Arriving in Budapest from sober, refined, capitalist Vienna, I imagined that the train was pulling into an exotic eastern city. My memory has filled the railway station with smoke and steam and sunshine; the acrid smells of engine grease and throat-catching cigarette smoke; huge, tamed steam engines and all the excitement and promise of the Orient Express.
This was my first experience of a city behind the Iron Curtain. It was the early 1980s and Ronald Reagan was resident at the White House, Washington; Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, London. Standing in line, as we did at the railway station, to exchange British pounds for Hungarian forints, alongside Russian people from the Soviet Union, and with German people from East Germany, was a novel experience, and could be equated now only with queuing alongside people from the planet Zog.
Soon after leaving the delivery room of my entry into this brave new world, I was fined on the spot by two policemen for crossing a road without first locating a pedestrian crossing. They could speak not a word of English, and I not a word of Hungarian, but still they extracted a hefty fine from my shoestring purse. I guess that it is the case the world over that only a minority of police officers are willing or able to perceive the relative validity of practices which take place in cultures other than their own. A seasoned traveller takes such events, and much worse, in their stride. For me, however, almost twenty years later, the gestalt remains incomplete. Idealistic, and therefore intolerant of the economic injustices of capitalism, I was eager to locate within an avowedly socialist socio-political system the strengths and advantages to affirm my prejudices. Instead, I was brought almost immediately face to face with authoritarian, punitive illiberality. My familiar, paranoia, forever skulking just beneath the surface, reared up and rampaged for days afterwards.
My wife was approached in a pedestrian underpass by two women who wanted to cut off her hair. The payment they offered was probably a fortune for them, and the wig they would have made from her hair may well have fetched a good price. Many people we saw looked poor, like many people in Britain who live in economically deprived housing estates and inner-city areas. The only people in Budapest who did not appear to be poor were tourists. I thought at the time about how people in Budapest were better off than the underclass in Britain, for transport and housing, food and cigarettes, though I am less certain about alcohol, appeared to be very cheap. There were few billboard advertisements to entice people into the cycle of desire, acquisition, consumption and disposal.
I guess that there were tourist-aimed pavement cafes. Budapest did not appear to have its own cafe society. There were, however, public canteens. Maybe these once existed in Britain: John Betjamin wrote a poem in the 1930s about a town called Slough, west of London, UK, in which he refers to "brightly lit canteens" in disparaging terms. To my knowledge, however, canteens are now only to be found in schools, hospitals, workplaces and the like. Whatever differences there are between a canteen and other eating places, the procedures are not the same. Without help from a sympathetic person, and without facility in Hungarian, trying to intuit the rules was far from easy. My abiding memory from this experience was, uniquely, drinking fresh plum juice.
I recall looking down onto the Danube from the hillside plaza in front of the cathedral. (Some of the nearby buildings showed evidence of what I took to be shrapnel damage. Was this from the second world war, or from conflict with Soviet Russia?) This is the tourist picture of Budapest, shown on photographs, and in cinema films as the Budapest location shot (Paris: Eiffel Tower; London: Big Ben; New York: Statue of Liberty). The tourist talk was about the Parliament building the other side of the river looking very similar to the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) in London, UK. Yet I did not understand how a Parliament could function in a one-party state.
The accommodation in which we stayed was the spare room (or vacated bedroom) of a family's cheap apartment in an apartment block somewhere in the seedy, if green, suburbs of the city, a lengthy tram-ride from the city centre. A film of George Orwell's novel 1984, starring Richard Burton, portrays Winston Smith living in a drab, shabby apartment. This picture contrasted with the tourist sites of Budapest. I want to say that I gained a more balanced view of Budapest, but I consider it more accurate to state that I gained a number of different views, some held in tension.
On the way out of Hungary, I visited Balaton briefly, to spend my remaining Hungarian forints, which would otherwise have to be forfeited at the international frontier. It was an unimpressive town on Lake Balaton, mildly reminiscent of Blackpool, UK. I have since seen on sale in Britain wine from the Balaton region. Perhaps it is good wine.
