I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1910. Hungary was still a poor, agricultural, semi-feudal country at the time. Only in the mid-nineteenth century were serfs freed, feudalism abolished, and entailed land rendered saleable, which, by making mortgage credit available, should have encouraged landowners to invest in modern farming methods and raise farm productivity. That, however, would also have required an entrepreneurial spirit and the will to do it, which were largely missing in the feudal nobility who owned most of the land. They were good at spending money but disdained the business of making it, and looked down on new-fangled methods of farming almost as much as they did upon such mercenary occupations as industry, trade and banking. Economic necessity seldom forced them to reform the management of their estates. Some mortgaged their land and used the proceeds for high living until impoverishment forced them to sell it; the more sober ones just sold the land and took up their other traditional occupation, government service, which in the Hungary of my childhood was still largely the gentry’s preserve.

My father’s family is a good illustration of that latter behaviour. His great-great-grandfather was a school teacher in a poor Slovak village in Northern Hungary, whose younger son managed to climb the only social ladder then available, the Catholic clergy. He was bright enough to be taken on as a free boarder in a Catholic school, graduated from there with a fellowship to a seminary, where he was ordained priest, earned doctorates in philosophy and theology and became professor of those subjects, until he was appointed bishop. At that stage, the emperor elevated him and his family to nobility and with it bestowed on him a piece of land called Nagykér. Later still, he became archbishop and finally the prince primate of Hungary and cardinal of Rome.

His father, the village teacher, was supposedly the son of one of the agents a Polish bank sent to Hungary’s free cities to supervise the management of their tax revenues, a part of which the then ruler of Hungary designated for servicing the loan he obtained from the bank. It goes without saying that the inhabitants of those cities resented and hated those Polish agents settled in their midst with the right to take part of their cities’ revenues away; when they massacred one of those agents with his family, only his small boy survived, hidden by one of his playmates’ parents; and that boy became our school teacher ancestor.

That was father’s explanation of our Polish name. One of my uncles, how-ever, ashamed perhaps of so plebeian an origin, hired a genealogist to trace the family’s origins; and he, needless to say, traced it to some important Polish noble family of the seventeenth century. Father never believed a word of that, nor did I, especially not after my discovery that the manufacturing of fake genealogies was a flourishing occupation, and not only in the United States.

To commemorate the Cardinal’s attendance of the 1853 Vatican Council, his name is engraved in huge letters in St Peter’s Basilica on the marble wall to the right of the main altar, as I discovered to my great surprise on a visit to Rome. He must have used that occasion for quite a sightseeing tour of Italy, to judge by all the rubber stamps of the many Italian principalities of the time I found in his huge, impressive diplomatic passport.

Rising from poverty to the highest position of Hungary’s wealthy Catholic Church, he—like many of the newly rich—became a spendthrift, even to the extent that the emperor reprimanded him for squandering the Church’s wealth. He certainly built innumerable churches, including a basilica at his seat in Esztergom; founded many primary and secondary schools, two convent schools for girls, a seminary and a teachers’ college; established and funded pension funds for school teachers and the lower clergy; built a poorhouse and organized the free distribution of food, clothing and books to school children in poor villages; generously contributed to founding Hungary’s Academy of Sciences and to every charitable, scientific and artistic cause; commissioned masses from Liszt and paintings from several Hungarian and Austrian painters; subsidized the Zsolnay pottery and revived the then moribund and now world-famous porcelain factory of Herend. Some of that was very advanced for the mid-nineteenth century, especially in that part of Europe.

He was also a good patriot. During Hungary’s unsuccessful revolution against Habsburg rule and the country’s suppression during the following absolutism, his name headed the secret list of subversives kept by Austria’s chief of police as the most ardent and dangerous protector of the Hungarian rebels, who saved many Hungarians from the Austrian hangman’s noose.

His own family he helped by financing and supervising the education of his nephews and their children, who were also helped, of course, by their elevation to the nobility and ended up as judges and county officials. Since Esztergom, his new official seat as Hungary’s primate, was far from his original bishopric where his estate was situated, he sold that and bought Nőtincs, a similar piece of land much nearer to Esztergom, and entrusted its management to his favourite nephew, my great-grandfather, who later also inherited it from him.

Feudal ownership of land usually went with administrative duties in the county where it was located; and my great-grandfather held high county offices there. Those, I suspect, were more honorific than onerous but gave him an excuse for leaving most of the estate’s management to his wife. She, according to family lore, was an excellent manager, who aged the wines the estate produced until they fetched a good price in the market, and she always made the farm hands sing while they harvested the grapes and other fruit to keep them from eating too much of the crop. She was also known to have rushed to the deathbed of the Prince Primate, her husband’s uncle, to bid him a tearful goodbye and use the occasion when the whole clergy was assembled around the dying Cardinal’s bed for crating up all the silver plate and cutlery she could lay hands on at his residence and drive home with it.

My grandfather, who inherited the estate, had one daughter and four surviving sons. His daughter, aunt Lola, must have been a lovely young woman to judge by her beautiful 1908 photograph that still adorns a wall in our house. She was married by a rich landowner and landlord, a bearded, pipe-smoking, ultra-conservative, old-fashioned male chauvinist who spent most of his time reading Hungarian history and literature in his smoke-filled study, stuck to traditional, inefficient farming methods, treated Aunt Lola more as a servant than as a wife and even kept her from having a telephone installed in their Budapest apartment, which forced her to come and make her weekly telephone calls from our house on Monday afternoons. [...]

Summer vacations at the estate

Much clearer are my later recollections of the long summers my parents, I and most of my uncles, aunts and cousins spent on grandmother’s estate in Nôtincs. It was hardly 40 miles from Budapest but seemed cut off from civilization, with no newspapers, no telephone, no trains, only very dusty roads and a small village nearby that housed the farmworkers, had a church and a baroque statue of St Christopher, but no post office, not even a general store at that time.

The house was a simple, empire-style, low-slung yellow building, whose thick walls kept it deliciously cool during the dry summer heat. The large entrance hall and the dining room, big enough to seat 30 people, served as living quarters, where I and my cousin János raced each other around the huge dining table on our tricycles and toy automobiles. A smallish "salon" or "clean room" for receiving important guests always had its doors locked, windows shuttered and the furniture covered with sheets to keep the dust off, because it never was used—presumably because important guests never came. There were more than enough bedrooms to sleep grandmother and her five surviving children with their families and a couple of guests in addition, considering that a family with merely a couple of children rated only one bedroom in those days and only father’s sister had three children. There was no bathroom and the only rather smelly toilet was at the end of a dark, spooky corridor. We children were given a bath every other week in the wooden tubs brought out of the wash-house into the sun for the occasion, with all the grownups watching the event; but they took no baths, having to make do with the washbasin in each bedroom. The wash-house and servants’ quarters were in a separate building, and separate also was the underground ice-house, which stored enough winter ice to last through the summer.

There was no running water and no electricity while we lived there, except in the cowshed, where a gasoline engine pumped water from a deep well into the water-troughs for the 80 cows and also powered an electric generator to provide lighting. I was allegedly the first person, at age 6, to ask why the electricity was not also brought into the house—a question which made a great impression on the grown-ups but was never answered, let alone acted upon. The huge dining room, however, where all of us congregated after dark, was well lit with as many petroleum lamps on the table as the number of bedrooms used, so that at bedtime each family would have one to carry back to its bedroom.

There were lots of people working in the cowshed, pigsties, stables and coach-house. In and around the house itself, the permanent fixtures were Mari, the cook, and old Uncle Miklós, who used to be the male nanny to my father, his sister and brothers, and who now was a kind of butler, ordering around all the young peasant girls in their many colourful skirts who did all the work. (Hungarian peasant women and girls in those days were supposed to wear as many underskirts as their age. I never found out at what age they stopped adding to them.) They lived in the village with their parents and the number who came each day varied with the number of people staying in grandmother’s house.

They had a lot of work to do, because just heating water and carrying it to all the bedrooms for a dozen or more people and then carrying the dirty water out again must have been quite a chore, so was the daily cleaning and refilling of a half dozen or more petroleum lamps, as were such kitchen duties as feeding the poultry, forcefeeding the geese, cleaning the chicken coops, catching, killing and plucking barnyard birds for the day’s meals, picking the day’s supply of fruit and vegetables, churning the butter and mixing some of it with honey for the delicious spread we put on the moist peasant bread and pancakes at breakfast.

Most of the girls probably worked for no or negligible pay, just for the good and plentiful food and occasional hand-me-down clothing they received. I am guessing that, because even 12 years later, by which time I had developed a social conscience, I was shocked to discover that the two kitchen maids in our luxurious Budapest house worked only for their bed and board and the chance to learn cooking and city manners. It was one of my rare victories over my formidable mother that I persuaded her to pay them at least a token wage. [...]

I have no recollection of ever seeing anyone read a book; and there was no tennis court, no riding, no shooting, no hunting, no outings, no walking—even beyond the garden and the church of the small village adjoining our garden—because there was nowhere to go, no town, no water, not even a clump of trees anywhere nearby, because in that part of Hungary every bit of land was cultivated, leaving few trees standing other than the ubiquitous mulberries bordering the dusty roads—reminders of an early reformer’s unsuccessful attempt to establish a Hungarian silk industry. Every time I see a Chekhov play, it makes me think of those summers, because they depict that atmosphere of lazy boredom where people are too bored to enjoy their laziness and too lazy to rouse themselves to do something enjoyable.

The grownups’ main diversions were the occasional visits we received from and paid to neighbours and nearby relatives. The slowness of horse-drawn carriages made such visits whole-day affairs; and with no telephone and very slow mails, such visits were mostly unannounced and had to be whole-day affairs also, because the hosts had to be given enough time to prepare a huge and festive midday meal, and all of us needed time afterwards to rest and recover from it.

The first sight of the convoy of two, three, or even more carriages glimpsed between the trees of the entrance driveway caused excited guessing as to the identity and number of the guests; and it was followed by feverish activity, because chickens or geese had to be caught, killed and plucked, fruit and vegetables picked, cream whipped, wines brought up from the cellar, and a sumptuous meal prepared. The only ready food was the emergency supply of meringues, stored in the dining-room cupboard and rendered edible by the addition of large quantities of berries and whipped cream. We were seldom less than two dozen around the table at those occasions, because all our neighbours had extended families just as we did; and those with marriageable daughters usually had an eligible young man or two as houseguests in addition, whom, of course, they brought along. I was considered a miser and teased for years, because once, when I learned of the unexpected arrival of some distant relatives, I was suppos-ed to have asked in an anxious voice: "All the sixteen of them?" Needless to add, a parallel, somewhat less festive meal with plenty of wine was also laid out in the servants’ quarters to entertain the guests’ coachmen and the extra peasant girls fetched from the village to help out with preparing and serving the festive meal.

I no longer remember who the visitors were, with the single exception of Aunt Richardis, whose unusual name still sticks in my memory. Richard Wagner was her godfather, which accounts for her name. Her father, related to the Scitovskys, was Hans Richter, the Hungarian musician who was Wagner’s friend, assistant, conductor of Bayreuth’s opera house in Wagner’s time and, according to Aunt Richardis, the real composer of Die Meistersinger, whose character is indeed quite different from Wagner’s other operas. She was a nice lady whom we occasionally visited in later years. [...]

My father

My father, as well as all his brothers, was brought up in the Austrian boarding school, Kalksburg, near Vienna, run by Jesuits, who discouraged close friendships among the boys and moved them into separate dormitories whenever they noticed two of them becoming too friendly. That must have been aimed at discouraging homosexuality, but perhaps also at suppressing the youngsters’ natural feeling of affection for another person, thereby to sublimate it into an all-encompassing love of God and humanity. He also accepted the Jesuits’ teaching that inequalities in society are unavoidable and must be tempered by those on top leading an examplary life of selflessness and concern for the general good. Not for nothing was that school considered one of the best training grounds of the Habsburg Empire’s famous incorruptible civil service; and my father, who alone among the Scitovsky boys could take the Jesuits’ iron discipline for the full ten years, must have been one of its prize products. He was conservative, compassionate, honest, fair, invariably polite and kind, but also lonely, remote and unapproachable. He had no intimate friends, never sat gossiping in a Budapest café, that cradle of coffee-house culture, never went near the many clubs to which he felt duty-bound to belong; and he knew not how to show love and affection, though one could occasionally tell that behind his reserved manner he felt them.

I greatly admired and respected my father, because his generosity, compassion, correctness and polite behaviour towards everybody made him utterly different from most people around him. For Hungary at that time had not yet outgrown its feudal heritage. The gentry, descendants of the old nobility, still ruled the country and manned its civil service, making their superiority felt by the way they treated and talked to those they considered their inferiors. I disliked that insolent swagger, adopted in some measure by all civil servants down to ordinary policemen; and my resentment of their uncivil, masterful behaviour, which belied their very name, may have been the origin of my lifelong leftist sympathies.

To return to my mother, she shared her husband’s fairness, kindness, generosity, and politeness to everybody but did not match his, by Hungarian standards, incredible honesty. He would not have smuggled a pack of cigarettes through customs; but she had no such scruples. Indeed, of the four quarrels supposed to have disturbed their exceptionally harmonious marriage, two had to do with smuggling. Once she persuaded a close friend, Countess Kuen-Héderváry, wife of the Hungarian ambassador to Paris, to send a package of hers by diplomatic pouch to Budapest. A customs official opened the diplomatic pouch by mistake and found yards of French silk my mother and her other close friend, Countess Bethlen, the prime minister’s wife, needed for their new evening dresses.

At another occasion, mother asked yet another friend, Ann Steger, whose husband owned a coal mine and the barges on which his coal was shipped up the Danube to Austria, to bring back from Vienna a few boxes of hers as ballast on a barge’s return trip to Hungary. The few boxes turned out to be dozens of crates, big and heavy enough to attract the customs official’s attention. They found them containing the carefully packed disassembled parts of three 18th-century baroque tile stoves my mother had bought in Vienna. Those beautiful white-and-gold stoves became showpieces of our newly built house, but the incident was most embarrassing for father who was just then about to be appointed minister for foreign affairs and knew nothing, of course, about his wife’s smuggling. Of the other two quarrels between my parents, one occurred when he caught her powdering her nose, which he then considered only slightly less immoral than using rouge or lipstick, the other when she cut her long hair short, leading the new fashion rather than following it. [...]

When my parents decided to build a home worthy of housing the antiques they were accumulating, I became interested in their passionate study of French, Austrian and Bavarian baroque architecture, their successful attempt to merge them, and their supervising the building of the house and garden that emerged from months of discussions and planning. That occupied all their free time for well over a year; and I quite enjoyed my involvement in it. That also included my interpreting for the French craftsmen who came from Paris to paint the faux marble of the grand staircase and decorate the ceilings and walls of the reception rooms and taking messages and drawings to the sculptor who carved the wood panels of the smoking room and to the blacksmith who made the wrought-iron balustrade of the staircase and the balconies’ railings.

We moved into the house just before Father became Foreign Minister; and that immediately led to Mother’s feverish activities in preparing magnificent dinner parties and resplendent receptions for the diplomatic corps, visiting statesmen, and the Budapest conference of the PEN Club. We had an excellent Paris-trained cook at the time, who later became the head chef of Gundel’s (Hungary’s best) restaurant; and many of those dinner parties were preceded by concerts given by Louis Kentner, then a student at the music academy, who later became an internationally known concert pianist.

I only peeked from a distance at the dinner parties around the huge table, with five wine glasses glittering at each table-setting, but was allowed to attend the concerts and admitted to the PEN reception, where I was introduced to John Galsworthy, Thomas Mann, Paul Valéry, Madariaga, among others, and was fascinated by Colette, who was exotically dressed, talked amusingly, and involved me in a long conversation, which I conceitedly attributed to my conversational prowess. I discovered a more plausible reason half a century later when I learned that my distinguished friend, Bertrand de Jouvenel, had at age sixteen and half become Colette’s stepson and soon thereafter also her lover, with the scandal of their long joint vacation away from the husband-father breaking up the latter’s short second marriage.

Those glittering, hectic parties came to an end when Father resigned from his post as Minister for Foreign Affairs and my parents’ social life settled down to a more modest and leisurely pace. Mother, of course, had a much larger house and a big garden to take care of and embellish, and a whole platoon of servants to keep busy and order about; but that still left her with plenty of excess energy, which made her, who had so much fun planning and supervising the decoration of our huge house, to continue planning, decorating and furnishing whatever interiors she could lay her hands on.

She began by redecorating the large and the small guest rooms on the mansard floor, which remained overly plain and thereafter she offered to help with, or more correctly take over, the decoration of friends’ homes. The friends and relatives, who succumbed to the temptation of having my mother decorate their apartments, got a good deal if their tastes coincided with hers; if not, they had to put up with the inconvenience that the workmen my mother brought to the job followed her instructions to the letter, but simply ignored the owner’s preferences if they differed from hers and if he or she dared to express them.

Her main scope for decorating, however, remained her own house for quite a while. After the main rooms were completed, she started redecorating the servants’ quarters. Their oval-shaped dining hall with its display of peasant pottery and antique copper utensils (of which I still own a few), and my mother’s pantry with its specially designed wrought-iron chandeliers became showpieces. Next came the servants’ bedrooms, with colourfully painted wood panellings, chintzy curtains and furniture to match.

The only trouble was that she judged those magnificently refurbished rooms too good for their previous occupants, so she tried to keep them empty by squeezing the domestic staff into the remaining not-yet decorated rooms. For example, she discovered that our young second butler was sleeping with our not-so-young cook. So she lectured him on sexual morality and managed, by promising a dowry and applying a little pressure, to make him marry and move in with the cook, thereby vacating his room.

Another example was the replacement of one of the maids and our ancient, alcoholic and increasingly forgetful first butler with a butler-and-maid couple, who of course shared a room. Months later, as we were coming home, a woman stopped us before we could enter, introducing herself as our new butler’s lawful wife, accusing him of living in adultery and demanding that we fire the adulterous couple. Father and I were stunned, both by what she said and by Mother’s cool reply that she knew about it all along but had made them pose as husband and wife in order to spare her family’s and the other servants’ sensibilities.

My mother’s strong personality and imposing presence were quite exceptional. In 1938, for example, when the Vatican chose to hold the 34th Eucharistic World Congress in Budapest, Regent Horthy decided to treat members of the Congress as guests of the Hungarian state, which involved a number of receptions, banquets, lunches and meetings in the Royal Palace. Not being a Catholic, however, he felt somewhat out of place and was also embarrassed by his wife’s knowing no languages other than Hungarian. So my mother, a Catholic and accustomed to move in diplomatic circles, was asked to play the role of official hostess at the Congress. Her command of languages, exquisite manners, impressive appearance and organizing ability made her a great success, not only by sitting at the head of the table at all the social events, with Cardinal Pacelli, the later Pope Pius XII at her right, but also by taking an active part in selecting menus, ordering flower arrangements and arranging a concert.

Let me also recount a much later incident, which shows that she retained her ability to impress people even in very old age. At the end of the Second World War, when Hungary’s inclusion in the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence made the coming of a Communist régime inevitable, my parents decided to join me in California. Unable to part with their beloved house and its furnishings, they merely rented it to the British Government for use as their ambassador’s official residence, hoping to live on its rent in the interim and to return home some day. In 1952, however, Hungary’s Communist government expropriated the house and promptly "privatized" it, by selling it to the British Government, which is still using it as their ambassador’s official residence.

The furnishings of the house, however, including my parents’ beautiful beloved antiques were not expropriated, and the British continued to pay rent on them until 1965. Then, Britain’s Ministry of Public Buildings and Works wrote that they want to stop renting the furniture and buy it instead, offering to pay Ł6,000 for it, which, they said, was fair value, considering its wear and tear and the 20-years’ rental they had paid for it already.

Father was dead by then and Mother was outraged at being offered so little for her beloved antiques. Yet, she had little choice, because antiques were unsaleable in Communist Hungary and their export prohibited. She wrote an indignant letter to Queen Elizabeth, complaining of her Government’s unethical behaviour in trying to exploit helpless, innocent victims of Communism; but it only resulted in a curt acknowledgment of receipt. So my mother, aged 81 at the time, took the first flight to Budapest, asked for and obtained an appointment with the Ambassador, told him in no uncertain terms what she thought of his Government’s shameful offer of a paltry Ł6,000 for her valuable antiques; but then offered, as a special concession, to sell them for $70,000—the equivalent of $300,000 in today’s money and approximately seven to eight times the British Ł6,000 offer.

The Ambassador promised to transmit her offer to the Ministry in London; but warned her that given the administrative complexities of such a transaction, it might take months to get a reply. My mother, however, not used to being trifled with, replied that she must have a check for $70,000 within a week, otherwise she would send moving vans the Monday following to take all the furniture away. With those words she stood up, indicating that the audience was over and walked out, leaving the Ambassador speechless.

Her threat was an empty one, of course, as she well knew. One could not possibly hire large moving vans so easily and promptly at all in Communist Hungary; and even if one could have, it would have been quite impossible to find a warehouse able and willing to store all the furniture of a house with 18,000 square feet floorspace. The Ambassador must have known that too, having been long enough at his post to be familiar with local conditions; but a couple of days later, my mother received a phone call from the embassy, asking when she could come to see the Ambassador at his residence to receive the $70,000 check.

The British may have discovered the true worth of our valuables and I also heard much later that Prince Philip was scheduled for an unofficial visit to Budapest, where he was to be staying at the Ambassador’s residence, which would have been awkward had it been emptied of its contents. Even so, the Ambassador would hardly have fallen for my mother’s palpably empty threat had it not been for her impressive presence, aplomb and self-assurance, which had often before given credence to her unrealistic threats and promises.

The present British Ambassador to Hungary, who in his student days attended a course of my lectures in California, is in love with his magnificent official home, almost in the literal sense of the word. He uses a painter’s rendering of its garden façade for his Christmas cards, just as my parents used a similar one for their ex libris. He asked me for negatives of all my 58 early photographs of the garden, the inside and outside of the house in its full glory as well as at various stages of its construction and of some of the more remarkable pieces of antique furniture, in order to have enlargements made, which he planned to frame and display on the walls of one of the corridors. He invited us for tea every time he learned that we were in Budapest and always asked me in an anxious voice how its present appearance compared to its original glory. I never had the heart to disappoint him with a true answer.

Even so, I suspect that aesthetically it must be one of the most beautiful and most beautifully furnished British embassies; although the British Foreign Office (to the Ambassador’s great displeasure) had some of the most precious antiques transferred to more important embassies, on the ground that they were too good for Hungary.

Let me just add here that after the fall of Communism, I applied for compensation to the new Hungarian Government for the expropriation of the house and received inconvertible papers worth at best $5,000—a fraction of one percent of the value of the house.

(To be continued)