Reluctant Refugee

M Decsy George

Description

Hands up! Who wants to be a refugee?I certainly did not!My mother had other ideas.For a fateful moment the iron fist of oppression eased its grip.This was all she needed.We crossed two borders.The physical barrier was easy.The culture gap was harder to bridge.This story is about human foolishness, selfishness and frailty. Yet above all, the enduring courage of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Brown Dog Books
• Date de parution: 21 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839521669
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Reluctant Refugee
Are lingering memories worth retaining?
The Reluctant Refugee
George M. Decsy
First published 2020
Copyright © George M. Decsy 2020
The right of George M. Decsy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership, 7 Green Park Station, Bath BA1 1JB
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-165-2 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-166-9
Cover design by Danzig Decsy Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK
This book is printed on FSC certified paper
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1: Tooting Bec, London 1989
Chapter 2: Getting Ready
Chapter 3: Budapest, Hungary 1956
Chapter 4: The Beginning
Chapter 5: Buda 1956
Chapter 6: The Border
Chapter 7: England 1957
Chapter 8: Bad News
Chapter 9: The Orphanage
Chapter 10: A New Name
Chapter 11: The Visit
Chapter 12: Mayfield College
Chapter 13: Reunited
Chapter 14: The Road Trip
Chapter 15: The Final Frontier
Chapter 16: The Meeting
Epilogue
PROLOGUE:
If you asked me where I’m from my answer would be England. This is the land that welcomed, nurtured and educated me. I am grateful for that.
Yet there is a part of me that will always be the refugee, the ‘other’, the onlooker, the outsider, the stranger.
Is the place we call ‘home’ a mere accident of birth or where one finds comfortable refuge? Is ‘father’ the unwitting sperm donor or the man who is there to catch you when you fall, shows the way when lost, tucks you in, reads you to sleep?
To seek answers to these pressing questions I make plans to take my family on a journey back to Hungary.
In my eagerness to belong, to settle in my new home, I have purposefully remained ignorant of the land of my birth.
Now, driven by recent events I am keen to take the measure of the land and its people.
To connect with my childhood friend Laci and above all to find this mythical man, this ghost, this legend, my father.
Does he know of me, who I am, where or how I live?
Probably knows no more of me than I know of him.
We are adrift in time separated by space, I am determined to close the gap.
CHAPTER 1
Tooting Bec, London 1989
Panting, her tongue lolling, Jessie stood waiting patiently as I fiddled with the keys. Removing the padlocks, I squatted, gripped the shutters with both hands and in an Olympic-style snatch, jerked them past the bent bit. The Brixton Riots a few years ago had stimulated some local activity, and a half-arsed attempt to breach the outer defences had left a bit of a kink in the mechanism. The ‘emporium’ was open for business.
Jessie pushed past me, making straight for her mat behind the counter and flopped with a grunt to snooze.
A fine example of her breed, and a well-loved family pet, but a reluctant deterrent.
When her doggie suspicions were aroused the shiny canines behind snarl-curled lips were indiscriminately bared at all customers including, often, regulars bearing treats.
She was reliably inconsistent.
In spite of me nudging her gently with my feet under the counter she managed to slumber through two strong-arm robberies in the last 7 years. I loved that dog. I hardly had time to turn the lights on before the first of my Friday visitors edged up to the window. I hesitate to call them customers as they rarely bought anything.
Except for ‘Radio Man’. He was the first to arrive. Cupping his hands to shade his eyes from the reflected morning sun, he peered at the dusty, haphazardly displayed merchandise on offer.
Satisfied all was well, he straightened up, leaving a greasy smudge on the glass. No matter, this is the day a man claiming to be a window cleaner was due to smear a dirty rag around the window.
‘Radio Man’ was unpredictable but could be relied upon to spend a good deal of his weekly allowance on cheap transistor radios. Opening the door he shouted, “Hello… I am here!” Jessie just twitched an ear.
Stumbling over the threshold, his slight frame burdened by many more layers of clothing than the August temperatures warranted, he shuffled menacingly towards me, a clear indication of the effects of his medication, Thorazine.
In his outstretched right hand was a jumble of multi-coloured wires bursting out of an orange plastic box.
Jessie snoozed on.
“It doesn’t work.” Clutched in his grubby hands was what once had been a small, orange plastic transistor radio.
He squinted at me through thick lenses of skewed glasses astride his thin, pointy nose.
The whole effect was of a rather confused weasel with a roll-up seemingly glued to his bottom lip.
“What have you done now?” I chided him gently, annoyed that he was so early.
“Let me see it.”
Somewhat reluctantly he handed it over. At a glance I saw that since his last visit the previous Friday, for reasons known only to him and perhaps his minders, he had rewired the internal circuitry of the radio with predictable results.
It was what we in the trade referred to as ‘beyond repair’. I threw it in the bin and reached up for a replacement.
“I’m out of orange, I have blue, red, grey and white.” He settled for red. I prised the cover off of the battery compartment, inserted two fresh double As, and turned it on. Tinny music emanated from the washer-sized speaker. Retailing at £6.95 it was not what one would call high fidelity.
I pressed him. “Why do you keep fiddling around with it? If you move even one wire it will stop working.”
Scanning the shop left and right, satisfied that we were alone, he leaned in conspiratorially. “I am talking to Mars.” It was a slow morning and my curiosity was aroused.
“What do you talk about?”
He opened his gap-toothed mouth to speak but was suddenly distracted by the contents of the large, brown ceramic ashtray lurking behind the Duracell rack.
Yesterday it had taken Mrs. White ten minutes of idle chit-chat and two king-sized Marlboros to ask me to sub her a tenner until she could get down to the P.O. to pick up her pension. The maroon smudges on the filters hinted at a much younger, sexier woman.
Radio Man pointed to the ashtray. “Can I have those?”
“Help yourself, mate…take whatever you want.” Without hesitation he fished the fag ends out of the tray and put them on the counter.
Reaching deep, he unburdened the pockets of his heavy overcoat, laying the contents next to the dog-ends.
In no particular order: Two grubby, snot-encrusted handkerchiefs; a cast metal double-decker London bus; Golden Virginia tobacco pouch; orange plastic BiC lighter; a small notebook with an elastic band around it; a handful of coins; and finally a jumbo-sized box of matches with no lucifers but housing a rather large and shiny cockroach-like beetle. As the creature made no attempt to escape I assumed it was dead. He added Mrs. White’s leavings to the collection.
“What about those?” He pointed to the empty ashtray.
“What about what?”
“Those!”
“WHAT!?”
This could go on.
There was nothing in the ashtray apart from a few dead matches.
“Why do you want them?”
Without answering, he scooped up the dead matches. Selecting the one which must have failed to ignite and was merely blackened at the phosphor end, he inserted it in his left ear (alarmingly deep for my liking). Enraptured, he manipulated the stick even deeper into his lughole.
“Stop that! What the fuck are you doing?” Removing his glasses he looked at me with childlike intensity.
“I’m talking to my people…on Mars.” Without pause he added, “I could kill you if I wanted to.”
“If you did where would you get your weekly radio fix from?” That was good.
I waited to see what was coming next but he just stared at me. We stood inches apart as he inserted a second match into his other ear, rolling the sticks between his thumbs and index fingers apparently fine-tuning the messages beamed to him from the red planet.
It was my lucky day. My life was to be spared.
As if they had spent their potential, he removed the sticks from his ears and threw them back in the ashtray. Turning without a word he left the shop, the red transistor pressed against his ear, faint distorted sounds of what might have been ‘Space Oddity’ leaking past his right ear.
He would be one of many today.
Close proximity to Tooting Bec Psychiatric Hospital had its challenges.
Normally, Friday was the day that the socially adept were allowed out to irritate local shopkeepers: some even had special outfits for the occasion.
There was the Milkman. I think it was the cap that he was fond of wearing which prompted his name. He usually popped in to pass the time. Unduly fond of snuff, brown rivulets dribbled out of his nostrils as he snorted his way through a series of questions/statements directed at a stack of used amps. Failing to get a response, he twiddled some of the knobs before turning to face me with further inquiries. I looked at him evenly as he continued to ramble on, knowing that any response from me would only prolong the episode.
Having made his opening statements he gestured wildly, spun on his glossy, black, eight-eye DMs and headed for the door. As he stepped into the street he looked back at me with undisguised pity to remind me that there were prisons without bars.
I rang up another ‘No Sale’.
From behind me, in the workshop I could hear the kettle being filled.
Then this Jock breezed in flogging fire extinguishers.
“Hey, Kev!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Come and see this.”
“What is it?”
“Just come upfront for a minute, you might want one of these for your van.”
I could barely follow what Jocky was all about but sensing mild interest on my part