Life before Frank: from Cradle to Kibbutz: Frank's Travel Memoirs, #1

By Frank Kusy

Born into poverty from immigrant parents, Frank Kusy learns to live on his wits – first as a pint-sized wheeler dealer in 1960's London, then as an unsuspecting money collector for local gangsters, then as the bane of his Jesuit teachers. With his antics driving his Hungarian mother to despair, he vows that one day he will make her proud of him. It is a vow it will be difficult for him to keep.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grinning Bandit books
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393872054

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

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Long before I was a travel writer, a market trader in London, and a budding entrepreneur in India, I was a tall, geeky boy with a bad haircut and National Health glasses growing up in 1960s London. It was a time of bombed-out buildings, long winters, and a lot of fog and smog. All the men wore grey or black suits (including my father, who added a greatcoat and a trilby to look like Humphrey Bogart) and a lot of the women wore figure-hugging dresses with large, flowery prints and rather less figure-hugging overcoats.

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Few people had a TV, let alone a car, and the only entertainment was the radio (my mother listened to Radio 4 all the time), the local cinema (my weekly treat was Saturday morning pictures), and the annual circus where I was wheeled out for photographs with increasingly resigned-looking monkeys. As for the street I lived in, two long rows of uniformly drab, soot-covered Edwardian houses led down to a series of ‘pre-fabs’ where we kids played cards and marbles, or kicked around footballs. Were they happier times? I don’t know. All that I do know is that I couldn’t wait to grow out of this monochrome world and find a life of adventure. Oh, and to change the name I had been born with...

Chapter 1

A Tale of Two Wojciechs

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Saturday, 11th March 1967, was a day I’ll never forget.

Five white-robed figures lay prostrate on the ground in the high, neo-Gothic college church known as St Ignatius of Loyola. Up in the gallery, a high, angelic voice sang forth their praises. Soon joined by a choir of other high, angelic voices. Then a lone non-angelic voice – suggestive of a demented mule – brayed forth and disturbed the solemnity of the occasion. Yes, my voice had just broken and I had ruined the ordination of five Jesuit priests. As 300 pairs of disapproving eyes swivelled in my direction, I decided that I would never sing in public again.

My mistake – quite a big one – had been to pass the U.K. ‘Eleven-plus’ exam a year or so earlier. It had given my Hungarian mother the impression that I was intelligent.

‘You’re going to get the best education in the world, John,’ she told me with a pleased grin. ‘And I’m going to make sure of it.’

And that’s what she did. Working day and night to keep me in food, uniforms, and school outings, she packed me off to St Ignatius – a grim, twin-towered Jesuit college in North London – and left me to stew there for seven years.

As for the ‘John’, that’s a different story. I was born Francis John Ivan Ludwig Kusy...Frank. The ‘Frank’ was tacked on the end of the birth certificate by my Polish father. He liked the name Frank. My mother preferred Francis. And since neither of them could agree on either Francis or Frank, they ended up calling me John.

The day my voice broke was also the day I learnt about my father, who had died ten years before. I was sitting at home complaining to my mother about my humiliation when she turned to me and said: ‘You think upstaging five priests and having the whole school think you an idiot is the worst day in your life. Your father must be turning in his grave!’ I asked her what she meant by this strange statement, and she replied that my father’s whole life had been full of worst days. As the eldest of six brothers in a remote hamlet on the Polish-Slovakian border, his own father had expected him to become the village priest. He had not wanted to be the village priest, so he’d run away to study law in Lwów – present day Lviv. He was not to know it, but he would never see his family again. Just as he finished his studies, the Second World War started and the Russians invaded Eastern Poland. The Soviet authorities regarded service to the pre-war Polish state as a ‘crime against revolution’and ‘counter-revolutionary activity’ and packed off about two million suspected ‘dissidents’ – including academics like my father – to gulag work camps in Siberia.

What my mother told me next shocked me to the core. My father had been strong-armed down to the nearest railway station and brutally bundled into a waiting cattle truck stuffed to the gills with other ‘enemies of the state’. Then he’d had the journey from hell into the depths of Russia, which lasted about three weeks, trying to survive in sub-zero temperatures (the truck was unheated and it was a particularly harsh winter) with no food, precious little water, and just one hole in the floor for toiletry purposes. ‘We were treated like animals,’ he’d reluctantly told my mother, ‘and then we got to the gulag and it was even worse. I was put to work on the mines, the malachite mines, which was back-breaking work. Most of the time, we survived on one slice of black bread a day. Severe frost, hunger, lack of any medical attention, and hard work – people were dying like flies.’

My father lost all of his hair and most of his health in that camp. Then, just as he had given up hope, he was thrown a lifeline. Due to Germany attacking Russia in June 1941, a Polish-Russian treaty was signed with the exiled Polish Government in London, and a decree of ‘amnesty’ was issued, allowing for the formation of a Polish army in the southern European part of Russia. Thousands of Poles were released from the gulags and joined General Anders’s army, which fought alongside the Allies in North Africa and Italy.

My father was one of those lucky few thousand. Though his trauma was not yet over. Shortly after joining the 2nd Polish corps under General Anders, he was put in charge of a bear. A bear with the same name as him. ‘I wish you wouldn’t have called it Wojciech,’ he’d grumbled to a friend who’d adopted it en route to Tehran. Wojciech means Joyful Warrior and it just knows I’m not that!’

The other thing the bear knew was that it hated my father. All the other Polish soldiers, it learnt to salute or drink beer with or smoke (or eat) cigarettes with. Him, it just spat and growled at. So when he was put in charge of it for a day he was understandably nervous. And rightly so, because only a few minutes into his duty – while he was cleaning his one and only war medal – the bear leapt forward and grabbed it.

‘The bear loved that medal,’ my mother laughed. ‘It was all sparkly and glinty and gold. Your father had a devil of a job getting it back off him. In the end, he threw a whole pack of cigarettes at him and lunged in to retrieve the medal while the beast joyfully ate them.’

It was a miracle the bear hadn’t died from this wholesale intake of nasty chemicals. In fact, my father’s heart had nearly stopped when he realised he might have poisoned the company mascot. But then it had sicked the whole lot up with a burp and that was the end of the matter.

Though not quite the end. Over the course of the next few years, Wojciech did become a ‘joyful warrior.’ During the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy he helped move crates of ammunition – never dropping a single one – and became a celebrity with visiting Allied generals and statesmen. He even attained the rank of corporal!

But he didn’t give up the fags. After the war, Wojciech was given to Edinburgh Zoo, where my father once visited him. He went all the way up there to congratulate the bear on its achievements and to apologise to it. And when he got there, some other former Polish soldiers were tossing it cigarettes, which it was joyfully eating just as before...

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Chapter 2

Shillings and Rings

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Not only was I born with weird middle European names – Ivan? Ludwig? – I was also born late. Ten days late. On the 17th of June 1954. My mother would later say, ‘That was just like you, John. You waited until meat rationing was about to end in England, so you could get the second sausage.’

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But it wasn’t like me at all. Even if I could I have chewed it with my tiny baby teeth, I didn’t want the second sausage. I didn’t even want the first sausage. When I quizzed my mother more closely in later years, she would come to admit:  ‘Actually, you showed little or no interest in food. You came out of me at seven and a half pounds, and took over a year to grow twice that much. All you were interested in doing, when I lugged you around the house or down the street, was peering over my shoulder with big, wondering eyes. You were such a curious child!’

I hated my pram.  When my mother wheeled me around in it, I would toss all my toys (including my bug-eyed plastic Gonk) out of it so that she had to stop and let passing strangers reach down and put them back for me. She never put them back herself. She had trouble with her knees. Plus she knew how much I liked strange, smiling faces peering into the pram. Right from the start, I was a sucker for attention.

As soon as I gained control of my opposable thumbs, the much chewed Gonk – along with my non-p.c. golliwog and other stuffed toys – became the subject of surgical experiments. In an age where a mother’s nail scissors were not plastic-tipped or banned completely from the reach of an inquisitive infant, I carefully and methodically cut open my furry friends and disembowelled them all. It was an ugly job, and one which my mother, when she recalled the incident to me in later years, suggested a past life as a Spanish inquisitor.

Not that my mother really believed in past lives. She was a hard-line Catholic through and through. One life was all you got, and if you didn’t get that right Jesus was going to look down on you from his cross and be very upset that he had sacrificed his life in vain. As soon as I started going to church, in my third year, and began learning about Jesus, I knew that I was doomed.

Something else doomed my third year. My father Wojciech died. He was only forty-four. I guess, looking back on it, we should have expected it – those long, hard years in the gulag had taken a terrible toll. ‘He had two heart attacks in quick succession,’ my mother told me, ‘and while he was waiting for the third – which killed him – he didn’t even dare hold you, his health was so fragile.’

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I didn’t think I had any memories of my father, but I was wrong. A year or so after learning his traumatic early life secrets, my mother found my childhood ‘Book of Memories’, which I had written for a primary school project. ‘You never showed me this,’ she said with a smirk. ‘Have you been keeping secrets too?’

I shrugged. I barely remembered writing it.

‘Let’s see what it says, shall we?’ she continued.

To be fair, it wasn’t a bad piece of writing for a ten year old. And it started innocently enough...

18.1.65

This is the Memory Book of John Kusy. I am a tall, imaginative but mischievous boy with brownish-yellow hair and brown eyes. I have a great liking for books and especially for writing my own stories, for my favourite lesson is composition and my ambition is to be an author.

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said my mother, nodding approvingly. ‘Though being a writer won’t pay any bills. You’ll want you to get a proper job when you grow up!’

The next extract of the diary knocked the approving look off my mother’s face completely.

19.1.65

When I was a baby, one year old to be exact, I lived in Balham. My father was a watchmaker and he fixed many clocks – including cuckoo clocks. After watching my father make some of the clocks chime (I was very fond of hearing the clocks chime), I quietly slipped into his work-room and set off all the clocks. Wasn’t my father surprised!

‘You couldn’t have remembered that.’ My mother eyed me suspiciously. ‘I must have told you about it. But you didn’t just start all those clocks, did you? You found something in one of them and you hid it.’

‘I did?’

‘Yes, you did. It was my mother’s wedding ring – the one thing of value I had left when I fled over the mountains with your Hungarian grandfather to escape the Russian armies in 1944. It was a big joke between your dad and me that I was wearing it when we first met – when I became cook to Lady Astor in London and he was her butler. You’ve got it on the wrong finger, he teased me. Is it waiting for you to find the right man, or have you found the right man and you’re dropping him a big hint?’

My brows furrowed. I