Spellbinding Memorial to a MotherFrom The New European

CHAR­LIE CON­NELLY on a stun­ning, ten­der new book in which the au­thor traces a par­ent’s event­ful life back from its tragic end

It comes to some­thing when the coun­cil send­ing round a cleaner to a young Ge­orge Szirtes’ house in south Lon­don while his mother was re­cu­per­at­ing from a 1967 op­er­a­tion and that cleaner be­ing David Bowie isn’t even close to be­ing the most re­mark­able story in The Photographer at Six­teen, pub­lished next week by Ma­cle­hose Press. In a book full of warmth, grief, cu­rios­ity, wis­dom, stag­ger­ing anec­dotes and a com­ing to terms with the vi­cis­si­tudes of 20th cen­tury his­tory, be­lieve me when I say Bowie in marigolds is far from the pre­vail­ing im­age you take away at the end.

It’s billed as a mem­oir but that doesn’t do jus­tice to a book en­com­pass­ing po­etry, Euro­pean his­tory, travel and bi­og­ra­phy in its highly orig­i­nal telling of the au­thor’s mother’s life and the ex­tra­or­di­nary, heartrend­ing events through which she lived.

“The am­bu­lance was wait­ing at the junc­tion,” the first chap­ter be­gins. “She had taken an over­dose and time was short. The driver thought he saw a gap, moved for­ward, then stopped be­cause the gap wasn’t big enough. The car be­hind ran into the back of the am­bu­lance. The am­bu­lance was dam­aged. The drivers got out and my mother died.”

As first para­graphs go that’s a pretty ar­rest­ing one, sig­nalling that this is to be no con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive. The Photographer at Six­teen is a bi­og­ra­phy told back­wards, be­gin­ning with the death of Magda Szirtes af­ter an over­dose dur­ing the sum­mer of 1975 and work­ing its way back through her re­mark­able life. This is a brave Ben­jamin But­ton of a for­mat – Szirtes is one of our most cel­e­brated con­tem­po­rary po­ets but this is his first prose book – but it works ex­traor­di­nar­ily well here, build­ing sus­pense through af­ter­maths and con­se­quences rather than omens and por­tents.

As first para­graphs go that’s a pretty ar­rest­ing one, sig­nalling that this is to be no con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive. The Photographer at Six­teen is a bi­og­ra­phy told back­wards, be­gin­ning with the death of Magda Szirtes af­ter an over­dose dur­ing the sum­mer of 1975 and work­ing its way back through her re­mark­able life. This is a brave Ben­jamin But­ton of a for­mat – Szirtes is one of our most cel­e­brated con­tem­po­rary po­ets but this is his first prose book – but it works ex­traor­di­nar­ily well here, build­ing sus­pense through af­ter­maths and con­se­quences rather than omens and por­tents.

By rights it’s a struc­ture so un­fa­mil­iar to us it should feel stilted but such is Szirtes’ skill that he leaves the reader with a vividly-formed im­pres­sion of a woman who found her­self re­peat­edly at the heart of some of Europe’s most tu­mul­tuous events of the 20th cen­tury yet, de­spite liv­ing with a heart con­di­tion, sur­vived them all to die on her own terms.

How well do we know our par­ents? How well can we know them? We view them in­evitably through the prism of their parental role, al­most as if they ma­te­ri­alised fully formed on the day we were born. There’s no set age for the re­al­i­sa­tion that our par­ents had lives be­fore we came along but the ar­ro­gance of child­hood makes it an as­tound­ing rev­e­la­tion when it comes. How­ever close we are to them we don’t truly know our par­ents be­yond the roles they play in our lives and, in our ear­lier years in par­tic­u­lar, we’re not ac­tu­ally that in­ter­ested.

How well do we know our par­ents? How well can we know them? We view them in­evitably through the prism of their parental role, al­most as if they ma­te­ri­alised fully formed on the day we were born. There’s no set age for the re­al­i­sa­tion that our par­ents had lives be­fore we came along but the ar­ro­gance of child­hood makes it an as­tound­ing rev­e­la­tion when it comes. How­ever close we are to them we don’t truly know our par­ents be­yond the roles they play in our lives and, in our ear­lier years in par­tic­u­lar, we’re not ac­tu­ally that in­ter­ested.

When we lose a par­ent, how­ever, it isn’t long be­fore we start think­ing of all the things we could have asked them, mulling over the things we wished we knew about them. What made them into the peo­ple they were? What were their hopes and dreams when they were young? Were they ful­filled? Had life turned out the way they’d hoped or ex­pected? How did they re­ally feel? Usu­ally those ques­tions only oc­cur to us when it’s too late and we’ll never know the an­swers, but here Szirtes sets out to an­swer some of them even though his mother has been dead for more than four decades.

He hopes to learn why she be­haved in cer­tain ways and did cer­tain things, not least tak­ing her own life in 1975 at the age of 51, but mostly try­ing to gain a sense of who Magda Szirtes, mother, wife, refugee, photographer, eth­nic Hun­gar­ian born in Ro­ma­nia, ac­tu­ally was.

The events of the first half of Magda’s life, through which the worst ex­cesses of mod­ern Euro­pean his­tory blun­dered back and forth, made her a per­son prac­ti­cally un­know­able while she was alive, it seems, so how can we get to know her in death? Szirtes sets out with lit­tle to go on out­side his own mem­o­ries: a few pho­to­graphs, some recorded con­ver­sa­tions with his fa­ther, a scat­ter of doc­u­ments and a sin­gle tape record­ing of Magda singing Happy Birth­day.

He has no choice but to project him­self onto these bare de­tails that leave huge yawn­ing gaps in Magda Szirtes, gaps that he has to fill amidst the dan­ger of for­sak­ing ac­cu­racy to con­jure the woman he wants her to be. It’s im­pos­si­ble to be dis­pas­sion­ate when you’re talk­ing about your mum.

Along the way as we move back­wards through Magda’s life we learn much about the Euro­pean 20th cen­tury, not to men­tion ex­pe­ri­enc­ing vivid rec­ol­lec­tions of just how it feels to be a refugee. For­tu­nately most of us will never know the re­lieftinged fear of ar­riv­ing some­where new and un­known in just the clothes we stand up in with un­speak­able hor­rors and dan­ger still just be­hind us, gate­crash­ing our thoughts and haunt­ing our dreams. This book may tell a refugee story from more than 60 years ago but the ex­pe­ri­ence, emo­tions, hopes and fears re­main ex­actly the same.

Szirtes, his par­ents and his brother ar­rived in Eng­land af­ter flee­ing the fall­out from the failed Hun­gar­ian up­ris­ing of 1956. On an early hol­i­day to Hast­ings when the fam­ily has found a home and his fa­ther has found work, the young Szirtes looks out to sea and captures a lit­tle of what it was like set­tling in Eng­land as a po­lit­i­cal refugee, es­pe­cially one from a land blighted for cen­turies by war, up­ris­ings and in­va­sions.

 “The sea guar­an­teed there would be no shift­ing of bor­ders,” he writes of the view from Hast­ings beach. “No for­eign army would march in and over­run what the Hun­gar­i­ans called ‘the is­land na­tion’. The Bri­tish Navy was the finest navy. The Bri­tish Em­pire was the finest the world had ever seen. Bri­tain had won the war and here we were on the very beach where Bri­tain had last been in­vaded. And when was that? Al­most 900 years ago. Think of that! What was it that mat­tered most in Eng­land? Free­dom, said my fa­ther. Free­dom.”

The re­cent me­dia frenzy over the small flurry of peo­ple cross­ing the English Chan­nel by boat is a per­fect ex­am­ple of the de­mon­i­sa­tion and fear of the other that pre­vails to­day, the surest sign of a na­tion ill at ease with its own iden­tity. They’re re­ferred to as ‘mi­grants’ and ‘asy­lum seek­ers’, the lat­est nifty bit of de­hu­man­is­ing through sim­pli­fy­ing of lan­guage that ex­cuses hav­ing to think of them as hu­man be­ings.

They’re the face­less threat, not peo­ple with skills, pasts, fam­i­lies, pas­sions and plenty to of­fer the na­tion in which they seek to make a home now that their own is closed to them. We’ve all met some­one with ‘le­git­i­mate concerns’ about im­mi­gra­tion who when you point to their French son-in-law, Pol­ish GP and In­dian ac­coun­tant reply, “oh no, I’m not talk­ing about them, they’re all right”, as if in the run-up to Brexit they’ll re­ceive a form from the Home Of­fice ask­ing them to list their ones-that-are-all-right. Chalk that up as a re­sound­ing suc­cess for the dog-whistling rab­ble rousers, be­cause the cli­mate has trans­formed since we were a wel­com­ing is­land haven.

When the Szirtes fam­ily touched down in Bri­tain on a BOAC plane in De­cem­ber 1956 with noth­ing be­tween them but a toy type­writer case full of old fam­ily pho­to­graphs and the clothes they stood up in they were re­ceived with un­fail­ing com­pas­sion and warmth.

There was no home sec­re­tary man­u­fac­tur­ing a phoney im­mi­gra­tion ‘cri­sis’ and de­mand­ing to know why they hadn’t re­mained in the first coun­try they reached. There were no navy ves­sels pa­trolling the English Chan­nel be­cause the big­gest threat to this coun­try is ap­par­ently half a dozen freez­ing, fright­ened Ira­ni­ans in a semi-de­flated rub­ber dinghy. Back then there was just prac­ti­cal help given will­ingly on the ba­sic hu­man agree­ment that we are all equal wherever we come from.

When a Bri­tish Army of­fi­cer reg­is­ter­ing the fam­ily at a re­cep­tion camp in Wilt­shire learns that Ge­orge’s fa­ther Lás­zló had worked as a plumber, “he was clearly pleased and de­clared that my fa­ther would have no prob­lem find­ing work... It was like magic”.

When the refugees were asked, in or­der to help de­ter­mine their wel­fare needs, to stand in lines cor­re­spond­ing to re­li­gious be­liefs Magda, a decade af­ter ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the worst of a trau­matic war, was re­luc­tant to line up with other Jews, such di­vi­sions and sep­a­ra­tions bring­ing back dread­ful, still raw mem­o­ries.

“My fa­ther as­sured her there was noth­ing to fear in Eng­land,” writes Szirtes.

The fam­ily moved from house to house at first, all ar­ranged, fur­nished and paid for by refugee com­mit­tees un­til they could get on their feet, but even­tu­ally they found a house in which they could set­tle and the Szirtes fam­ily “com­menced English­ing our­selves as fast as we could”.

Yet while the refugee ex­pe­ri­ence un­der­pins the book it’s the enigma of Magda that over­rides the nar­ra­tive. We learn that she has a his­tory of heart trou­ble, that her sui­cide isn’t her first at­tempt, and as the book grad­u­ally slips back through time we hear hor­rific sto­ries of her ex­pe­ri­ences and marvel at how she could pos­si­bly have made it as far as that Wilt­shire mil­i­tary camp, let alone build a whole new life from scratch.

It’s not giv­ing too much away to say that Magda’s en­tire fam­ily was mur­dered dur­ing the war. It’s a com­mon story of the Holo­caust but one whose im­pact is no lesser for such an unimag­in­able bur­den for any­one to carry through life. Nat­u­rally she had high hopes for her two sons, chan­nelling all her love into them as the only legacy of un­told gen­er­a­tions car­ry­ing on their shoul­ders the ghosts of peo­ple they’d never known.

That sense of life’s fragility learned through trauma made for a mixed re­la­tion­ship as Szirtes grew up. Magda was as­sertively pro­tec­tive of her two boys: when a neigh­bour com­plained about the young­sters us­ing a swear word in the gar­den she im­me­di­ately sent them back out with in­struc­tions to swear as loudly and in­ven­tively as they could, for ex­am­ple.

But there was also the sup­pressed anger at the an­tipa­thy the uni­verse had shown to her suf­fer­ing: Szirtes re­mem­bers be­ing a small boy mak­ing a mess of his home­work and his mother sud­denly leap­ing out of her chair to strike him on the head with a plas­tic box.

The more The Photographer at Six­teen pro­gresses, the more it be­comes a won­der that Magda hasn’t dis­played more anger given the cards she was dealt. As we pass through her life in re­verse there is frus­tra­tion and re­lief, joy and dark­ness, con­cen­tra­tion camps and be­tray­als, mis­un­der­stand­ings and losses, com­mu­nism and fas­cism, hid­ing places and cross-border flits, all com­bin­ing to make the photographer of the ti­tle a be­guil­ing, heart­break­ing yet ul­ti­mately elu­sive enigma. She’s brought to life beau­ti­fully in this un­flinch­ing, un­fail­ingly warm ac­count of a dis­placed, tragic, rel­a­tively brief life that for all its tu­mult ended at the road­side in a dented am­bu­lance as drivers ex­changed in­sur­ance de­tails. One thing we learn from The Photographer at Six­teen that for some peo­ple cir­cum­stances con­spire to leave them in con­trol of only one thing – their own death.