BEFORE THE WAR
I WAS BORN
I was born the younger of two sons, a matter I was never allowed to forget. My brother John was 5 years, 2 months and 12 days older and the age difference has always been slightly exaggerated, until it became six years. This falsification of our age difference was a major cause for the constant disagreements between my brother and me.
I also had a cousin, Eva, 3 years older than me, who could have been a sister, because she lived with us during school periods and we holidayed at her village home when we were not together in Budapest. She and John used to lord it over the little bloke, who made up in ferocity, what he lacked in age. In spite of lots of verbal and physical fights, the three of us were reasonable friends, even though adults must have had some difficulty in enjoying us.
On one occasion my Aunt Margit, Eva's mother, became quite hysterical while my brother and I had one of our not infrequent physical confrontations. The poor lady feared that we will be inflicting permanent damage on each other and she burst out crying. She was assured by her sister that her sons usually survive these bouts and will once again be the best of friends until the next fight.
My earliest memory is of my Mother being taken away in an ambulance from the huge block of flats we lived in. The combination of her being in pain and on a stretcher, watched by dozens of people from the building, caused this incident to stay in vivid memory. I can also remember visiting her in hospital, and how I ate her pudding in spite of the all prevailing stink of the ether, which was still making her throw up and retch, days after her operation. She was lucky to have survived an ectopic pregnancy, and was operated on in the nick of time.
She can recall how in the middle of the night my father awoke to her screaming in pain and suggested that she take some pain killers. When her subsequent screams woke him again, all he wanted to know why the stupid maid hadn't telephoned for the doctor, and promptly carried on snoring.
My father was undoubtedly the all-time prototype of male chauvinists, in a country and in an era when such achievement was not easy. At the same time, he was a loving, caring person who tried to get everyone to love him. In this he was not quite successful.
His wife must have adored him, but was not known to say a nice word about him or to him during the 63 years of marriage, which was never softened by the utterance from either side of a friendly word. If they were not arguing or shouting at each other, they were not on speaking terms. They were quite ingenious in finding new grounds to fight about. Yet they were devoted to each other's well being, and were quite friendly to each other when parted. Under these circumstances it was not surprising that they were apart a lot. They hardly ever went on holidays together, nor did they take their children with them.
Father went off on his trips to the watering places in Hungary, and abroad to places like Karlsbad, Abbazia, the Semmering in Austria and to resorts in Switzerland. Mother went to visit her relations or her children who were sent off to have their holidays abroad, so they may learn foreign languages, or were sent to relations, to be out of the way.
During their absences they became very fond of each other. Mother complained about how she was missing him, while he wrote long letters, begging her to mend her ways, and not criticise and not hurt him, and if possible become even more subservient.
The minute they got together, all was forgotten and they were off on the usual shouting match. There are a few classic examples of this happening and they must not go unrecorded.
On one occasion Mother went off with some relations to Felden in Austria, and having been on his own for two weeks, Father decided to travel there and spend a week with her and us children, then 2 and 7 years old.
Mother and the rest of the family and relations picked him up at Felden station and on the walk back to the hotel, he put his arm round Mother, who complained that her hair would be ruined. Father turned round, walked back to the station, bought a ticket and traveled back to Hungary, without as much as saying "Wiedersehen".
Another time Father returned from Karlsbad with an expensive bracelet for Mother. It was handed over and Mother, far from the tactful little downtrodden girl Father would have liked her to be, said: "this is so beautiful that it must have been one of your girlfriends who picked it" at which Father picked up the bracelet, flung it against the wall, and most of the expensive carved gem stones disintegrated.
Eventually the bracelet was returned to Czechoslovakia and was repaired, and Mother still maintains that if it wasn't picked by a woman, it was given to her because Father either got two of them cheaper and gave one to the other lady, or else because he had a bad conscience. Probably both of her assumptions were correct.
It was not really surprising that the children grew up to be rather frightened of our parents. Mother lashed into us with her critical tongue, Father bellowed at Mother, employees, and us - every one. It was not a particularly happy childhood, - but we could not compare, because we hardly had any friends.
The problem was that we were rich. Not terribly rich when measured by the standards of the Western world, but excruciatingly so when compared with the rest of the population around us. We had everything: from a refrigerator to a radio, from central heating to a car. Come to think of it we had more than just one car. We had a number of cars during the weekends, when the chauffeurs of the travelling salesmen had to deliver the cars to stand outside our home, until 5 a.m. on Monday morning, when Father's chauffeur-driven salesmen were off again to get orders for agricultural machinery and farm equipment.
Hungary in the 1930's was in the throws of the depression, just as the rest of Europe. People were unemployed and hungry, while a minority survived with the minimum of inconvenience. We belonged to this minority. Father's business was to supply equipment and specialised machinery and other requisites to the huge farming estates of the aristocracy and church and it was a time when drought animals were being replaced by tractors and farm labourers were replaced by machinery, causing even greater unemployment in the rural areas. In spite of his being most sympathetic to the hardship which farm labourers had to endure, I doubt if this caused any pangs of conscience for my Father, - why should it? Was he to refuse assisting the mechanisation of Hungarian agriculture? Certainly not, his job was to give himself and his family the best of everything, especially as regards the education of his sons. They should have the best education he never had, they should have the best education money can buy.
In any case there was only a limited amount one could do to help the unfortunates who felt the misfortune of the depression. I well remember the beggars on the street and the hungry children, who came to stand outside the footpath tables of the coffee shops, asking to be given a piece of bread by the patrons, until chased away by the waiters.
On one occasion a man was found semi-conscious outside our home and the maid called the police, believing the man to be drunk. In due course a sweating policeman, equipped by a saber they all carried arrived, having had to walk up the hill in the summer heat, and being more experienced in these matters than the maid, pronounced that the man is starving. Indeed the man, having been given some food and milk revived sufficiently to be helped by the policeman to walk downhill.
This particular occurrence was instrumental in my realising that we must have been more privileged than others. It was literally the first time that problems from outside the iron fence surrounding our garden were penetrating to the rather insular society which we, family and the staff were.
The problems of "wealth" were manifold. We lived in those hills of Buda, where those with money congregated, yet we went to school elsewhere. Our school mates lived in the City and had no intention of being bothered with the likes of us, who had to go home after school. At home, we were not encouraged to play on the streets - on the hill there weren't any level streets to play on anyway. There were some unused blocks of land, and we played football with some other kids sometimes, but something was always wrong with those other kids. Mostly they were not supposed to be good enough for us.
We were supposed to find our friends amongst our relatives, with whom we were thrown together, whenever Mother visited her many distant relations or they were invited to visit us. The invitations depended on the scholastic capabilities of the offspring of the particular relation and we were instructed to become friends of those relations who were studious, in the hope that their example will rub off. There was nothing wrong with the idea, except that neither John nor I had any contemporaries amongst our relations.
It was not understood by our parents that we missed having friends. Not having the same mobility as they had, we could not be where our school mates were. We were envious that they were able to meet each other and get to know girls, visit other kids, go to movies, etc. We had to get up earlier than our classmates to get to school on time from the "villa" on Rózsadomb (Rose Hill). When school was over, we had to hotfoot it back to our house on the Hill; the sweet excitement of watching the girls parading up and down the Boulevards of Budapest was not for us. Poor little rich boys!
At the same time we were always told that we were poor. We had less pocket money than the others, because we were not allowed to know that we were better off. Our good clothing could only be worn at family parties, but when we went visiting poor relations, we were not allowed our best suits. We only had toys and belongings if they helped us in our school work. We could have gold nibbed fountain pens, but no cowboy outfits. We had a Bechstein piano, but no football. We could not play the piano and we weren't that good at playing soccer either.
We had cars going from the house to Father's office next door to the school, but we had to catch the bus. If by some miracle we got a lift, the chauffeur was instructed to drop us off some distance away from the school, so our class mates would not realise that we were not as poor as they were; or as poor as their parents told them that they are.
We had no family life as such. My father visited the "Club" with his friend Julius, a solicitor, every afternoon and had dinner there or where ever. There is no doubt that he had affairs and probably always had a "steady" but conducted his affairs as discreetly as he could, and was satisfied that as long as he was discreet and provided the family with a lovely home and the trappings of well being, his responsibility ended.
He has certainly looked after his family well, or at least he was convinced that he had. He got a famous architect to design the house on the Hill for himself and the family. The architect was famous because he built a row of buildings on the shores of the Danube for thousands of people to live in flats, - he could not have been famous for designing practical homes for families.
We had a two story house, where we had two large rooms for sitting with and entertaining visitors, a dining room which was the same size as the two lounge rooms, - combined. To get into either of the lounges you either had to go out to the entrance hall, i.e. the staircase or else walk through the dining room, which was also the only way to get to the enclosed verandah, supposed to be the place for family togetherness. There was no way to approach the kitchen without passing the downstairs toilet, outside of which was the only place in the house, where an icebox and later the electric refrigerator could be placed.
It must be pointed out that the downstairs toilet was usually in use before meals by one of the six people entitled to use it and when being used by my father it's door was always open during and after. Thus the smell of the food, the kitchen and the toilet blended into a smell which I can still recall.
There were further examples of architectural stupidities upstairs. The largest room there was the laundry. Every single item laundered had to be carried downstairs, through the kitchen and hung in the backyard and then carried back to the laundry to be ironed. There was no shower, but that was in accordance with contemporary practice in Hungary. The bathroom had no hot water supplied to the bathtub, thus summer or winter the chip heater had to be lit if anybody wanted to have a bath. In the mean time in the cellar a fire was kept going all the year round to supply hot water to the bidet, and even to the tiny circular basin installed especially for washing one's teeth. However no hot water was available in either the bathroom, kitchen or the laundry.
The house was quite large and thus it was ingenious to design it in such a way that it contained two bedrooms only. Thus my parents lived in one bedroom and, with an interconnecting door between the two bedrooms, my brother, cousin Eva and I lived in the other, as well as a governess, when we had one. And we actually lived in that bedroom, because that was the place where we three had to do our home work, play, sleep and conduct our fights. When in 1939, John left Hungary and vacated our shared bedroom, he was a month off 18, Eva was 16 and I was approaching 13. Quite extraordinary, especially because of our home being used filming movies, as being one of the outstanding homes of that era!
Admittedly, the upstairs area also had a room for two of the maids, the size of which allowed for two beds and nothing else. Their wardrobe had to be kept in the laundry but their skirts were stored under their beds. Hungarian peasant women wear up to 15 skirts (simultaneously) and therefore none of them would have had less than 30 to 50 skirts, hence the need for permanent under-bed-storage facilities.
The lady who came once a month to saw our shirts, pajamas and underwear had to sit at the top of the stairs, - there was no room elsewhere to set up our pedal operated Singer sawing machine, nor was there any room to store the clothing required by the three younger members of the family.
Lots of space was taken up by areas hardly ever used including our Hungarian veranda and the balcony used only once a year to watch the fireworks on St. Stephen’s day.
It could not have been a more impractical house, but it was pretty, - from the outside.