Not long back I was asked to be an extra on a TV soap opera. I’m lucky that its a bus ride from my 2nd HQ in Yorkshire; some rise before dawn, travel a few hundred miles from the midlands and back, and walk a way with a healthy twenty quid profit after food and gas.
Its a job that requires the ability to stand around, eat food, and socialise; I do it for the banter and the home made soups (note to CEOs & filmmakers, good catering ends any protest).
Friends you make here can vanish and turn up again anytime from two weeks to two years; and when they do it’s a simple “how’s it going” and everyone picks up from where they left off. Those with a flexible life find it easier to do than others; namely those retired, self employed, or unlucky enough to be on zero hours contracts.
The 3rd assistant director (or crowd handler), gets us to stand with a musician I met last time on a movie in Sheffield. He’s a South Yorkshireman; being from Leeds, protocol insists I must look down on him, but despite this great divide we still got along.
Conversation darts as it does from one loosely connected thing to another before settling on travel, and he becomes the 295th person to hear about my pipe dream with owning a house in in lake Balaton, Hungary, and inviting my mates over all year around. For those who don’t know, Hungary is cheap, so are the flights,
Balaton is obscenely picturesque.
Then it turns out; he’s Hungarian. Well kind of. I’d known him before as Steve, the bassist (with so many musicians on set, it’s helps to know their weapon of choice too). Turns out his real name was Istvan (Hungarian for Steve) Vajda. This leads on to further questions; namely what was a Magyar doing in Yorkshire with no trace of an Eastern European accent…
Turns out Steve was half Hungarian, and half Yorkshire. His father had left Hungary whilst the Russians were crushing their uprising in 1956:
A brief history for those who don’t know; across eastern Europe after WW2, Russia kicked out the Nazis and put people in charge who would dance to their tune. Most were called “Something Democratic Republic” and would be invaded by Russian troops should they stop being communist enough. Most of these countries were signed up to the Warsaw Pact, which meant that again, should anyone lose their appetite for communism, all the other countries would join in with giving them a good kicking.
Come 1956, Istvan Snr is a soldier in the Hungarian army, taking a day off at the movie house, and watching a few bullets wizz by on screen. The sound effects are good; only when he gets up and leaves does he realise that most of the gunfire was coming from outside. The Russians are waiting, and now firing at him. They’re are pushed back; yet regroup. As their own propaganda would say… “Hungarian patriots, with Soviet assistance, smashed the counter-revolution..”.
As those last words imply, there were a few people in Hungary who wanted to keep the communists around. Some of them shot at Istvan Snr whilst he swam across a river in December and escaped by various other means over the Austria border, where they weren’t quite so in ❤ with the eastern bloc.
First thing he does is run to the British embassy. Something’s lost in translation; they just point outside and tell him to get a coach bearing the words, “Sheffield United Tours” (god knows if it was football related), and unwittingly, the bureaucrats send a clueless foreign trooper to his freedom.
An explanation- As things kicked off in Hungary, most British cities had sent tour buses to recover their stranded locals; From Vienna, a tour bus had taken him to Sheffield Memorial Hall, the place where he had spent his first night in England, and I had met his son nearly 60 years later whilst filming.
Between now and the time he first stepped off the coach, he married a local girl, two kids, and went on to think and dream in English. His kids would go on to visit his homeland, and be scolded for listening to the (banned) BBC, who feared it would get them arrested.
Istvan Vajda passed away 2 days after this article was published; surrounded by his family in Rotherham.
