Connor: a true story
Connor was a rather unusual young man whom I met a number of times in the middle of the 1980s. He was the boyfriend of Ildiko, the daughter of a Hungarian friend of Marianne, my wife. We were asked to keep an eye on this young woman who was accepted to read Sociology at Oxford Brookes University. Ildiko met Connor when he was selling newspapers for the Socialist Workers Party outside Oxford Brookes, where Connor was already in the final year of his studies in Sociology.
We invited both of them for dinner. Marianne took an instant liking to him. He was tall and handsome with black hair. His face radiated intelligence. The conversation was led by Ildiko, telling us stories from her schooldays in Hungary, about how opinionated most of her teachers were. Connor did not say much, but what he said made good sense. He spoke English with an immaculate Oxford accent. He told us that he did not think much of János Kadar’s “Goulash Communism”. It was funny to listen to him attacking Kadar, the General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party, from the Left.
Towards the end of the day Connor became more talkative, willing to talk about himself. He told us that in his younger days (meaning when he was under 20) he had flirted with anarchism, reading Bakunin and Proudhon. He was particularly impressed by Proudhon’s famous dictum: Property is theft. He assured us that he never had any property apart from the clothes he had on. “Surely,” I said, “you must have acquired some books in your busy life.” “Yes, in a way, I have,” Connor replied, quickly changing the conversation to a more neutral subject like Hungary’s winter climate.
We kept on inviting them for dinner. By the third or fourth occasion, I returned to the subject of books. “What are you reading nowadays?” I asked. He took a paperback out of his pocket, showing me Christopher Hill’s Lenin. “Good choice”, I said. “Concise and readable.” He turned out to be an expert on Marxist ideas. So was I. Connor had the distinction of being the first person I met in England who knew more about Marxism than I did. We had a good conversation. I was happy to find a sparring partner. The ladies were bored. We had to adjourn to another day.
When the other day came I tried to quiz him on property, particularly on its relationship to theft. “Yes, it is theft,” he confirmed. He believed that everybody had the right not only to read but also to own any published book. He regarded libraries as vast prisons where books were held captives in open cells. He put his principles into practice when, for my birthday, he gave me a quite expensive book on the Marxist interpretation of history by, I think, Eric Hobsbawm. When I told him that he should not buy expensive books for me, he assured me that he never paid good money for a book. He just spirited them away when they were bought by the library and before they were registered. Most of them he returned. Some of them he kept.
I was puzzled. How can a man with the most refined British accent be a member of an extreme Left political organisation? I invited Ildiko for coffee one day and came immediately to the subject. “Do you know where Connor is coming from?” “Yes,” she said. “He does not keep it secret. You could have asked him. He was born in the West of Ireland. He never knew his father and saw his mother only once in his life. His mother produced six children, all of them placed with foster parents or put into children’s homes. Connor was particularly lucky with his last foster parents. He fondly remembers them. They were both teachers. They made him pass the 11-plus exam and found a place for him in a grammar school.
After three years, when Ildiko graduated, she and Connor were still together. Ildiko got a job in Vienna as an English lecturer in a secondary school. She took a plane to Vienna, Connor travelled by train. His journey took more than a week, because he had to dodge conductors and inspectors. He refused to buy a ticket. He was caught once in Germany, but he pretended not to understand German, nor English, and somehow got away with it.
We visited them a year later when we stopped in Vienna on our way to a Hungarian holiday. They had stored all their belongings in the bedroom in half a dozen big cardboard boxes. Did they know which box contained what? Approximately, yes, but only approximately, because if you wanted access to the content of a box, first you had to remove a sundry set of books and only then could you find out whether it was the box you wanted. We judged the situation unacceptable, a dereliction of our duties if we left everything unchanged. Without telling them we went to the equivalent of IKEA and bought two wardrobes in flatpack form. Ildiko and Connor were not pleased, neither when we brought the flatpacks, nor when we put them together.
Otherwise, they seemed to be happy. Connor spent most of his time reading while sitting comfortably in an armchair. (I forgot to mention that a few months after we first met he asked us for a loan to attend a course qualifying him to teach English as a foreign language. He repaid us a decade later when they settled in Ireland.) He made no attempt to find some gainful employment apart from teaching English. It’s not that he was work-shy. He wanted to work but he just could not afford the time.
He never accepted money from Ildiko, except on one occasion when he lost all his adult pupils. He lived on borrowed money for a week or so, after which, reluctantly, he took a job in a fast-food restaurant. He was caught red-handed, reading while the chips were burning. He was immediately sacked. He made no further attempts to seek employment in the hospitality industry.
We saw them again next winter. The cardboard boxes were still there. The two cupboards had vanished. Connor’s desire to redeem the world had vanished too. He never joined the extreme Left in Austria. He also stopped reading Marxist texts.
The last time we heard of them was a few years ago. They sent a Christmas card. They had got married and had two teenage children. Ildiko was a housewife. Connor had become the head of the Department of Management Studies at a university in Ireland.
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