I blame the General

In 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, I came to England with my wife. We were both refugees. I got a jobin an industrial research laboratory and the beginning was difficult. Before coming, I’d never talked to a man or woman whose mother tongue was English. People talked in an accent I had never heard before.

Six years passed. We learned to speak English, we became British subjects. We had a child. We wanted to see the world or at least another country, and not as tourists. I wrote to several research laboratories in Europe and the US offering my services. Several replied, some of them offered a job, including Bell Laboratories.

What I really wanted was to work in France, in particular to live in Paris. It was fashionable for Hungarian poets to strut the Parisian streets with high spirits and empty stomachs, and the greatest of them was Endre Ady. He described the city before the First World War as “Embersurus gigaszi vadon” (Gigantic wilderness packed with people). It may not sound great in English but it does sound great in Hungarian. Every schoolboy of my generation knew the line. That’s exactly what we all wanted: to be in that great wilderness. My wife dreamt about Paris. She wanted to walk all day, lose her way and then walk and walk until the sun came up again.

In France I wrote to an electronics research laboratory, Compagnie Sans Fils (CSF) in Orsay, near Paris. We waited for a reply from them. It came after a few weeks. “Please come over for an interview,’ they wrote. So I went over and talked to several people, including those who held the purse-strings. By 5 pm I had an offer:

“Start in six weeks’ time. We give you a salary 15 per cent higher than your current one.” Monsieur X, my future boss, smiled benevolently and added,  “I forgot to say. We give you 13 months salary in a year. Will you accept it?”

“Happily,” I replied.

“Well, then send copies of all your papers. You know, we need them in this country.”

“Certainment”, I replied. “We’ll contact you,” he said in English. I left.

I sent my papers and waited. The weeks went by. There was no news from CSF. Had they changed their mind? Four weeks had gone of the six. I decided to phone them. When I gave my name to the secretary, she connected me. After a pause of half a minute Monsieur X took the receiver. For another half a minute neither of us said a word.

“I have not heard from you,” I said breaking the silence.

“No,” he said.

“I am sorry for bothering you,” I continued “ but I would like to know the situation.”

“Yes,” he said.

After a further pause I took all my courage to come to the point. “Are you still offering me a job?” I asked. He switched to French. If he had to say something unpleasant he preferred to do that in his native tongue..

“Voilà,  la situation n’est pas simple. Quand nous vous avons offert le poste, nous n’étions pas encore en possession de tous les renseignements vous concernant. Nous avions cru comprendre que vous étiez un réfugié hongrois. Hors, selon la copie de votre passeport que vous nous avez transmise, vous êtes de nationalité britannique. Étant donné que nous gérons de nombreux documents confidentiels, nous ne pouvons pas vous offrir ce poste. Avec toutes nos excuses.”

And the English translation.

“Well, it is not a straightforward case. When we offered you a job we did not have all the information about you. We were under the impression that you were a Hungarian refugee. But according to your passport, which you sent us, you are a British subject. You must understand, we have a lot of classified work here. We cannot offer you a job. We are sorry.”

I did not blame Monsieur X. It was obviously the General who did it. He did not like the Nassau agreement that had been concluded between Kennedy and MacMillan a few months before. I knew that. I also knew that you could forgive your enemies but it is much more difficult to forgive friends who helped you. I knew that Britain would not be a member of the Common Market as long as the General was alive. But what has all that got to do with me? I have never done anything to the General, why pick on me? I am an electronic engineer, Hungarian or British, what does it matter? To work in a research laboratory in England was practically the same as working in a research Laboratory in France — with some difference in remuneration.

I was a bit depressed. Was this the end of our ambition to live in France? No, that setback had only strengthened our resolve. The General would not win, I vowed. I would get a job in France, whatever it took. I wrote to Universities in Paris. A month later I had a one-year job offer from the Laboratoire de Physique, Ecole Normale, an establishment founded by Napoleon Bonaparte.

I liked the Ecole Normale. Good working atmosphere. Once inside, tutoyer was the rule, and that included Nobel Prize winners as well. It was very left wing but the people were good company and there were non-stop discussions about politics. Not long ago I came across an American assessment that counted the ratio of Nobel Prize winners to alumni for Universities worldwide. They put Ecole Normale at the top, way ahead of the runner-ups, CalTech and Harvard. I think that is correct, but if they include organisations in their statistics which have small intake (Ecole Nomale takes only 200 undergraduates a year) they should not have ignored Trinity College, Cambridge, with a similar intake and 34 Nobelists.

Paris is a nice city. We had a good time. Alas, the only family member who during this year attained any distinction, may I say uniqueness, was our three-year-old daughter. She was the only British subject living in Paris who spoke only Hungarian.