Already
on the stage are two famous veterans of Hungarian sport: the 1936 (Berlin)
olympic champion in the women’s high jump, Ibolya Csák, and the
pivot of the legendary Hungarian soccer team of the 1950’s, Nándor
Hidegkuti. I am invited to step into the space between them.
As
I look down from the stage, I remind myself that I am Andrew Hargrave,
a journalist from Glasgow, Scotland, a citizen of the United Kingdom and
a champion of nothing. The fanfare, the jubilation, the media interest
belong to the man whose name is engraved on the silver trophy handed to
me by the president of the Hungarian Olympic Committee: my long dead father
Alfréd Hajós, Hungary’s first (double) olympic championin
swimming at the first modern olympic games in Athens in 1896.
He
is being admitted to Hungary’s recently founded “Club of Immortals”, the
only one of 18 no longer alive.
As
I stand on that stage, I am assailed by a mixture of pride and doubt: pride
in his achievements not only as an all round sportsman (for he also pioneered
soccer in Hungary) but as an architect note: yet feeling a fraud, basking
in his reflected glory. As I’m being interviewed on TV, radio and by the
newspapers, I constantly have the feeling of belonging to the “other side”,
those asking the questions rather than the one answering them. I had been
invited to represent my late father at the ceremony by the Hungarian Olympic
Committee barely five years after my existence in Scotland had been “discovered”.
(Not quite true. In 1978, 15 years before, I was approached as a “living
relative, and the son of the great Alfred Hajos”, by International Hall
of Fame Inc., of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, informing me of father being
one of the first honorees in that Hall of Fame.)
It
had all started early in 1988 with a tentative inquiry from Budapest by
13 year-old schoolboy (who got my Glasgow address from a cousin in Budapest)
in a general school*, whether I was in some way related to the famous Alfred
Hajos whose name the school had decided to adopt.
Although
I had been in Hungary many times since the war, visiting my parents while
they were alive, as well as writing about the politics, the economy and,
generally, life in Hungary, I never used my father’s name or fame for any
special treatment. On the contrary, I had spent much of my life trying
to escape my father’s shadow while acquiring my own identity. After many
years I believe I have succeeded - living in a different country, the UK,
writing in a different language, English, neither as a sportsman nor as
an architect, but as a journalist.
Had
it been for Father, I should, of course, have succeeded him as an architect.
However, I saw writing as my profession from early childhood: hence this
conflict of objectives which caused him much heartache and me many wasted
years, frustration and anguish. It led to recriminations, misunderstandings
and, finally the parting of the ways, both in spirit and in physical distance.
All
these sentiments flashed through my mind at the ceremony and the interviews
that followed. Yet the fact that the interviewing journalists seemed to
be interested not only in the “immortal” Alfred Hajos, but his elderly
living son with a (for them) difficult name to pronounce, gave me some
satisfaction. I felt that at last I was being recognised
as a person in his own right, in the country of his birth - someone who
had finally emerged from his (father’s) shadow. At the same time, I had
to admit that it was his “intervention beyond the grave” that secured my
presence in that hall, starting with that schoolboy’s inquiry.
This
memoir is mainly my story: how through circumstances often beyond my control,
I got deflected from my own, then hazy aims and ambitions, and eventually
managed to shake off that shadow, partly imagined but strongly felt, to
become- as said- “a person in his own right”.
*A
“general school” is part of an education system not uncommon in Central
Europe: four primary and four secondary classes, after which pupils may
choose either an academic course (four years, ending with matriculation
and possibly going on to university), or a technical one, depending on
the type of trade chosen.