metropolitan land

After a brilliant start in Dublin near the Leopardstown race course, my life took a custard tart and we ended up in the suburbs that filter left and right off the Metropolitan Line. The purple one that shoots out of Baker Street. My father had an office in Holborn. “Let’s move my nutty family to Middlesex.” It must have made sense to him. For about five minutes.

We started out in Northwood. On ‘Farm Way’ in a house my mother named “ Foxrock” after our Dublin excitement.

Five years later we moved two stops up the Metropolitan Line to Pinner. Where my parents had found this house that they couldn’t rename. It was called “Brook House.”  It was on Moss Lane. There was a river that ran through the garden. It was still suburbia, but this time we had a large white house and lawns and trees and gooseberries and two greenhouses and tack sheds where we could pretend we owned a horse and a tennis court where we put up a big circular plastic swimming pool and a green slope that we turned into a Christmas tree patch. My father isn’t here to answer for this. But I can assure you although we Murrays lived in the suburbs, we were floating on it like truffle oil.

A mother that would avoid coffee mornings and head off to the Spiritualist Association of Great Britain where she would do healing on a Friday night.

A father who was a member of the Octave Players, a nigh-on professional group of amateurs who had been denied a paid life in the theatre by the second world war.

We lived there. But I doubt we paid taxes.

My father put the television that he couldn’t make work into the middle of Moss Lane and told the TV company to come and get it before their equipment caused an accident.

My siblings and I went to school there.

West Lodge ( maroon) and St John’s ( purple) for my brother.

Northwood College ( navy blue) for my sister and I.

I am not going to ramble on about the extraordinary life I lead at the stagnant pudding that was Northwood College.

But for years…… years….Years when knickers stayed large. Socks turned into tights. Underarm hair grew.  Grey wool culottes were considered practical. Domestic science was sewing pink teddy bears.

Popularity came or didn’t. Sports triumphed, or didn’t. Academia beckoned, or didn’t.

I would get on that train from Pinner to Northwood. I would walk down Maxwell Road to the school. The walk seemed so long. The trees seemed so huge. The teachers seemed so tall.

This last week I went back to Northwood to have lunch with my old drama teacher, Bess. 

bess Jones. one of a kind.

Who, when I was flat lining at school, where I was even being overlooked even in Elocution, took me on as a pupil.

Lunch was lovely. But Northwood and Pinner looked like they were part of a miniature golf set.  Like Gulliver had been to visit and sat on them.

I remember Northwood station where I would watch the  NC schoolgirls who met boys; who knew how to put layer upon layer of mascara on their eyelashes, and roll their pleated skirts up and over on their waistbands so they were just a frill over their knickers. The straw boaters which, in the Northwood College rules had to sit on top of our heads, were bouncing between their shoulder blades.

Last week, it was just a station. A shoulder high station.

Or maybe I am 7 foot tall. Or maybe all of life needs to be looked at with pink sunglasses.

Middlesex.     by John Betjeman

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens


Runs the red electric train,


With a thousand Ta’s and Pardon’s


Daintily alights Elaine;


Hurries down the concrete station


With a frown of concentration,


Out into the outskirt’s edges


Where a few surviving hedges


Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again.


Well cut Windsmoor flapping lightly,


Jacqmar scarf of mauve and green


Hiding hair which, Friday nightly,


Delicately drowns in Drene;


Fair Elaine the bobby-soxer,


Fresh-complexioned with Innoxa,


Gains the garden – father’s hobby –


Hangs her Windsmoor in the lobby,


Settles down to sandwich supper and the television screen.






Gentle Brent, I used to know you


Wandering Wembley-wards at will,


Now what change your waters show you


In the meadowlands you fill!


Recollect the elm-trees misty


And the footpaths climbing twisty


Under cedar-shaded palings,


Low laburnum-leaned-on railings


Out of Northolt on and upward to the heights of Harrow hill.


Parish of enormous hayfields


Perivale stood all alone,


And from Greenford scent of mayfields


Most enticingly was blown


Over market gardens tidy,


Taverns for the bona fide,


Cockney singers, cockney shooters,


Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters,




Long in Kensal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.

60 Andrassy Boulevard, Budapest.

When I was an actor.  When Margaret Thatcher was slicing away at the National Health, and the Arts….it was just the natural thing to oppose her. That meant leaning left. And I guess I have never tilted back.

I still believe, fervently, in voting. I believe it is a gift given to us and I never take it lightly.

outside the national museum. a Russian tank.

And this brings me back to Budapest. There were bridges and beautiful buildings. There were synagogues and basilicas. There were opera houses and the Danube.

doors

doors

doors

There was the beautiful and moving garden of remembrance behind the Dohani Synagogue, where the anti-semitic cruelty happened all in a rush in 1944. Where there is the most beautiful sculpture: an upside down menorah tree with every leaf inscribed with a name. And two marble stones inscribed to Raul Wallenberg and Nicholas Winton.

the memorial tree

The afternoon when I went to see the documentary about Nicholas Wynton called “ Nicky's Family,” turned my life upside down.

But back to Budapest again.

the Rakocsi market

children playing outside the market

hungarian home made gnocchi

It was my visit to the “ House of Terror.”

A grey corner building on Andrassy Boulevard.

60 andrassy blvd

 

 In 1944 it was called the House of Loyalty.  As the party headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis. Then between 1945 and 1956 it became the House of terror. Where  the secret Police and a shadow army of informants would watch people in their workplace and one in every three families had someone seized and tortured. Fuelled by the Communists, they turned on their own.

Finally in 1956, there was the uprising. Young people stood up. Risked everything. Because they thought different thoughts.

outside the radio building where the uprising started. a flag with the hole where the Hungarians cut out the russian insignia. and a little ribbon with the Hungarian colours.

 For two weeks there was freedom. Then the tanks rolled back in and there were imprisonments and mass executions.

 The Russians didn’t leave until 1989. …..1989. 32 years later.

This building, the very same building where people were interrogated and tortured, in 2002 was turned into this extraordinary museum. It is beautiful and moving and breathtaking and frightening.

You pass through rooms of artistic symbolism. You walk past walls of photographs of all the victims. You watch videos of people, simple farmers, who were sent to work camps and starved almost to death. You walk through the cells where they would make people stand up for days on end, you look at the gallows they had set up in the basement. You end up looking at the walls of photographs of people, most of them still living, who wielded power that they had no right to. No one has been brought to justice. Not one.

It was the highlight of Budapest for me.

waiting

 I went out into the daylight and looked at the people carrying their shopping home or waiting for a tram or leaning against a building having a cigarette and I realised I would never have any idea what they had been through.

Completely Lost in Translation

I got lost.

In a new city it is easy to do. You walk out of the hotel with a map and you take a left on NEPSZINHAZ UTCA when you should have taken a right and then instead of BERKOCSIS UTCA you end up on NAGY FUVAROS which turns into KARACSONY SANDOR and you are feketehazied…or whatever the word for a frustrating sense of doom is, in Hungarian.

I start out hopeful with some florints in my pocket and an apple stolen from the hotel breakfast in my bag and the map. Within five minutes I could be gone forever with no breadcrumbs to get me back to where I started.

I have tried to memorize some helpful words.

 hello : Szervusz

Yes and no : Igen and Nem

Do you speak English: Beszel Angolul?

Do you have vegetarian food : Vannak onoknel vegetarianus etelek?

Where are the toilets: Hol a vece?

Help!: Segitseg!

Another pharmacy....I think

a pharmacy. ...I think

I open my map to where I think I might be and people smile quietly and shake their heads.

I get on a tram where a nice woman’s voice announces the next stop which is BLAHA LUJZA TER. Which sounds  a little like the next stop which is BAJCSY ZSILINSZKY UT. So I stay on the tram until it stops and it goes back again and I recognize the big church which is where I was lost when I started and I get off.

I go into a bakery shop, starving after eating the apple slowly for four hours and ask if any of the pastry things have meat in them. The nice girl gets a man from the back who says, “ Meat, yes.” I say “ meat, no.”

He says, “ meat, good. " I say. “ Cheese, good.” 

“ Cheese? “ he says. “ Good,” I say.  “ No.” he says.  

I buy it anyway. It is a strange curd thing with apricot jam. 

But at this point I don’t care.

gallery baths. they weren't as rude

no talking the sign said. totally ignored

sorry swimming costume hidden by ottoman tiles

I go to one of the thermal baths that Budapest is famous for. Sitting on a geological fault, mineral water gushes forth from 120  thermal springs.

I took that from the guide book.

veli Bej baths

I went to Veli Bej Baths.  Because the book said it was the oldest (1575) of the Ottoman-era baths. Because the book said the water was piped in at 38 degrees through original clay pipes. The book said it was  good for joints and arthritis. The book did not say that the little band you wore on your wrist would lock you out of the cupboard in which you stored your clothes and the bitch of a receptionist would leave you standing there amongst a host of fully clothed Hungarian people in your rather sad swimming costume as you promised her that you would leave and never come back if she just opened your locker one last time with her magic key. And the book didn’t have the glossary for the words the bitch was shouting about you to everyone in the building as you put your clothes on over your still wet body because you didn’t dare ask for a towel. And the book doesn’t have a page for the facial expressions a bitch can pull when you apologize for the nineteenth time when you can’t make your wristband release the turnstile so you can go out to ARPAD FEJEDELEM UTJA and get lost all over again.

 ALLJON MEG ITT. ELTEVEDTEM.   stop this right here. I’m lost.

summer in the blue and green spaces

This weekend, here in London, we had a solid tap on the right shoulder from our unreliable friend, Summer.

It wasn’t that everyone suddenly put on flimsy frocks and flip flops.

To tell the truth, people have put their thick jumpers and boots to the back of the wardrobe when May slinks into June.

This Summer.  It is a season. after spring and before autumn.It is a fact.

They may tie a cardigan around their waists. They may have an umbrella in their jacket pocket. They may have raincoat crushed at the bottom of their shopping bag. There are still dark trousers and men going to work still wear suits. But there are lots of flowery blouses and lace dresses. The tights get ditched along with thick socks and there are a mass of little pumps and open toe shoes.

This weekend I have been on buses as I went to swim in various cold water lidos. I notched up Parliament Hill, Tooting Bec and Brockwell Park. And as I traveled on the 37, the 314, and the 93 double decker red buses, I passed all these people romping on the grass of Wandsworth and Clapham Commons. Hampstead Heath,  The Tooting Bec Fields.

Parliament Hill Lido

friends - A &B - at the Bockwell Lido

They played soccer and cricket, they walked their dogs, they sat and had pic-nics, they did yoga, they lay back and read books.

Many houses in London are now split into flats and there isn’t always a garden to go to through your back door. So people share the big open spaces with dogs, balls, Frisbees, cricket bats, bicycles and each other.  All out in the August sun.

Summer, you unreliable friend... all is forgiven.