Inside Outside by Andrew Riemer Page A

illicit currency.
    People expended extraordinary ingenuity in contriving safe hiding places for their hoards. Rumour spread its net around neighbourhoods and communities. Never in the spines of books! They arrested someone at Number 47 last week. My parents thought they had been very clever when they worked out how to loosen the lead seal on the electricity meter, thus enabling the cover to be lifted and the cavity behind it to be stuffed with banknotes and coins. Then we heard that Mrs Somebody had been dragged off by the police when they discovered a roll of American dollars in her meter. We tried the lining of topcoats; we tried the back of the green-eyed radio; my mother had the wedge heels of her summer sandals hollowed. Our precious dollars and gold coins led a restless life, constantly moving about the flat, our clothes and our possessions in search of safety. We were always on the lookout, always alert and watchful, apprehensive, forever trying to anticipate whatever ‘their’ next move might be.
    It was a neurotic world, bordering on hysteria. A curious excitement filled the air, a recklessness with a touch of hectic gallantry. People were living their lives to the full, as if there were no future. For some there was none. For some there was only ruin—financial, political and physical. For others, like my parents, the future was the peaceful dullness of places like Epping. But even for them that peace soon turned to ashes through economic hardship and the boredom of living in a world entirely lacking the excitement of their last months in the old world.
    Like most other children living through those strange days, I fell under the spell of that carnival of excess, anxiety and excitement. Like my parents, like everyone else, I was in a state of anticipation, of marking time, and while I was marking time, I engaged with the pleasures of life—at least as far as they were available to me. For the first time in my life, apart from a couple of weeks spent at a nursery school some years earlier, I was to attend school. My education was, however, shortlived. On my second day, a barber came into the classroom carrying the sinister appurtenances of his trade: razor, brush, bowl and strop. We—thirty or forty squirming boys—had to submit to the indignity of having our heads shaved as a precaution against lice. My parents were outraged. They took me out of school—we would after all be leaving for Australia soon. Officialdom ignored my truancy. My schooling was not to begin until I was past my eleventh birthday, when I was received into the perplexed bosom of Canterbury Public School in New South Wales.
    The months of aimless activity that followed my two days of schooling provide my most significant memories of that former life, a life that abruptly ceased to exist as soon as we caught sight of those streetlights near South Head the following year. Much of that time I spent in the company of my maternal grandmother, who had grown even more sour and mean-spirited in that hectic and self-indulgent world. No doubt we did all sorts of things which I have now forgotten; some of my most powerful and evocative memories of that time are concerned with our frequent visits to a funfair. That funfair, modelled (like so much else in Budapest) on the famous, and much larger, Prater in Vienna, stood—and still stands—in the public gardens which began at the top of our street. My grandmother and I would stroll in a leisurely fashion towards its gateway, and enter a magical world.
    It boasted the usual attractions of such places, but my grandmother and I spent an eternity—or so memory tells me—visiting two of them in particular. One was called Venice, a kitschy version of the Tunnel of Love. To the accompaniment of a cracked, hissing recording of the Barcarolle from
The Tales of Hoffmann,
your gondola glided down the dark waters of the Grand Canal, past imposing palaces, past the magical facade