Time went by and I was running down the clock, so I needed to get my act together somehow, because my girlfriend was not capable of finding me accommodation that suited my budget and we were in October. The prices she shared with me, the going rate for rooms in London, were completely unimaginable by Austrian standards. She had almost a month to find accommodation, but she could only manage to read an advertisement in the window of a decrepit convenience store on Upper Richmond Road in Putney, South West London, which offered one bunk bed in a run-down hostel or a rogue house for £30 a week, where I had to share the room with five Chinese individuals. I might have thought about it if they were five Brazilian courtesans from Ipanema who had come to London to teach Portuguese with a French accent, but five short, bold, middle-aged men working in the Hong Kong Buffet in Chinatown, Soho, seemed rather inappropriate.
The thought of having to share a room with unknown individuals sent shivers right down my spine. Imagine you are checking out of “Hotel Mama”, where you have the fully equipped basement at your disposal, including a love nest, bathroom, toilet, workshop, kitchen, and rehearsal room.
Opposite my love cave was a little storage facility, an under stairs cabinet where my mum hid all the drinks, like fine wines, reds, and whites, liquors, and aged brandies, distilled Pálinka over 55% alcohol content, sent by a trusted angel, my grandmother directly from Transylvania, and then suddenly you have to share a small room with others in an unfamiliar city, a thousand miles away from home. For a little country boy like me, this was not imaginable at all.
So, as for my preparation, I went on to a couple of websites at work and downloaded over 650 phone numbers with attached addresses of Hungarian people in the greater London area and suburbs. I thought those details might come in handy upon arrival; they might give me some useful and guided information! They were fairly easy to find because, back then, most people had landline numbers that appeared alongside their addresses in the online phone book, and obviously, having a Hungarian mother tongue, all I needed to do was type some typical Hungarian surnames into the website’s search fields, and those addresses popped up like there was no tomorrow.
As I kept pulling them off of the net, one after another, a certain road name particularly caught my eye and immediately focused my attention. With laser beam perfection, I pulled out the very street name on which my girlfriend lived. It was a Hungarian man’s name, living just the opposite side of the road according to his house number, which I compared to my girlfriend’s. I picked up the phone and reported it to her with excitement.
“Imagine you are living on the same street as a Hungarian man! “Please go over there, knock on the door, brief him about my situation and ask if he could help or advise me to solve my accommodation issues because I’m moving in a month’s time and I still have no place to stay.”
She gave me a mouthful and went down hard on me by saying: “How do you think you know a Hungarian person lives opposite me in London?” This is absolutely ludicrous, you are completely crazy, and she went on being extremely unhelpful and pathetic. I raised my voice and said, “Ask him!! He’s definitely Hungarian or related to Hungarian people, because with this surname, it is simply impossible not to have any Hungarian roots. He might not speak the language, but he might have Magyar relations or connections.” Any help or information would have been greatly appreciated at that time.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, so stop being unpleasant and do as I politely asked you to. I’m due to arrive a few days shy of a fortnight, and I have no place to stay because you broke your promise and pussyfooted around instead of moving heaven and earth to find me a suitable place to stay. I don’t really fancy sitting and sleeping on the park bench in the middle of November.
In the evening, I received a phone call. “You were right,” she said, because I spoke to my host and, indeed, the person under the house number you had mentioned is Hungarian and he speaks Hungarian too. This is no news, I replied in a heavy tone. “I was aware of this all the way. The whole point would have been for you to go, knock on his blooming door, and ask him if he could help or give any helpful advice.
A couple of days later, I received a text message to call her immediately. Phone calls were dead expensive back then, especially to mobiles. My old classmate from the HTL times, Erntl, who helped me through all my German exams and wrote a handful of lyrics to some tunes we played once with the band, which we called “The Aqua Heads with the Handicaps,” disbanded after the first and last rehearsal, just about to leave the company. Before he left, though, I asked him why he would have two landline phones at his disposal and everyone else in the office only has one. One occupied a small part of his table, and cleverly disguised was the other one on a small chest of drawers just under the table, which was only visible to someone peeping from an angle or kneeling in front of his table.
He said, “The second one is for testing.” I was pretty good at reading between the lines and asked him if I could have that testing line after his departure. He pulled his mouth to one side and asked me. What do you need to test? I mean, the guy was a genius at IT and router setups and configurations. His cyber security books continue to sell like hotcakes on Amazon. On the contrary, I learnt a few months ago how to shut down a PC properly. That’s not the kind of guy one should tell stories to.
So I simply stated, “I do not want to test anything; I replied. However, I observed that when you talk to your girlfriend and to your friends, you have yet to use the phone on your table but the one under your table. I have also counted the digits when you make those calls from your test phone, and they are exclusive to mobile numbers, and we were told that calling private mobile numbers from a landline is strictly prohibited. ” He smiled at me and whispered, “You can have one too. I pulled it through from the router rack. It is untraceable. Knock yourself out with the phone calls. No one will ever know. However, I need my line until I am here, but let me pull you one through too, so you can enjoy it immediately, because I can see that you are on a mission. “
Well, that’s precisely how I could enjoy free unlimited phone calls to mobiles and landlines around the whole wide world from my work.
It’s not so much what you know as it is whom you know!
A few minutes later, I had a phone set up under my table too, and without wasting a single second, I called my girlfriend. She informed me that the guy’s name is Nic and that if I wanted to talk to him, here is his mobile number. After the chat with her, I called the man and explained my situation. He spoke broken Hungarian, but perfectly understandable. He did not waste any time informing me that he had a double room, which he would sublet to me for £400 a month.
At this moment, the saliva stuck in my throat. I couldn’t swallow. Nor was I capable of establishing which emotion would be appropriate among crying, laughing, shouting, swearing, or maybe even thanking. I had chosen the latest and hung up the phone in total shock. My math was never great, but I could easily calculate 400 times 20. The British pound was around 20 to 22 schillings. Although Austria had switched to euros by then, it was still the early days, and people still spoke in schillings. My monthly wage at the time was 16,000 schillings, which took a hit and dropped to 11,000 schillings after the 5,000 schillings went straight into my mother’s coffers and, subsequently, into the mortgage payment. So basic primary school mathematics threw a figure at me which was only 1,005 schillings higher than the amount I had received as a soldier in the army, which we called hunger wage.
I realised that ending up with 4,000 schillings a month would not happen and made my mind up right there and then. Is this fellow completely bonkers? I asked myself repeatedly, while poisoning my thoughts with a few extremely colourful words and phrases in Hungarian, which is possibly the only language in a world where it is perfectly normal to drag the good Lord into the mix while swearing!
My mate Kopo lives in a 3-bedroom detached house for 4,000 schillings, and I ought to pay 8,000 schillings for a room in a man’s house, sharing all the facilities. At that point, Nic was out of the competition because, in my mind, he was a rip-off, and I don’t know why, somehow, I felt that he should have had sympathy for me. I understand and agree that I sound insane, but he disappointed me and I did not wish to talk to him again.
In fact, Nic became a rather important figure in my battle through my early days in London and indirectly helped me to achieve financial freedom. He played a major part, and I will mention him several times as this odyssey continues.
The good times were rolling on between the three of us; many drunken nights at home, mostly me and Kopo, because Uglich was not mobile; he did not have a car at his disposal; we did some music, and did see some gigs too, but stayed out of trouble all the way.
I also put in my resignation on the 16th of October at work, because I know that the 11th of November 2000 will be the day of my departure. I made sure I was working till the very last day, because I needed that test line till the very last moment.
They were rather relieved that I was gone. One of the wannabe mini bosses asked me why, but it was clear in his body language that he was only asking out of courtesy. I could not care less, because when I turned up at this company around a year before my departure, I didn’t even know how to shut down a PC properly. I was unplugging it from the back by the mains when they asked me to shut it down. Now I could create folders, set up a router, upload pictures, mostly to dating websites, send emails, and so forth. So I was totally happy with my progress.
I came from nowhere and suddenly rubbed shoulders and entertained people with university degrees. I never gave up, and I always believed in myself. The bigger the punches were, the quicker I would dodge them, and when I got caught, I stood up, shook the dust off, changed tactics, used another entrance, and stepped right back into the ring! I always came out on top, even if I had to go through the gutter and below.