Inside Outside (16 page)

While I was learning English in this laborious and inefficient manner, gradually outstripping the intellectual demands made on me by the Special Class, I embarked on another voyage of discovery: I became for a time a voracious reader. Although I had received almost no formal schooling before coming to Australia, my mother had taught me to read when I was about seven, and also to write after a fashion—though my handwriting has always been vile and difficult to read. I did not take to books, however, until those depressing months in Hurlstone Park, when I needed an escape from the boredom and the nastiness of life at school. Once again I attempted to find consolation in wildly romantic fantasies, the converse of the drab reality of my surroundings. My reading matter was, to say the least, curious. My parents had brought a few books with them—more were on the high seas with our furniture—which formed a staple of reading and re-reading until they were eventually swapped for other books. They were the usual romantic or sensationalist fiction relished by middle-class readers in Europe as much as in Australia. I read anything and everything. If my parents had any misgivings about the suitability of the books I was reading, wisely they said nothing. Dubious stuff was better, after all, than nothing.

I devoured a weird selection of novels. Several were Ruritanian romances in a genre inspired by
The Prisoner of Zenda
. There were a couple of twenties society-sagas in which aristocractic gentlemen, who were usually called Ödön or Aristide, spent a great deal of time eyeing voluptuous
demi-mondaines
through gold-rimmed monocles. One particularly violent book—the source of several disturbed nights—was called
Via Mala
. It described the grim life of a family in a remote Swiss valley who were kept in the most abject bondage by a tyrannical patriarch, the owner of a sawmill. This nasty and brutal tale surfaced one evening not long ago when I watched a German film adaptation of the novel on satellite television in London. I slept peacefully that night.

The book that made the greatest impression on me, though, was an account of the life of Leonardo da Vinci. This was my favourite book; I must have read it a dozen times—I resolutely refused to consign it to the pile of books for barter—yet curiously I have forgotten both the title and the name of the author. I became enamoured of its lurid and no doubt quite fanciful images of Renaissance Italy; these exerted the same magical influence on me as those nights at the opera in the long-distant past of the previous year. I thrilled to the splendours and brutalities of that heroic world. I always envisaged its proud princes and arrogant popes, its brigands lurking on moonlit nights behind a majestic Palladian portico, and its courtesans waiting to ensnare their latest victims within the frame of a gilt proscenium arch, illuminated by the mystery of a theatrical illusion. Once more I was seduced by the highly-coloured fantasies of a world where people lived with intensity, meeting their fate with courage, bravado and even insouciance—an absolute contrast to the drab world of Hurlstone Park and Canterbury Public School, the pitted playground, the crumpled, often foul-smelling teachers in their soiled, sweat-stained clothes, their fingers brown with nicotine, their nails perpetually black with grime.

The effect of this probably unhealthy influence on my emotional and intellectual development is not for me to judge. I know, however, that it played a major part in the alienation I felt from the world in which I was trapped—it also explains in all probability why, in later years, I came to relish the wonders of the more bloodthirsty of the Jacobean playwrights. What I experienced in those months in Hurlstone Park was probably no different from the experience of many imaginative children, but in my case the gulf between an unsatisfactory reality and a thrilling fantasy-life was, I believe, extreme. I became excessively conscious of the ugliness of my surroundings: the rows of mean cottages in treeless streets, the noisome ditch of the Cook's River, the sagging wires slung between termite-infested poles, the sea of red roof-tiles baking in the harsh sunlight.

I grew equally disgusted with the people around me, not only the crumpled teachers, the sinewy boys or the freaks of the Special Class, but also people like the enormous woman, shaking with fat, a cigarette always poking out of the corner of her mouth, who ran our fly-spattered corner-shop. These perfectly ordinary inhabitants of an everyday world filled me with loathing and a sense of anguish that became, or so I imagined, unbearable. Because my command of English was so rudimentary at the time, and my ability to communicate so imprecise and tentative, my despair and isolation were particularly aggravated because I was trapped within my introspective, indeed solipsistic world. If you cannot reach out to the people among whom you are forced to live, it is fatally easy to fall into the error of coming to believe that the lack is in them, that somehow they belong to an inferior order of being. That disastrous and arrogant mistake was to be repeated time and time again by people of my parents' generation, often with appalling consequences, just as it was evident among the elderly customers of the Balkan Grill in London more than a decade after these times.

Inevitably, I am giving here a very precise impression of a complex process which was accompanied by all kinds of doubt, emotional ambiguities and violent changes of mood. The development of these attitudes was neither simple nor direct, and, needless to say, it went by largely unnoticed at the time. Yet it had one curious consequence, apparently the obverse of the despairing sense of otherness I acquired in the course of those months. I was desperately eager to be accepted by people whose language I was beginning to master and habits to understand, because I could envisage no other life except their life. The only alternative to the joyless and mean-spirited world of the streets of Hurlstone Park was the hypocritical, caste-obsessed migrant society where children were expected to offer to kiss Aunti Klári's hand and to employ the linguistic ceremonies of a stifling culture. I felt that I had nothing in common with that over-elaborate way of life. Only in the highly-coloured romances that I devoured during those months, or in the fascination with opera (which had to lie dormant for many years to come) could I safely acknowledge an essential part of my personality, one closer to ‘European' models than I would have cared to admit at the time.

Caught in these cross-currents, I embarked on an endeavour (which was to last until I was well into my twenties) to shed every outward sign that had anything to do with my life before coming to Australia—that is to say, to lead a life of mimicry and parody. It may also be that I was eager to discard memories of what had been lost because, from the perspective of the late forties, I knew them to be irrecoverable. Perhaps I was merely perverse in subjecting myself to such all-encompassing voluntary amnesia. Whatever the truth, once I escaped from the Special Class with a minimal but working knowledge of everyday English—sufficient to camouflage the extent of my ignorance—I could address myself to the task of assimilation among the paspalum fields of Epping.

Epping, where we lived until the year I left school, provided an ideal environment for the task of refashioning myself, for unlearning the experiences and discarding the heritage I had brought with me to Australia. Most importantly perhaps, my parents and I had our own home, inadequate though it was in many ways. Nevertheless we occupied a clearly-defined space which was ours as long as we continued to pay the rent and observed the unwritten conventions concerning the Dunnicliffes and their kind. We were no longer in the awkward situation of people living in rented rooms. Our landlady in Hurlstone Park, though a kindly and well-intentioned soul, had made it absolutely clear that she had first call on the kitchen and the bathroom—you could not sing out to her to hurry up before you burst. We spent much of our time keeping out of her way. In Epping we could shut the glass door of the kitchen that served as an entrance, assured of the privacy we needed to recuperate, to deal with our problems and anxieties, or to have noisy rows. This was a place we could live in. We had known better, but we had also known much worse. As a confirmation of our intention to settle, and probably also as a symbolic commemoration of the previous occasion on which we took occupation of a flat, we daubed the walls with fresh kalsomine before we moved in.

School proved much less of a problem than previously. There was no question now of a Special Class. I knew enough English and was sufficiently familiar with the rituals of school life to survive, though (sensibly enough I suppose) I was put into a class a year below my age group. Moreover, on my first day I did not look such a freak as I had when I arrived in the playground of the school in Canterbury. I had long before acquired the required paraphernalia, including a curious green oil-cloth cape to wear on days of torrential rain.

Both teachers and pupils at my new school were more welcoming; they seemed a little more relaxed than those gnarled and sinewy inhabitants of Hurlstone Park. They were less suspicious, inspecting me with something of the wide-eyed curiosity of country people. They found me very strange, of course, but since they lived on the edge of a city which they rarely visited, but which contained very peculiar people, their surprise was gentler, rather muted. They were less intense, slower moving, much less streetwise than the pupils of Canterbury Public School, many of whom were, in all probability, victims of hardship, unemployment and violence. Epping was a more prosperous place. No-one seemed particularly wealthy (or if people were, they were careful to hide it) but no-one seemed underfed or poorly clothed. In this very ordinary, rather dull world I attempted to invent a personality for myself based on what I understood to be the most desirable characteristics of Australian boyhood.

I must have cut a curious figure. I was shorter and darker than the mostly long-limbed, fair-haired boys of Epping. My speech was still heavily marked by the open vowels, separation of syllables and lack of accentuation that make it so hard for Hungarian-speaking people to acquire the stresses, intonations and elisions of Australian English. Though my vocabulary and command of grammar had improved greatly, I was still confused about idiom, especially the elaborate rules of schoolboy slang with its subtle distinctions and gradations. I was entirely ignorant, for instance, about the mythology and hierarchy of cicadas. I could never remember whether a Black Prince was more of a find than a Greengrocer—and in any event, I loathed flying creatures of any kind. I caused much hilarity by confusing a full-back with a wicketkeeper. I got into a hopeless muddle over the taxonomy of marbles. Yet for all that I tried to swagger and lope like the freckled heroes of the playground. I did my best to imitate their slurred diphthong-ridden speech. I invented anecdotes of family life that were parodies of things I had heard people say in the playground. Yeah, my Dad made heaps on the SP last Satdy. Geez it was beaut at Terrigal. Of course my bike has gears, whaddaya think? I was tolerated with an innate courtesy, but I fooled no-one. The other boys allowed me to tag along, largely ignoring me, a clown in the retinue of the great ones of the earth. Occasionally they would throw a crumb of recognition at me, but I was, and have remained to an extent ever since, on the outside, never entirely a citizen of the world in which I lived.

That surrogate existence was, nevertheless, preferable to the alternative, remaining within the confines of the exile's world, where the children of my parents' acquaintances were expected to preserve the polite rituals of well brought-up Central European children. I dreaded our mercifully infrequent visits to Rose Bay or Bellevue Hill. I hated having to be polite to our hosts and then to be sent off to play with the children of the household. In part I envied their expensive toys, their nice rooms, their talk of trips in the family car and holidays in the Blue Mountains. I came to feel increasingly isolated from their way of life. One family we visited on Saturdays or Sundays insisted that their children receive us in the uniforms of their expensive private schools. Such sartorial behaviour in Epping would have raised hoots of derision. In Rose Bay or Bellevue Hill my drill shorts and cotton shirt (for I quickly outgrew my New York finery) caused these children to look down their noses at me. These days I occasionally catch sight of the boy—now a balding man in his fifties—in the streets. We pass each other without a flicker of recognition. I see on these occasions the absurd vision of a child on a stifling summer afternoon neatly rigged out in his Cranbrook uniform—jacket, tie and hat—being told by his parents to play with me nicely until it was time to come in for strudel and kugelhopf.