Too Young to be Old: From Clapham to Kathmandu (Frank's Travel Memoirs, #1) Read online

  ‘I’ve just about had with him!’ she said, stabbing the sausage in her Toad in the Hole viciously as though it might be Bill’s head. ‘Last night was the final straw.’

  I asked what had happened.

  ‘First, he avoided his bath by going upstairs, ringing his bell continuously, and complaining to all the assembled staff that his dirty trousers had been taken away for laundering. Then he threatened to keep ringing the emergency bell until they were returned. When this didn’t work, he appeared in the dining room in his underpants and staged a hunger strike for his trousers. So I dragged the trousers out of the laundry – they were soaking wet by this time – and said, “There you go, there’s your bloody trousers!” And what did he do? He started loudly bragging that he had all the staff “running up and down” for him. I could have throttled the bugger.’

  The pale-faced young deputy was beside herself with rage.

  ‘What’s Bill’s story, then?’ I asked her. ‘Why does he need so much attention?’

  ‘His wife used to wait on him hand and foot. He nearly starved to death after she fell ill with cancer. He couldn’t understand why she couldn’t come downstairs to feed him. In the end, having waited three days for her to serve up his supper, he went upstairs to see what was going on. She was dead.’

  ‘Well, that explains a lot. Where was he earlier? I didn’t see him during fire drill.’

  Miss McCann permitted herself a wry smile. ‘We locked him in his room. There’s no way we could have Bill on the loose at a fire drill. I’m not sure I’d even let him out in a real fire.’

  I smiled. ‘Have you had a real fire?’

  ‘Oh yes. Last week the alarm went off, the fire brigade turned up, and a load of fireman appeared at Matron’s door. She was inside, shampooing her hair and boiling potatoes. Actually, it was the potatoes that set the alarm off. So she appears in the doorway, with her hair in rollers, and all these firemen pour in. “I was only boiling potatoes!” she cried, but they didn’t believe her.’

  From her glee it was evident the put upon deputy had enjoyed seeing her pompous boss taken down a peg or two. But then she bent forward in an attitude of total seriousness and said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to take the rise out of Matron: do that round here and you’re dead. Only one thing worse than getting on the wrong side of Matron, and that’s getting Parker’s back up. He’ll sack you for sure.’

  Back in my office, I was surprised to find it full of people. First there was old Miss Johnson wanting me to address an envelope containing two chocolate digestive biscuits to a friend in Margate. Then there was Miss Morton, a social worker wanting details of the home. Standing behind her was Mr Seeger with two up-to-date wallpaper catalogues, determined to give me a complete description of his holiday in Madeira. Elderly Mr Reitz had wandered in wondering if I would pay for his Flora margarine out of petty cash, Miss Sutton had followed on to tell me why she couldn’t sleep last night, and Mrs Everitt had tagged along behind her because she had nothing better to do. The developing conga line of curious residents was only broken up by Matron, who burst into my office and shepherded them all out again, barking a terse: ‘They’re my responsibility, dear. If they have any problems, they should come to me!’

  Closing the door on her, I put my hands together and started chanting again. And found myself grinning from ear to ear. ‘So the chaos continues,’ I chuckled inside. ‘How many more surprises can this day bring?’

  As though in answer to the question there was a sharp knock on the door and Mr Parker strode in. ‘I’ve been looking at you, Mr Kusy,’ he said, unexpectedly shaking my hand. ‘And so far, I like what I see. Call me Jack!’

  I was so taken aback, I could hardly speak. ‘Erm...well, thank you...err...Jack. But I haven’t really done anything.’

  The bushy browed tyrant gave me a macabre grin. ‘Anyone who can find my fire sign in less than a minute is alright by me,’ he said. ‘And let me tell you right now, I’m making some big changes round ‘ere shortly. You keep your nose clean and continue to show promise, and you might find yourself included in them. Got it?’

  ‘Got it,’ I said weakly as I let him out, and then my heart began thumping in my chest. Fear, excitement and trepidation all washed over me as I considered the implications of his statement.

  ‘Blimey,’ I thought. ‘Is this chanting working already?’

  *

  As I walked home that night, trudging through the new layer of thin snow papering Clapham Common, I wondered what I was doing working with old people. I also wondered what I was doing in Clapham.

  The answer to the second question was easy. Clapham in the ‘80s was possibly the drabbest and dreariest part of London – a long way from the posh and gentrified “Cla’am” it later became – but I had met and rapidly fallen in love with a pretty little secretary called Christine, who happened to work there. Throwing caution to the wind, I had left the peace and security of my parents’ house and taken a small flat with her just below The Pavement.

  Blonde and petite, and standing not more than five feet on her tippy toes, Christine had a body to die for. Unfortunately, she also had the brain of a 12 year old. Christine was fond of wearing the same pyjamas she’d worn since she was 12 years old, and of cuddling her childhood teddy bear, named Ralph. She was also fond of speaking in baby talk, as in: ‘How is Mister Percy today? Does Mister Percy want to stand up and say hello?’ This was addressed to my penis, which was subjected to vigorous sex at least three times daily. After a few weeks, Percy got bored of saying hello. He most definitely wanted to say goodbye. That did not stop the pea-brained nymphomaniac, however. She simply moved a new boyfriend into the spare room and started bonking him instead. ‘The poor bastard,’ I mentally sympathised. ‘She’ll wear him out in a month.’ But she didn’t, he apparently had a much more resilient Mister Percy than me, and they both ended up getting engaged and moving out. Which left me happily celibate and living on my own at 142 Victoria Rise for the next three years.

  The answer to the first question, what I was doing working with old people, was much more complex. Yes, it did have something to do with pleasing my mother, with finding a job I could hold down for more than five minutes.

  But it had a lot more to do with my grandfather.

  Chapter 3

  My Grandfather

  I’m sure a lot of people have had remarkable grandfathers, but to me – at the young and impressionable age of 27 – mine was the most remarkable grandfather ever.

  He hadn’t made much of an impression on me the first time we’d met. I was only three at the time, and he had flown over from his native Hungary to console my mother, who had just lost my Polish father to a third and fatal heart attack. But if he didn’t make an impression on me, I certainly made an impression on him. On his trousers, to be precise. My mother had failed to alert him to my one word of Polish – ‘Kupa!’ which meant ‘I have to go right now!’ – and since he kept dandling me on his knee instead of rushing me to the toilet, I pooped on his pants.

  The second occasion I met my grandfather was even more dramatic. I was now twelve, and he was back in the UK to attend my mother’s marriage to my step-father, the wonderfully named Bertram Mutton. Precocious to a fault, and unchecked by any male authority for almost a decade, I made the mistake of badmouthing my mother in his presence and instantly regretted it. A sharp slap to the back of my head had me seeing stars. ‘Johnny!’ admonished my grandfather, using my childhood moniker. ‘If you talk like this to your mother, you must be a very bad boy!’

  It was a lesson I took very much to heart.

  In August of ’81, a year or so before I made my rash decision to work with the elderly, my grandfather came to visit for the third time, and I was shocked. Gone was the keen-eyed and stately figure I dimly remembered from my childhood. Now he was nearly blind (from glaucoma) and badly limping from a recent operation. ‘Good Lord,’ I thought when he unsteadily entered the house. ‘How on earth did he get
on and off the plane?’

  I soon learnt the answer. My grandfather had a will of steel. He also, when I sat him down one day and interviewed him (with a mind to documenting my family history) had a remarkably good command of English.

  ‘I first learned English as I was 22 years old,’ he told me. ‘When I was studying at the School for Engineers in Budapest, I get lessons from an old English lady. She was the daughter of the riding master of the Hungarian Queen Elizabeth, Franz Joseph’s wife. But then I get my diploma, I get a position at a great factory – making windmills! – and I have no more time and money for English lessons!’

  Even more remarkable was how many times my grandfather had been up and down in his life. At the start of the first World War, he was sent as an artillery lieutenant to fight the Italians in Albania, and nearly drowned on his return. The ship carrying him home to Hungary ran itself on the rocks off the coast of Yugoslavia, and all but a few of the troops on board perished. His luck was that he had malaria and didn’t jump into the freezing sea unlike most of the other soldiers. He’d felt too cold to leave his cabin, he told me, and was rescued when the ship didn’t go down at all, but was salvaged.

  Back from the war, he landed a very good job in an agricultural machinery factory, and did well enough to get married and have two kids (my mother and my uncle Hunor), but then the Great Depression came along and four out of five of all factory workers in Hungary were laid off. My grandfather was one of them. Undeterred, he struggled on, earning the modern day equivalent of £5 a day (making thread in an English-Hungarian factory) for the next seven years until fortune suddenly smiled upon him.

  ‘I meet my old friend from university, Boronisza – which means “a man who does not drink wine” – at a big dinner in Budapest. He is now the Minister of Hungarian Industry, and he asks me what I am I doing. Then he invites me to come and join him as Chief Engineer for Industry, with responsibility for all Hungarian factories making steel, machinery and iron. A very big job. A beautiful job.’

  ‘Yes,’ chipped in my mother, who had just brought in two cups of cocoa. ‘It was a very good position in the Ministry. His next step, but for the Second World War, would have been Secretary of State, a Cabinet position. But then his wife, my mother, died very horribly of cancer. This was in 1937, and although he held his position right through the war, he was broken hearted. It was terrible blow for him, losing my mother. He idolised her.’

  My grandfather nodded sadly at the recollection. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  ‘Yes, I lose my beautiful wife. And then, in 1945, the Russians came and I lose my position. I also lose my son Hunor. He was wounded in the fighting, and taken to Vienna, but I did not know this.’

  ‘All that we did know,’ my mother continued, ‘was we had to get out of Hungary. Because everyone was bombing us. The Russians bombed us because of the occupying Germans, the Germans bombed us because the Russians were advancing in on them in Hungary, the Americans were using us as dumping ground for any spare bombs left in their planes, and even the English were bombing us – we never knew why.’

  I picked up my cocoa and looked curiously at my two closest relatives. How come I had heard nothing about this before?

  ‘Because you never asked!’ snapped my mother when I posed the question. ‘Honestly, John, you have as much interest in us as a family as a cat bored of its kittens!’

  ‘Well, I’m interested now,’ I said. ‘What happened next?’

  ‘What happened next,’ said my mother, ‘was that I nearly died. The Americans started dropping big “chain bombs” – strings of bombs chained together – and wherever they landed, a great long gash or valley appeared in the terrain. One Sunday I went to church late – I just caught the last Mass – and while I was away the Americans dropped several chain bombs and completely levelled the street where our villa had been standing. I found my father furiously digging in the ruins looking for me. He couldn’t believe I had survived!’

  Over the next hour or so, as I got caught up in the story and my cocoa went cold, my mother filled me in on the true horror of war, as experienced by hapless Hungarians who had lost practically everything overnight.

  ‘Then began the task of digging all our belongings out of the rubble. This was difficult because it was winter and a thick snow covered the ground, but some army officers came over to give us a hand. We recovered quite a lot of our possessions, and loaded them onto sledges and pulled them over to the school for the university students, where the Ministry was located, and where we gained temporary lodging. I came across a school friend of mine. We had only been dancing at a ball the previous year. Now he was in uniform. And I was without a home. We looked at each other, and I said: “Well, that’s life!”’

  ‘So what did you do then?’ I asked. This was the first time I had ever listened to my mother with such attention. Her endless monotone monologues usually put me to sleep.

  ‘Well, all of a sudden, the bombing stopped and everything went quiet,’ she said. ‘The quiet before the storm. A few people decided to get out, and make a dash for Austria. It’s strange, how in times like these, people make so much of belongings. You know, there were mothers and children desperately in need of transport, but the last lorries had left already, weighed down with other people’s heavy luggage and possessions.’

  My grandfather nodded sadly, then broke out in a big smile. ‘Do you remember the swimming suits, darling?’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, the swimming suits. By sheer luck, we managed to get to the Austrian border. One of the Ministry officials, a friend of my father’s, had a car. But by now, all that my father and I had was a rucksack and a suitcase. And because we had left in such a hurry, we had just stuffed them with the nearest things to hand – useless oddments mainly, like half-knitted skirts, and gloves, and an electric iron. I couldn’t believe it when the first thing I found when I opened up my rucksack was a swimming suit!’

  ‘And the first thing I find in my suitcase is a swimming suit also!’ laughed my grandfather.

  ‘That was so funny,’ my mother grinned at me. ‘We didn’t even have a bowl to make pastry or collect water in when we got to my dad’s friend’s sawmill north of Graz, but there was a nice big lake there. We did a lot of swimming!’

  I loved watching the humour and warmth running between my mother and grandfather. They had been through so much together; the bond they shared was so close. But one thing puzzled me: why had my mother gone back to Hungary from Austria when she could have come to England a year or two earlier?

  My mother shrugged. ‘I could have gone West, to England, at that time. But I stayed with my father, and took the first train back to Budapest with him, in May 1945, to continue the search for my brother. When we had left a few months before, we had had two places in Budapest: my grandmother’s house and our own little flat. When we got back, however, there were other people living in them. That was the fortune of war. With so many people losing their homes in the bombings, they just moved into any empty house they could find. And we couldn’t get them out. In fact, that was the law. Possession was ten tenths of the law in wartime. And we were treated like criminals, because we had left Hungary. It didn’t matter that we had left for our safety. Anyone who had moved out at the same time as the Germans was regarded as a Nazi sympathiser. Or a revolutionary. All the Hungarians who had stayed told us we had deserted them in their “hour of need”. They accused us of believing in a Nazi victory, and seemed to have expected us to just stand there and welcome the invading Russians with outstretched arms.’

  ‘This we could not understand,’ murmured my grandfather. ‘I do not hate the Russians, but they were very bad for our people.’

  My mother stood back and regarded him with disbelief. ‘You do not hate the Russians, dad? But they took everything from you – your homes, your lands, your job, your status – and left you with nothing! Let alone what they did to our country. I mean, we could see from the train as were coming back into Budapest, all those
nice little villas and holiday places had been absolutely ruined. The Russians did absolutely everything in them and to them. They completely vandalised them. They said they were bringing “culture” to Hungary, but they brought nothing! Standards of living plummeted immediately. The Mongol troops I saw didn’t even recognise a water closet when they saw it. They thought it was for drinking water from. They pulled the chain, put their cup down the bowl, and drank the water! And they used to kill you for a wristwatch. Because they didn’t have watches. I’ve seen army officers with a string of watches – men’s and ladies’ watches – clear up from the wrist to the elbow. And one even had an alarm clock dangling off the buttons of his army uniform. And he didn’t know he had to wind it. None of them did. So when it stopped, they just threw it away. I tell you, that was the case. And they said they brought us culture!’

  There was an uncomfortable silence when my mother finished her rant. My grandfather shifted uneasily in his seat. I made a mental note never to sing ‘O Chichonia’ in her presence.

  Then she was off again.

  ‘So we didn’t respect them. We couldn’t. Mind you, we didn’t fare much better under the Germans. We were very disappointed in the Germans too. They could have declared Budapest an open city. Instead of which it was left to be totally destroyed. They blew all our beautiful bridges up, just to stop the Russians crossing over from Pest into Buda, where all the fighting was. And it was winter, so the Danube froze over and the Russians just walked across! They didn’t need to destroy our beautiful bridges at all. That was very bad of them. The Russians swept right across Hungary, and pushed up as far as Austria. And they took all the factories and dismantled them all. By the time the Americans arrived, in just a few jeeps, the Russians had been and taken everything. Even our prize racehorses. They rode them up and down and drove them so hard that we had to shoot them. They threw hand grenades into the little lake we used for swimming, and where we used to do our washing. They killed all our fish. And they did it just for fun. They rode into the lake stark naked and on horseback. And when we went to the small outside toilets in the Hungarian camp in Goss, we had to crawl on our stomachs. Because they kept shooting at us. It was a favourite sport for them. They did that for fun too.’