of here?’ For that I not only remained unfed by day, but that night he didn’t bother to bring the paper-thin dirty blanket either. I learnt what colour the sky was by the ninth day. By then K.K. merely pointed and I reeled off all the junk I could remember. But I’d done it wrong. Somehow ‘Sky is red; silk is blue.’ K.K. shouted and hit me softly against the face. I had no food or blanket and shivered with the intense cold of the night-time. From then on sometimes I got things right, sometimes wrong, according to the colour K.K. had decided everything was that day. Even with gruel every day I would have become weaker and weaker. I passed the ‘wisecrack stage’, the ‘asking questions’ stage, the ‘do you understand English?’ stage. I was weak and exhausted and on the day I got everything so correct that K.K. brought me a piece of cold cooked meat, I sobbed for an hour without feeling sad – with pleasure perhaps it was.
Every morning the door was opened and I handed out my slop pail; every night it came back again. I began to count the days. With my fingernails I incised a crude calendar in the soft wood of the door, behind it I was out of sight of the peep-hole. Some of the days were marked by means of a double stroke; those were the ones I heard the noises. They were generally loud enough to wake me, the noises, when they happened. They were human noises but difficult to describe as either groans or screams. They were somewhere between the two. Some days K.K. gave me a small slip of paper; typewritten on them there were orders such as ‘The prisoner will sleep with arms above the blankets.’ ‘The prisoner will not sleep in the daytime.’
One day K.K. gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. As I sat back to puff at it he said, ‘Why do you smoke?’ I said I didn’t know and he went away; but the next day Grass was Sepia, and I got beat about the head again.
After I had marked twenty-five days on my calendar K.K. brought me a slip that said, ‘The prisoner will receive a visitor for six minutes only.’ There was a lot of shouting in the corridor and K.K. let in a young Hungarian Army Captain. He spoke reasonably good English. We stood facing each other until he said, ‘You requested a meeting with the Great Britain Ambassador.’
‘I don’t remember it,’ I said slowly.
K.K. pushed me in the chest with force that thudded me against the wall of my cell and left me breathless.
The Captain continued, ‘I don’t question. I say this. You ask.’ He was charming, he never once stopped smiling. ‘A secretary is without. He sees you now. I go. Six minutes only.’
K.K. showed a man into my cell. He was so tall he beat his head against the door jamb. He was embarrassed and awkward. He explained reluctantly that the decision wasn’t his, that he was only the third under-secretary, and that sort of thing. He explained that there was no record of my being a British citizen, although he admitted that I sounded like an Englishman to him. He was so embarrassed and awkward that I almost believed that he was the British official he purported to be.
‘You wouldn’t think me impertinent, sir,’ I said, ‘if I asked you to give proof of identity.’
He looked madly embarrassed and said, ‘Not at all,’ a few times.
‘I don’t mean papers of identity, you understand, sir. Just something to show that you are in regular contact with the old country.’
He looked at me blankly.
‘Everyday things, sir, just so I can be sure.’
He was keen to be helpful; he came back with the everyday things and a load of reasons why the Embassy could do nothing. His greatest anxiety was in case I should implicate Dalby’s group, and he was always fishing for news of any statement I was going to make to the Hungarian Police.
Doing this while maintaining that I wasn’t a British subject was a strain even for old-school British diplomacy. ‘Don’t get sent to a Political Prison,’ he kept saying. ‘They treat prisoners very badly.’
‘This isn’t the YMCA,’ I told him on one occasion. I began to wish he’d stop coming. I almost preferred K.K. At least I knew where I was with him.
Every day seemed hotter and more humid than the previous one, while the nights became more chilly.
Although K.K. knew enough English for everyday needs, that is, to feed me or punch me on the nose, I found I could get a cup of sweet black coffee from one of the guards when I learnt enough Hungarian to ask. He was an old man looking like a bit player in a Ruritanian smaltz opera, sometimes he gave me a small piece of chewing tobacco.
Finally the tall British man came to see me for the last time. They went through the shouting and preliminaries, but this time it was only the Army Captain who spoke. He told me that, ‘Her Magestyries Government’ under no circumstances can regard me as a British subject. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘the trial will proceed under Hungarian law.’ The man from the Embassy said how sorry he was.
‘Trial?’ I said, and K.K. smashed me against the wall again, so I kept quiet. The British man gave me a sorry-old-chap look with a flick of the eyes, put on his rolled-brim hat and disappeared.
K.K. had a rare flash of altruism and brought me a black coffee in a real porcelain cup. Surprise followed surprise, for when I sipped it, I discovered it had a shot of plum brandy in it. It had been a long day. I curled my feet as near to my head as possible and curling my arms close, I went to sleep thinking, ‘If I don’t get out of here quickly you fellows are going to miss each other.’
Some nights they left the lights on all night, and on nights when I got every single K.K. colour wrong they sent the old moustachioed guard to keep me awake all night. He talked to me, and if K.K. was there, shouted at me not to lean against the wall. He talked about everything he knew, his family and his days in the Army, anything to keep me awake. I couldn’t translate a word of it, but he was a simple man and easy to understand. He showed me the height of his four children, photos of all his family, and now and again made a flickering movement with his hand that meant I could lean against the wall and rest while he stood half in the corridor listening for K.K.’s return.
Once every third day the Army Captain returned, and although I may have misunderstood, I believe he told me that he was my defence counsel. On the first visit he read my indictment; it took about an hour. It was in Hungarian. He translated a few phrases like ‘enemy of the State’, ‘high treason’, ‘plotting for the illegal overthrow of Peoples’ Democracies’ and there were a few ‘imperialisms’ and ‘capitalisms’ thrown in for good measure.
There were thirty-four marks on my door now. By resting and sleeping in snatches I had put a few of my nerve endings together but I was no Steve Reeves. The diet was keeping me pretty low physically and mentally. Each morning I got up feeling like the first frames in a Horlicks strip. It was pretty obvious that if I didn’t swim against the current there would be nothing left of me I’d known and loved. There was no chance of a ‘Houdini’ through the boltwork and a fighting retreat out of the main gates. It was to be a cool calm slow walk or I wouldn’t be there. Thus did I reason on my thirty-fifth day of isolation and hunger.
The only person around who broke the rules was the old man. Everyone else had the door locked behind them; the old man stood half-way out of it to give me a few minutes’ sleep. There was no alternative. I had no weapon but the door. I wanted to escape at night, so that meant I couldn’t use the light flex. The slop pail was too heavy to be used adroitly. No, it was the door, which meant, I’m afraid, that the old man got it. That night I was all set to try. Pretending to rest I leaned against the wall lining the door up against my target. He didn’t come close enough. I did nothing. When finally I went to bed I shivered until I went to sleep. It was a couple of nights later that the old man
