When his grandparents came to Ireland from Hungary in 1956, it wasn't the promised land they found, writes Mark Collins.
At the time of the uprising, my mother and grandparents were living in the west of Hungary, close to lake Balaton. Although natives of Budapest, they were relieved to be away from the city during the insurgency. However, when my great-grandfather died a natural death, my grandfather returned to Budapest for his funeral.
My great-grandfather was a strong-willed man; he was a Professor of Oriental Languages and a Hungarian chess champion. His surname was Asztalos, which translates as Carpenter. He wouldn't have approved of his children fleeing Hungary, but now that he was buried, most of his family, including his widow, decided to leave. In today's language, my family were economic migrants - they suffered no political persecution - but during the Cold War this distinction does not seem to have been applied to those living beyond the Iron Curtain.
My grandfather returned to lake Balaton and prepared to leave. In the morning, they went to the border. They paid a local farmer to sneak them into Austria. They were nearly caught. Lying on the freezing ground trying to evade an army jeep, my mother, aged 11, saw headlights shining above them. Once across, they made it to a refugee camp. In order to attend university, my grandfather had joined the communist party, though he wasn't politically active. Now this came back to haunt him. While his mother and sister went to America, he figured that he'd never get in as a card-carrying communist. They heard that Ireland was taking in refugees. Out of 200,000 people who left during the uprising, 530 arrived in Limerick, and they were among these.
Their first night was in the disused Knockalisheen army camp, Co Clare. It was filthy. My grandmother requested a bucket of water and soap. She scrubbed the floors. Days later, the travelling caught up with her. She collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to hospital. A kindly man, Dr Furnell of Limerick, saw to her. When he discovered that she had worked in hospitals and my grandfather was a doctor, he got them jobs in a research lab and a house to rent overlooking the Shannon.
It was a stroke of luck. My family have been indebted to Dr Furnell ever since, though we never kept in touch. He also got my mother a place in Laurel Hill school. Unlike the children in Knockalisheen who spent months, sometimes years, in the camp without attending a proper school, my mother's education wasn't really interrupted. In the space of three months, she went from a school adorned with images of Russian dictators to one with pictures of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.
She loved the nuns, and they loved her. However, she didn't realise that she was being "saved" from Soviet atheism, though saved she was: within two years she was top of her class in religious knowledge.
The Irish Red Cross paid for my grandfather to attend college to re-sit the necessary medical exams. As there were no jobs in Ireland in the 1950s, my grandparents went to England and left my mother in boarding school. She ended up studying in UCD. Her surname Asztalos was recognised by a fellow student who asked her, "Are you related to the Asztalos the chess champion?"
SHE MET MY father in college. They had their first dance in a disco on Parnell Square. My Irish grandmother lived on the Howth Road and it pained her that she couldn't detect the social class of her daughter-in-law. It also disturbed the neighbours. When the engagement was announced in the paper, eyebrows were raised by my mother's peculiar name.
When my mother left Hungary, she left her citizenship behind. When she arrived in Ireland she was technically "stateless", a legal limbo before you obtain citizenship. Although she had a visa, she only became Irish when she married my father. As there were few jobs in Ireland in the late 1960s, they emigrated to Toronto, where they got married. They stayed a few years before returning to Ireland in 1973, shortly after my birth. My mother hadn't wanted to go back to Ireland. Not only did Canada have everything a young mother wanted, it was also multi-cultural. She was no longer the token refugee. Back in Ireland, she was.
As a child, I wasn't good at spelling. This was blamed on her. A teacher once told her: "Your accent is interfering with his ability to learn English." Other teachers were interested in her and suggested that she promote her own culture to us. It always upset my Irish teacher that my mother never taught me Hungarian. But she never saw the point, and always believed that she would never return to her native land. Although Hungarian was spoken in our house between my mother and grandparents, we, as children, viewed it as another dead language, just like Irish in school.
During the 1980s, we went back to Budapest before the Berlin Wall came down. We saw the red stars on buildings, the depressing supermarkets, the old cars. I asked my mother why were there five doormen standing around the hotel door.
"In Hungary, there's no unemployment," she laughed.
After spending most of their lives in England, my grandparents retired to Wicklow. When my grandfather died, he was buried in Avoca. By coincidence, he lies beside a great-uncle of mine on my Irish side, Denis Hart, a journalist and author. On the wall beside their graves Wicklow County Council, with black humour or a lack of sensitivity, hung a notice: "Dumping is prohibited - by order."
My mother is an assimilated Irish person, though her accent still comes through. Recently, at work in the family photography business, she was arguing with a customer, an angry woman on the phone. Suddenly this woman shouted: "Go back to your own country."
My mother replied, "I came here nearly 50 years ago!" It upset her greatly. It was the only racism she'd ever experienced. But then again, not everybody can be like Dr Furnell of Limerick.
Mark Collins is the author of a novel, Stateless, to be published by Pillar Press on October 23rd. For more information, go to www.markcollins.ie