Cultural Mismatch

In spite of the many obvious differences between Hungary and England, there are of course, many similarities. Both being nominally Christian countries, we share the main festivals of Easter and Christmas.

Christmas is marked in both countries by the excesses of present- buying and an over-indulgence of both food and drink; also the coming-together of family members, which results in varying amounts of tension and stress alongside the joy and warmth. Yet here the similarities seem to end.

In the run-up to Christmas, Hungarians – along with a number of other European nations – celebrate the coming of St. Nicholas on December 6th. Children put polished shoes in window sills, hoping for chocolate, and not the birch twigs which denote a naughty child! In England, however, having long ago abandoned the celebration of saints’ days, St. Nick has been shunted on to Christmas Eve, and December 6th has no significance at all. Similarly, as in much of Europe, presents in Hungary are given and received in the darkness and candlelight on the evening of the 24th December, as opposed to the morning of the 25th as in England.

English shops are already selling crackers and Christmas cards from September, while in Hungary there is barely a sign of the coming festivities until the beginning of December; London’s lights are switched on in Oxford Street at the beginning of November, but the Hungarians are then still visiting the graveyards (November 2nd, All Souls) where their relatives lie, covering their tombs with white chrysanthemums and lighting candles.

All over Britain, artificial trees can already be glimpsed in the sitting rooms of houses from any time late in November, gathering dust, their novelty waning as the weeks pass. In Hungary, several varieties of pine tree can be found in open-air markets around the city, at busy squares and traffic intersections, from the second week of December, and artificial trees are only now being bought by a minority of people. The truly magical atmosphere of Andrássy út, with its hundreds of thousands of tiny white lights in the branches of every tree lining the entire length of the avenue, illuminated from the beginning of December, also contrasts sharply with that of London and its more gaudy decorations.

In Communist times an attempt was made to rid the country of such an obviously Christian festival, and in the 50s the government declared the days to be The Celebration of the Pine Tree - proponents of today’s political correctness might take some inspiration here…. But like all such contrived nonsense, people celebrated as they always had: churchgoers attending midnight mass, others lighting candles and preparing for the family meal on the 24th. The 25th and 26th are, likewise, bank holidays – no rushing to Boxing Day sales, only family visits and more feasting.

One of the year’s busiest shopping days in Britain is the the 24th, Christmas Eve, while in Hungary the morning sees the final, frantic preparations towards the meal and present-giving that takes place after dark, in the afternoon. The tree – which has been kept cold on the balcony or propped up somewhere outside – is brought in and decorated (young children are taken to the cinema by grandparents so that the sight of the decorated tree – traditionally brought by the baby Jesus – is as exciting for children as the presents themselves).
By four o’clock public transport has stopped and the city is quiet and peaceful as on no other day of the year. Homes sparkle and shine, the food is almost ready, relatives have arrived dressed in their finest, and after a candle-lit dinner of fish (or more recently, turkey) the gifts are opened.
Merry Christmas to all the readers of this blog – however you celebrate it!

Twenty Years On / Part Two

Twenty years is a long time – particularly if viewed as half the number of years that Communism dominated the lives of people in this part of the world. Many of the ills bemoaned by those living here - from pollution and poor customer service, to reliance on the state to solve one’s problems, and a poor work ethic - are all ascribed to the evils of the system that cast its shadow on every aspect of people’s lives for four decades.
I may not live to see the close of four decades of freedom, but at this halfway stage I can stand and look back at what has been achieved and what is still left to be done: I try to gauge what has been gained and what has been lost.

Leaving Britain in 1982 and heading for a new life in a totalitarian state was greeted with disbelief by family and friends. At the height of the Cold War, they could neither imagine nor believe that anything on the ‘wrong side’ of the iron curtain could be better than what we were voluntarily leaving behind us.
Similar perplexity was expressed by Hungarians we came to know in Budapest – surely everything must be better in our home country; was there some ulterior motive for our decision to abandon the Motherland?
Try as we might, our explanations on both fronts proved largely fruitless. Our letters from home were opened, Paul’s presence and activities in the Music Academy were monitored, and we overheard British Embassy staff voicing doubts as to our real purpose for coming to the country. It seemed that neither Hungarians nor the British accepted that we might have anything other than suspicious reasons for staying. Quite simply, neither side saw anything but hardship and deprivation in communist Hungary.

It would be foolish to assert there was nothing amiss; great swathes of writing attest to the ills of the system as it was. Many foreigners are at a loss to understand why anyone should feel an ounce of nostalgia for those years of communist dictatorship, and comparatively scant sources exist to counterbalance a decidedly lopsided picture.
We found in Hungary a cohesive society where everyone was ‘poor’ (by today’s reckoning) but no-one was destitute. We could all pay our bills without the slightest worry (including the phone bill, if we had one!) Food was plentiful and cheap – if variety was lacking, we nevertheless ate well and without a thought for the cost. Everyone had employment – yes, of course maintained artificially, but it guaranteed an income, an absence of homelessness and a feeling of belonging to the society in which we all lived. The three basics of existence (a roof over one’s head, warmth and food) were supplied at little or no cost.
The education system extolled excellence in the form of both grammar schools and vocational training, alongside specialist tuition for anyone with talent in any field from sport to music. The health service had no waiting lists of any sort, and medicines were available at nominal cost. Family life – in the absence of more colourful distractions – remained strong, and friendships thrived in a world where no email or text messaging existed, and where with a dearth of telephones, personal meetings were the usual form of communication. Nursery education from 6 months of age was free, and 3 years’ maternity leave with your job back, was also guaranteed.
There was virtually no crime: life was peaceful, and in a society where work was not taken over-seriously, we had a great deal of leisure – the word stress (stressz) then being blissfully non-existent in the language!

And if we could not (easily) buy the latest hi-fi or car, books cost pennies, a ticket to the opera or the cinema was a mere 10 forints, and a restaurant meal with a taxi home was within everyone’s means.
The feeling of ‘us’ (ordinary people) and ‘them’ (the Communist Party / Russians) bound even strangers together: all of us living in a system which - through helping one another - could be circumvented or overcome. Those one helped today, could help in turn tomorrow. The result was akin to the camaraderie one reads of in the war.

The abolition of the border opened the proverbial Pandora’s box. The ills we had sought to describe in a vain attempt to rationalise leaving England, such as unemployment, vandalism, a society where the only value put on anything is monetary, homelessness, job insecurity, a fragmenting society where each looked out only for himself (these were the Thatcher years), were suddenly made real.
Unfortunately, the dreams Hungarians had cherished: that the country would become the financial equivalent of Austria, have not come to pass. They have acquired the dark side of western living, without the compensations.

I remember in about 1990 – when political jokes were still a part of everyday life – being asked this one: How is Hungary both a communist and a capitalist country? The answer: we have communist wages - and capitalist prices….

Twenty Years On / Part One

I had seen the huge celebrations in Germany: Angela Merkel standing alongside French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: foam dominoes falling, fireworks showering the cheering crowds, and concerts marked the occasion. Gordon Brown commented on “the unbreakable spirit” of those Germans who had dreamt so long of freedom, and said, “Two Germanys were one, and now two Europes are one.”
In the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the twentieth anniversary of The Baltic Way was celebrated – when in 1989, more than a million people joined hands across the three countries forming an unbroken chain, and which led to the restoration of independence of these countries.
As I watched the giant screen in Prague, counting down the years to that of the momentous happenings of 1989 on the news , I wondered if I had missed something here in Budapest.

Commemoration there was – but celebration…? The opening of the Hungarian border with Austria which took place on August 19th, 1989, and which heralded subsequent events in other Soviet bloc countries, was marked by a visit from Angela Merkel to the spot where it took place. Having grown up in East Germany she must have felt particularly that, ‘What Hungarians did here was very brave.’
October 23rd, the anniversary of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets which was brutally crushed, was also used to commemorate the declaration of the Republic of Hungary declared on that same day, twenty years ago.
But there were no street parties, no laser shows and fireworks, no joyous celebration of the long-won freedom Hungarians had craved, and which marked the anniversary in neighbouring countries.

Hungarians are not famous for their upbeat optimism, and it has certainly been in short supply in the last years. Paradoxically, when I first visited the country in 1978, and when we subsequently came to live here in 1982, it was precisely their jovial good humour and ability to laugh in the face of some of the absurdities associated with living in a planned economy, that struck me about Hungarians. They would not, probably, have described themselves as happy; they felt only too keenly the ‘punishment’ of being on the wrong side of the curtain, and longed for the freedom to travel and to have access to the perceived streets of gold they envisaged on the other side of the border. Yet for the most part they accepted the status quo and learnt how to make the best of the situation in which they found themselves, even taking pride in the imaginative ways they found of circumventing rules and regulations to get what they wanted. This in sharp contrast to the oppressive atmosphere we experienced at the same time in the GDR and Czechoslovakia.

I doubt many newcomers to this country would come to the same conclusion now in 2009, some twenty years on. Illusions of dramatically improved living standards and well-being have quickly been replaced by envy of the minority who have – by fair means or foul – achieved monetary success. Disappointment and sourness, feelings of betrayal and having been cheated, can be observed on many a face around the capital. The right to vote in a democratic election offers little solace to those unable to pay their utility bills, far less a foreign holiday.
It is hardly any surprise then, that this twentieth anniversary should have been so muted. While it is unarguable that many improvements have been made to buildings and roads, and that life is easier on many levels from dealing with bureaucracy to shopping, the mood is gloomy. Polls show that the majority of Hungarians feel they have not benefitted from the new system, and that the changes have been bad for the country as a whole.

I suspect that those who could have organised more extravagant events to mark the 1989 anniversary, thought better of it.

BKV

Budapest’s public transport company (BKV) certainly attracts its fair share of criticism. I would venture to say that the majority of this comes from the indigenous population rather than from visitors or foreigners living in the city, though tourists who have run foul of ticket inspectors for whatever reason, have their own stories to tell.

Having shared my life almost exactly between England and Budapest, I feel able and justified to express my own opinion:
It is certainly true that public transport is no longer cheap – I compare it with my first years here when a tram or metro ticket was 1 forint, a bus ticket 1.50 forints (that is, one forint 50 fillér – there were 100 fillér to the forint - the extra to cover the cost of petrol) and a monthly pass 110 forints – this at a time when the state wage was 3,000 HUF. The current price of a monthly pass at 9,400 forints is therefore proportionately higher when taken as a percentage of the current average wage of approximately 130,000 forints.
This may account for a strongly held grudge among many people, that somehow public transport should be free – I have been witness to a number of incidents where strong resentment was voiced at the cost of the pass, and where the traveller stated he had no intention whatsoever of purchasing a ticket, far less of paying the fine he had incurred.
Clearly, this is nonsense. I have yet to hear of such a place where public transport is provided free. The possibilities for avoiding paying for a ticket obviously vary from one place to another. In London there is no easy way of avoiding paying (considerably more) for your tube or bus through the city. The tubes are, for the most part, shabby, claustrophobic and overcrowded, and frequently the seats are covered with empty drink cans and newspapers. At weekends engineering work can add substantially to one’s journey time entailing long waits and diversions.

Public transport in Budapest is presently free for pensioners, including those from other E.U. countries. Having bought a weekly pass for two visitors from England this summer, I was stopped by an inspector – not (as I expected) to check the validity of our tickets, but to ask the age of my companions, explaining that if they were 65 years old we should return to the ticket office and ask for a refund!
Last weekend, by contrast, we were with a friend who lost her ticket, and we had a fairly unpleasant – and totally fruitless – altercation with the inspectors. My annoyance at their refusal to give her the benefit of the doubt, is occasioned by the fact that I see on a daily basis, people who are regular fare-dodgers escaping the 6,000 Forint fine she was forced to pay. Trams and buses are crowded with people who do not buy tickets, but if they are fast enough to run off, big enough to be intimidating, or unwilling to be drawn into any sort of discussion with the inspectors, they are simply permitted to alight at the next stop – where quite obviously they wait for the next tram to continue their journeys. Those – like our friend – who come into none of the aforementioned categories is thus coerced into paying the fine and thereby subsidising those who refuse to pay – along with those of us who buy the ever more expensive monthly pass.

Away from cost, I have to admit to still enjoying the sheer variety of ways I can reach any destination in the city. And I have yet to hear anything but admiration and envy from English visitors who marvel at the frequency at which trams and buses arrive.
I also continue to enjoy my travels on the lesser-used trams – as the number 17 – where we are frequently greeted by the driver with, “A very good morning to you!” as he climbs into his cab at the front. Or the occasional eccentrics – often trolley-bus drivers – who regale their passengers with a running commentary on the weather or the state of the roads.
The strangest journey I had on a trolley-bus was one evening when, after stopping to allow me on, I not only found I was the only passenger, but that the driver drove past every successive stop ignoring the waiting passengers there! I pressed the button to get off just before the terminus – I wondered if he would stop; he did, but the ride remains a mystery.

Maybe the most unusual journey I did was from the Farkasréti cemetery down to Moszkva tér. The tram was covered in garlands of flowers, festooned over the front window and along both sides of the entire length of the vehicle. When we reached Moszkva tér, people were waiting with more flowers in their arms to bestow on the driver. The reason: he was retiring after some thirty years of completing that same run, and both flower sellers outside the cemetery at one end, and his regular passengers at the other, wanted to show their appreciation.

BOOK LAUNCH

The launch of my two books Now You See It, Now You Don’t (Hungary 1982-1989) and House of Cards (1989-1996) took place at Treehugger Dan’s Bookshop in Lázár utca on Friday evening, 20th November.
Following the usual doubts one might have when planning such an event – that no-one will turn up on a cold, foggy November night at the end of a week’s work - the new worry became whether there would be enough room for everyone! In the event more than one hundred people came, the last was almost stranded in the street unable to force her way in, and the wine was sold out by the end of the evening!
The guests were introduced by Miklós Molnár, the publisher of the book, who kept up a humorous dialogue with the audience throughout the evening. A wonderfully erudite talk was given by Péter Pásztor – a former colleague of mine from the days when we both taught in the English department at Pázmány Péter University, and who works as a translator of literature, art history and other books. He also translated my first book into Hungarian. Following this, Caroline Bodóczky talked of her own arrival in Hungary 1966, and related other anecdotes similar to those she had found interesting or amusing in the book. Caroline was the first British person I met in 1983, almost 18 months after we had arrived in Budapest – communications at that time being limited to telegrams and personal meetings, which slowed everything down!
It was a great evening, and particularly heartening to see so many old, and not-so-old, friends who had come to support the event, as well as others whom I did not know.

Thanks also to Dan for helping make the evening a success. Books are available in both of his shops – the one in Lázár utca, and that in Csengery utca.
Thank you to everyone who came!

NOW YOU SEE IT, NOW YOU DON'T / HOUSE OF CARDS

Book Launch

The title of my blog is taken from that of my first book about Hungary, published in 1998.
When we arrived to live in Budapest in 1982, there were fewer than a dozen British people then resident in the country – all of them married to Hungarians. We knew none of them, and in fact met the first (who herself had arrived in the 1960s!) about eighteen months after we had arrived.
As we approached the end of the Communist period, I felt that someone should describe a life that was unimaginable and incomprehensible to all those who had not shared the experience. I turned to the dozen compatriots whose arrival in the country had preceded our own, but none, it seemed, was planning such a venture.
Interestingly, there are a number of books about the war years and about 1956, and indeed, learned and scholarly books detailing the history and politics of the era, yet none answered the question we were so often asked: But what’s it like – living in a Communist country?

Now You See It, Now You Don’t was my attempt to rectify this: to describe a way of life which outlawed the use of photocopiers, where no English language newspaper could be had except in an embassy (or occasionally a dollar shop), where only around 10% of people had a telephone, and where there was virtually no contact with the outside world, except via letters that took weeks to get to their destination – if they did at all. There were, of course no computers, no internet, no satellite television – in fact, no television broadcasts at all on Mondays! No tabloid press, no pulp fiction, and the most modern western-made film (which was literally shown for years), was Hair! A country where everyone earned 3,000 forints a month, where a tram ride was 1 forint, a bread roll 30 fillér (100 to the forint), and where a ticket to the opera was 20 forints! No income-tax, road tax or insurance existed; there were no bank accounts, and even buying a flat was done in cash!

There is hardly an item in a present-day supermarket that was available in the 1980s. Occasionally I look around me as I stand in Kaiser’s or Tesco’s and realise that this is indeed the case. Such ordinary items as bananas or oranges were available only at Christmas, and if you were prepared to queue for a good long time. Broccoli, leeks and zucchini were unknown; disposable nappies were unheard of, and such everyday necessities as toilet paper or washing powder were sometimes absent from shops for days or weeks. In fact, there was never any guarantee of finding anything that had not been grown, in season, in this country.

Such information is not the stuff of history books, but (hopefully) gives a much more vivid insight into what it meant to wake up every morning and go to work in a world which has now almost completely disappeared. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that no-one (other than English teachers) could speak two words of the language, meaning we were forced to learn theirs! There was absolutely no way round this!

House of Cards is the sequel which I wrote about five years later. I had not intended to write another volume, but felt compelled to do so as I observed the reality of the dual effects of democracy and capitalism both on Hungary, and its people. For the seven years of living here before the change, we witnessed the almost obsessive desire of Hungarians to travel out of the country, (in extreme instances, to defect) and ideally, to belong to The West. They would accept no criticism of the system we had left behind, whether its unemployment (non-existent in a Communist state), homelessness or poverty.
Now we watched as these same phenomena arrived over the border. Confident predictions that Hungary would soon enjoy a standard of living akin to that in Austria, began to fade.
Marriages crumbled as loans were secured for houses which lay half-finished for years, their owners’ extravagant plans exceding their means. Subways filled with the homeless, and the threat of unemployment undermined people’s previous security; utility bills and public transport costs increased by leaps and bounds, and some began to question if this was really the Promised Land they had so long awaited.....

These two books are now published in one volume.
I look forward to seeing everyone who might be interested in reading them -

Friday, November 20th, at 7.30 p.m.
Treehugger Dan’s Bookstore,
16 Lázár utca, Budapest
(behind the Opera House)
www.treehugger.hu

The Post Office: Part Three / The Postman

The postman in Hungary occupies the equivalent position in the social fabric, to the milkman in Britain. And maybe like the milkman, whose role and importance have faded with the dawn of Tetrapak and Tesco’s, he has been superseded by email and a banking system.

In humorous exchanges, the postman has been credited with a motley band of children who somehow do not seem to have inherited the genes of their parents: those who have red hair (when all their family are dark), or who are any kind of family misfit!

This aside, the Hungarian postman of yore adopted a number of roles: the first was as deliverer not only of letters, but bringer of monies. With no banking system before 1989, it fell to him to deliver pension money on the 2nd of each month. The elderly would loiter on the walkways above courtyards, leaning on railings awaiting his arrival; we also waited for sundry payments for translations completed or recordings done. When the cash was handed over, it was customary to share a small amount of one’s earnings with the postie – always a good investment, in view of the fact that the postman had powers far in excess of those the job would normally incorporate.

As the only person guaranteed to make a daily visit to every building, he was uniquely placed to observe any irregularities in the lives of its occupants. For example, when flats were still state-owned and rented by their tenants, conditions for their ‘inheritance’ when the occupier died, were complex. Grandparents made sure their grandchildren were registered as living with them, because in the event that they had failed to do this, the grandchild had no hope of inheriting the right to rent the flat when he would later need to do so. The ‘flat problem’ in communist Hungary, ecplised every other social problem. Those without this possibility could be condemned to fifteen years on a waiting list before being granted their first state flat.
Most children – naturally enough – lived with their parents. Visits to grandparents were made with varying degrees of regularity to reinforce the pretence, but the truth could not be hidden from the postman. He would know perfectly well the reality, that no child was living with them, since he chatted to all those to whom he took their pensions. It was probably unlikely he would betray anyone to the authorities, but it did no harm to give him the odd ‘tip’ for money or a parcel brought upstairs to your flat door, just in case….

Our own case was similar when we moved to a flat with a telephone. Applications for telephones also incurred waiting lists of twelve to fifteen years. Moreover, they ‘belonged’ to the tenants of the flat, and could be taken with their owners to any new flat they moved to.

Luckily, the previous owners of our flat did not need to take their phone with them, since their new home already had one – a very rare circumstance. Yet the only way we could prevent this most precious of commodities being confiscated from us and given to the lucky person at the head of the waiting list, was to maintain the pretence that the old owners were still resident in the flat. To this end, we had nothing more to do than take the monthly pay-in slips to the Post Office, and pay the bills.
Of course, the postman knew very well the true situation. The old owners had lived there some thirty years, and the postman had obviously had this same round for a similar length of time. Thus, when we moved in, he came up the sixty-odd stairs to introduce himself to us. Having satisfied himself as to what manner of residents we were, he dropped in a casual question regarding the phone. We explained that the old owners were not taking it with them; we would continue to pay the bills. A knowing look passed between us: an unspoken conspiracy.

He arrived some weeks later with a parcel of books for Paul. There was nothing to be paid for this service if the books were posted from within Hungary, and yet I felt I would enquire.
‘No. Nothing to pay,‘ he said, ‘but they are very heavy.’
His meaning was not lost on me. I went to find my purse….