This is a repost of a tiny portion of my original website: I published some of this in my poetry book - see "buy poetry" on the banner menu on my main blog here - here are all travels & travails.
Sunday, 23 March 2025
Life stories: 1957
Escape from the Iron Curtain Map [Previous ¦ Next]
October 1956 saw the invasion of Budapest, Hungary by Yuri Andropov's Soviet tanks. My parents were pregnant with me, and decided that if they ever were going to emigrate, it better be done before I was born - crossing the border in secret with a babe in arms would be well nigh impossible. So Dad got a permit from his employer underhanded (Dad was a geologist working in coal mines then, and his boss, um, left in his drawer the signed notice that allowed him to leave town for work). They went to the New Year's eve party of a friend, who alone knew they would not return home that night. They boarded instead the train bound for the Austrian border, and when police control came by they stayed in the toilets - those were simply holes in the wagon floor, so you can imagine an eight-month pregnant mother enjoying the draft on a cold December night! They disembarked, paid off a farmer boy who led them to the mine fields along the border, which was just being closed after the unrest. They thread their way past the miradors across the border river Laita frozen at this time of the year. Austria was nominally neutral, but it happened to dispatch empty postal lorries along its eastern border, to pick up refugees on foot and ship them to a disaffected train station in Vienna. It had been converted into an immigrant processing center, to which converged head-hunters from Canada, South Africa and Australia among others. Hungarian refugees were mostly white-collar workers with some means and unattached to the land, and thus a rich crop for nations in post-war growth.
2004 add.: When I was at Esri, I managed the Petroleum User Group session at the International User Conference. It hosted SAG (Special Achievement in GIS) awards, and that year the Austria Post was a recipient. So I approached the local distributor's manager, who received the coveted award. After introductions, I told him my recollection of postal lorries patrolling the border at the cusp of 1956 & 1957. He fetched a senior manager about my age, and his eyes went big as saucers: He had heard about it but dismissed it as an urban myth, so it must be true he said. We quickly slid off to safer topics such as where I was born and baptised: few have the chance to be associated with not one but two prestigious locales in Vienna, they quipped.
My Dad's best friend from university (they were born the same day and thus were registered together) found my parents on a bale of hay, and immediately had Mum whisked off to the Semelweiss clinic (named after he who reduced infant mortality by simply instructing nurses to wash their hands before assisting in childbirth). I was born three weeks late no doubt due to the stressful voyage, and a kindly old member of parliament took care of us. He arranged that I be baptised in the Stefansdom (St. Stephen's cathedral), from which I got my middle name. My Dad actually got a job with Exxon in Calgary, but the Canadian government would only ship us from its eastern seaboard. This was the dead of the winter, all liners were full and my parents didn't care to risk the passage with a month-old babe on a cargo ship (either there were no flights then, or they couldn't afford them). So Dad accepted a post in Paris because Mum got a Ford scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. '57 was about as bad as '87 and my Dad bounced among jobs until he landed his career job with the French national oil company which would become Elf a quarter century later. We also moved to southern France and started a new life under idyllic circumstances. Pau was small and not unfriendly as many Spaniards had just emigrated to escape the Franco regime. There were however only two Hungarian families around, and Pau was very provincial in that nothing foreign was available.
Life stories: 1961
Out of the frying pan into the fire Map [Previous ¦ Next]
Dad worked as a geologist for the international team of French national oil company Elf-Aquitaine, and the north African Sahara region was just yielding its riches to seismic and drilling investigation. We thus went to Algiers, but unfortunately landed amidst a revolution, when local chiefly Muslim Arabic people were pushing the colonial French into the sea - we moved seven times in the six months we spent there, and I clearly remember tying my shoelaces the first time outside in the driveway to the boom of distance howitzers. A pump jockey was shot dead for serving gasoline to my Dad's French car - I sat across the window glass when the sharp pop was followed by the thud of a body, the roar of the engine and squealing of tires as my Dad sped off.
In stark contrast I was introduced to the vast expanse and unending light in the Sahara. L'ombre du désert (desert shadow in the sky) as the setting sun cast earth's shadow above the eastern horizon in dusty air. Silent hommes bleus du désert (blue men of the desert) appearing as if by magic on their solemn dromedaries (single-humped camels), then disappearing on their quiet footfalls in the soft sand: tuaregs robed in blue from head to toe, sun-tanned skin stained with blue dye pounded into the fabric with no benefit of water; bright eyes and teeth flash briefly as they turn away with the grace and supreme confidence of desert masters. Bright light and knifing shadows in villages, houses close together to keep out the sun and the heat, awnings bridging buildings and trapping air into suffocating dark corridors infested with flies, cries, kids both children and goats. Men running with a litière, improvised stretcher to rush a body to be buried before sunset per Muslim rule. Women in black chadors and men in white jelebayas, counterpointing the stark sunlight and deep shadows.
Dull winter days in cinder-black houses with tile floors and no heating to cut the chill. Curfews and bodies shrouded in brown paper, which we learned to step over all too casually. War is random: all quiet in one street, the muffled report of a bomb exploding around the corner, crowds rushing to the scene and taking us with them, my parents attempting to turn me away from an empty blood-stained pram akimbo in the rubble. I was young, but my parents had lived through this during World War II then the uprising in Budapest, and their parents before that during World War I, and theirs yet before in the Prussian wars of late 1800s. When would it ever end? When would I stop jumping every time something popped, the exhaust in an old car or gunfire in movies? When would I quit being fascinated by things military? My parents refused to talk let alone cry, a total blackout on anything before my birth. I learned by age four that they might provide for me materially but not emotionally.
Saturday, 22 March 2025
Life stories: 1963
Nirvana at last [Previous ¦ Next]
After the desert debacle, my Dad was offered a plum posting in Brisbane, on the northeastern coast of Australia. We traveled widely thru North America (New York, Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Dallas and LA), S. Pacific (Tahiti, Fiji, New Guinea), SE Asia (Philippines, Japan, Kampuchea, Hong- Kong, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and India no less than twice), as my Dad's firm sent us abroad and then back home at regular intervals as expatriates. My parents could afford all they wanted, a new company car, a large house with veranda and lush tropical garden, delightfully open Aussies and tightly-knit expats (expatriates), private school for me, bridge for Mum, field work in the vast Australian interior for Dad, long road trips up the Queensland coast and the Great Barrier Reef, down New South Wales and the Snowy Mountains. I learned English in no time in the streets with a very broad Queensland accent, ran barefoot and half naked, indulged in swimming, rugby and cricket, and started a 30 year-long love affair with horseback riding and pets. Life was good, at last.
On the downside we were far from what Mum and Dad called home, while I vowed to stay down under. The labor régime brought endless strikes, so much so that cooking stoves had both gas and electric ranges so one could cook regardless. One never knew when mail would arrive from halfway across the world where everything seemed to happen. Alcohol was big, some workers took weekly pay, drank at the pub, and women took the car on Saturday to shop on what money was left by their men. Racism and misogyny were not even perceived as such, and Aussies still turned their backs on their southeast Asian neighbours (giving Sukarno free rein in Indonesia and looking on as the US engaged in Vietnam). The country's socialist traditions mirrored those I knew in France, and thus helped form my political education with more continuity than my peregrinations might initially have lead to believe.
I also learned a lot on life at an early age: I was exposed to eastern religions early and countering my Catholic upbringing. My parents were not really religious, a dislocation that was reinforced by back-to-back French and Australian (read: British at the time) education. History for example was seen so differently by those two former empires, that I relied on dates and place names to recognise matching events! I was only to learn later on that my parents had emigrated with an empty suitcase filled with a rucksack, so they were hard up for cash to early on. They were however well treated by the French government, and afforded privileges not given to native French: refugees' welcome already brought ill feelings from their hosts still learning to cope with the post-colonial era: This would go on through the end of the century, and wrack society post-Soviet régime and -Balkan wars.
Life stories: 1965
Family ties [Previous ¦ Next]
After escaping Hungary and living halfway across the world, my parents finally felt ready to face family again, and we visited both grandmothers in Southern France and Dad's brother's family in Geneva. We daren't return to Hungary, because we had no citizenship as yet. My Mum's Dad had died in prison, having been part of the pre-communist régime, though her Mum lived on alone for almost 30 years (I was closest to her, though I rarely saw her). My Dad's Dad suffered from depression and already could not travel. My uncle was also an expat in Sudan, part of communist régime's help in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia and South America, which wreaked so much havoc for example in Cuba and Vietnam. My uncle was to die soon of untreated cancer, ironic considering that he taught medicine. Resulting unresolved and/or unexpressed grief from my Dad, would further add to tension in the family. For example he would leave for months in the bush for his job and never call back, when I never believed he could not.
Two trips were highlights for me, Papua New Guinea (1964) and New Zealand (1966) in the intervening years the company didn't pay for our trip home. Papuans still saw stone age co-exist with modern era, mountainous interior stayed much as it had before colonisation, and coastal areas thrived in modernity. That really struck me as a youth, and I'll always recall the village festival near Mount Hagen in the Papua highlands. Mountain men had a big toe that was almost like an opposing thumb for climbing up trees and muddy slopes, so imagine my surprise when a man riding a bicycle in loin-cloth and feathered head-dress used his big toe as a brake by sticking it between front tire and fork. Or to see women stick their afro in a pail of bleach and have lighter hair above a straight line over their ears. New Zealand was a less happy experience, as we toured North Island but never reached South Island due to a terrible car accident near Gisborne (it would gain fame later as the first major city west of the dateline and thus into the new millennium). Suffice it to say that while our old car had lap-belts in Brisbane, new shoulder belts in our then-new our rental car saved my parents' lives!
2016 update: what are the chances... Did you know we rented a semi near Cambridge UK, because the land lady joined her Kiwi husband near Tauranga... and that her husband said that, 50 years later it is still a black spot on the coastal road to Gisborne!
Life stories: 1967
Second home and citizenship [Previous ¦ Next]
Mum and Dad and I returned to Pau in southwestern France at the end of an expat cycle, and now we were able to gain French citizenship (our first opportunity was in Algiers when everyone knew he'd be conscripted if naturalised, and our second opportunity was in Brisbane that had no French consulate or embassy, so our application for naturalisation got delayed over a decade). Interestingly enough, only two countries did not let us in with out titre de voyage, travel document, in all our worldly travels until then... by which time I had been around the world twice at age ten! My parents bought an apartment and finally decided that France was it. My Mum having had a hemorrhage after my birth, had not been able to conceive since, but new treatments allowed her to have my sister and brother 18 months apart, over a dozen years after me. Her body took it hard however at age 40 as she was never strong physically, and was ridden by depression as we would learn later. So I ended up raising my siblings as a teen, which proved a disaster for me and an effective psychological contraceptive for my next 25 years...
I worked hard and well through school, and life was good next to the Pyrénées mountains, where Dad bought a condo and I skied and hiked a lot. Also renewed my love affair with horse and pet, in a town with long-standing British traditions (Pau boasted golf-course, casino and horseback riding facilities since the early XIX c., when Wellington fell in love with the place upon returning from a Spanish military campaign). My parents' efforts that I keep up my English also helped me maintain an English-French duality that would become critical later on.
Life stories: 1975
The end of a cycle [Previous ¦ Next]
I earned my baccalauréat with much difficulty, but forged lifelong friendships with three boys and a girl (one boy would die of cancer later, and the girl was to be lost and found again on the internet after 25 years). They were surrogate family, who helped negotiate my challenging teens. I was confused around homeland, got caught up in French student demonstrations and basically learned to dislike France. Civil law didn't sit well with me (one is deemed guilty until proven innocent, unlike common law I knew in Australia), neither did the French manifesto liberté, égalité, fraternité (I thought freedom encouraged initiative and inevitably lead to inequality, while equality maintained by government rules curtailed freedom, and the brotherhood of man did not look good in my world travels and turbulent family history): For example one always had to carry positive identification, and I was once hauled off to the police station during a demonstration in 1968; I was an innocent bystander who left his papers at home, at age 11 when politics and papers are not one's greatest concern!
My parents were also on a down cycle after paradise down under in Australia: Dad's career shunted aside, Mum's weak health, and siblings kicking up all manner of unresolved issues as young ones will do. Closer proximity to Hungary helped little, as we dared not return until well after our naturalisation, just before my Dad's Dad went into the night after a life at dusk. I would later learn that depression is the silent killer, is passed down-generation, and quietly oppresses close ones unawares. It would remain undiagnosed for half my parents' life. I seriously considered escaping this to become a priest, but then again I was wracked by self- inconsistencies, which were to haunt Catholicism in the new millennium. I took a keen interest in both early Christian and early Medieval history, as I saw there the seeds of modern events.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)