscences about the world he had lost: his family’s hunting lodge, their faithful retainers, golden misty mornings, sleigh-rides on moonlit winter nights—cheap images culled from equally cheap fiction. But the relief afforded by these interludes was short-lived. After a few minutes he would revert to his former theme, growing increasingly strident, constantly trying to catch sight of himself in the mirror above the fireplace of our windowless living room. He would turn his fury on his wife’s parents, those filthy Jews, bloodsuckers, living in the lap of luxury in an hotel suite in Lausanne. A pigsty was too good for people who were so lazy they’d shit on the floor rather than take the trouble of going to the bathroom. He would veer off into complicated analyses of his wife’s excretory habits, how she wasn’t able to produce anything, not the tiniest skerrick, unless she had a box of expensive Swiss chocolates beside her. Dear God, she would end up by bankrupting him—whereas, of course, they lived on her money in a comfortable house in a pleasant suburb.
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