Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [6]
Not being thought of as English gave me a great advantage in that it removed me altogether from the British class system, in which the most obvious identifier is accent. But since the class system is central to life in the United Kingdom, it also left me adrift. I had none of the cozy companionship with my peers or the sense of belonging that constitute the real advantages of a class system. I had always felt myself to be an outsider except when at school in Switzerland, where everybody had been an outsider, except the Swiss.
So the problem wasn’t what kind of a career I should pursue, it was where I was going to live, which was much easier to resolve. I felt a great sense of relief at reaching this conclusion, one that sustained me through many days of unpleasantness as the Russians “mopped up” after their victory, restoring the Hungarian Communist Party to power with a brutality that was to keep it there for more than thirty years. The streets were empty now of everything but burned-out tanks, smoldering barricades, corpses, and the omnipresent, expressionless Soviet soldiers. The enforced calm of defeat, oppression, and terror descended on the city.
I tried the secret telephone number that Graham Greene’s friend had made me memorize, but it turned out to be that of the British Embassy, which you could find in any Budapest telephone book. I was eventually hustled out of Hungary in a long convoy of foreigners who had managed to annoy the Hungarian communists or their Soviet masters. As I crossed the border into Austria, I saw that man from MI6, dressed in the uniform of a British army doctor. He cut me dead—actually turned his back on me when I waved at him.
IT WAS a portent. I did not return home as a hero.
My friends and I got rather more attention than we wanted in the British press, but most of the papers treated our journey to Budapest and back as an escapade by high-spirited Oxford students, although the French press described us as if we had been adventurers in the John Buchan tradition. “Vacances en prison!” one Paris headline blared inaccurately, above a photograph in which we appeared unshaven and scowling, like Balkan bandits.
In fact, we had plenty to scowl about. We had left Oxford midterm, without permission, on the very sensible grounds that we would have been refused, and neither the university nor our colleges were pleased or in a forgiving mood. At last, at the cost of a long and serious lecture from the college dean warning me in no uncertain terms to apply myself to my studies more seriously in future and to avoid adventures, foreign or domestic, I was allowed back again, though not quite forgiven—I had committed the unpardonable sin of getting Magdalen College mentioned in the newspapers.
AS I struggled through that winter to catch up on my studies, lost in the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (my tutor’s specialty), I felt, for the first time, a certain discontent with my life at Oxford. It was not, I recognized, the fault of the university or of Magdalen College. They had not changed, nor were they ever likely to, but I had.
When spring came, I surprised my father—and myself—by taking a job as a waiter in a Chelsea espresso bar owned by the father of a girlfriend instead of joining him on the Cap d’Antibes. My father put it down to love (a possibility