Monica Porter

Last weekend I took a trip down memory lane. I visited the Norfolk village where, back in the 1980s, my husband and I bought a holiday cottage. We’d travel up there from London most weekends with our two young sons. That all ended with our divorce in 1992. Soon afterwards the cottage was sold, and I hadn’t been to the area since. Curious now to see whether the village had changed, I headed for the A11.   During the journey I reflected on those distant days. The cottage hadn’t been my idea.

Hungary, the country of my birth, takes a lot of flak these days – and with good reason. How nauseating that the nation which suffered Soviet oppression for nearly half a century – and whose 1956 Revolution was so savagely crushed by the Soviet army – now cosies up to a Russian president who reveres Stalin and bemoans the dissolution of the USSR. The maverick Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, once his country’s outspoken champion of freedom, is emphatically not on the side of Ukraine in its existential fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

For the past decade I have suffered from noisy neighbours in the flat below mine. First it was the stream of student tenants, thundering up and down the communal staircase day and night, banging doors, shouting to each other, playing their guitars. Then at last the flat was bought by a middle-aged owner-occupier, who completely gutted and refurbished the place; the deafening noise and pervasive dust from the months-long building works was almost unbearable. Now that his works are over, I have to put up with the day-to-day clatter and clamour of a neighbour with a lot of Gen Z house guests and a penetrating voice. Noisy neighbours are a plague for those who work at home. Naturally, I find it most maddening when I am in the middle of writing a book or article.

You could say my unfortunate track record with pets began in the cradle. At the time of my birth my Hungarian parents had a dachshund named Herr Doktor (because of the serious expression he always wore), or Doki for short. He was very put out by my arrival, as I received much of the attention previously afforded to him, and because my fastidious mother wouldn’t allow him into the nursery. So he upped sticks and moved in with the family next door. But as Doki was unfamiliar with the terrain there, one day he darted on to their driveway at the wrong moment and was run over and killed. While I obviously wasn’t to blame for Doki’s sad demise, I did play a role in it. And in time the incident seemed to fit into a pattern in my life.

As a kid growing up in the Bronx and afterwards in the suburbs to the north, I loved New York. To me it was like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz – vast, glittering and full of promise. It was where my family settled after escaping the nightmare of communist dictatorship, in the aftermath of the crushed 1956 Hungarian revolution. It was where we found freedom, democracy – what they used to call the American Dream. In later life, after I had left America and come to London, I made occasional return visits to New York and noted the changes wrought by time – mostly for the worse. But my affection for it never wavered because it held so many fond memories.

Our Serbian guide Zoran is a jovial fellow and as we rumble through the streets of Belgrade in our minibus he regales us with a joke about the difference between the various nationalities of the former Yugoslavia, all now with countries of their own. ‘We Serbs are rude,’ he says, ‘but the Croatians are self-centred, the Bosnians are thick, the Montenegrins are lazy and the Macedonians are just Serbs with a speech defect. As for the Slovenians, they are so polite they must be gay!’ Joking about each other is a definite improvement on fighting each other, as per so much of their history. The countries on my Balkan tour – Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria – have been struggling for more than three decades with their post-communist problems. But they do like a laugh.

A recent study by the Centre for London thinktank claims that the city’s black cabs could disappear forever, unless something is done to reverse the decline. Thanks to Uber, the ubiquitous satnav which devalues the cabbies’ hard-earned Knowledge of London’s streets, and the Mayor’s anti-motorist measures, there are ever fewer black cabs rumbling around the capital. The number dropped from more than 23,000 in 2014 to just under 14,500 last year – down by a third. Only a hundred licences were handed out last year. At this rate, we are told, they will vanish altogether by 2045. Well, tough. I’ve been a Londoner for half a century and have had enough bad experiences with our black cabs to feel that their disappearance wouldn’t bother me a jot.

There are two types of people: the hoarders and those who are always chucking things out because they hate clutter. I fall into the latter category. In my view, a well-ordered environment makes for a well-ordered mind. So you’ll not see my desk buried beneath the usual office detritus, nor my car strewn with apple cores, empty crisp packets, and scrunched-up receipts. In moments of boredom, I enjoy going through a drawer or cupboard to weed out items no longer required. However, my long-standing urge to jettison useless stuff has led to trouble. One episode still haunts me. I was in the kitchen with my mother, who was cooking an elaborate meal.

I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social history. And they naturally assumed I’d been part of that whole scene, with flowers in my hair and love beads around my neck, smoking pot and blasting out Jimi Hendrix records from a bedroom hung with Che Guevara posters. They took it as read that I was at the legendary Woodstock music festival and danced all night in a muddy field. This image of their youthful mum appealed to them, so they convinced themselves it was real.

Many years ago I wrote a book called Dreams and Doorways, a collection of interviews with well-known people – writers, actors, politicians, sports personalities – about their childhood. I wanted to find out how their early experiences helped to turn them into the high-achieving adults they later became. And in almost every case, some kind of deprivation or anguish or obstacle was a key factor; they’d been motivated by a determination to overcome adversity. My days were a little less happy. My mother didn’t believe in the permissive child-rearing policy of liberal American moms For boxing champ Henry Cooper, it was extreme, ‘bread-and-dripping’ poverty in South London.

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at some point in the near future, but I do know that my 20-volume Encyclopedia Americana and its sister publication, the 20-volume children’s encyclopaedia called The Book of Knowledge, will be coming with me. Everything about its concept and design was aimed at fostering curiosity They were published by The Grolier Society of New York in 1957.

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’? If I am to depart this city which no longer feels entirely like home, where to go? Half a century on, I regret to say that leaving the capital is the very step I’m now considering. I’m not sure I love it anymore and, to be frank, I am rather tired of it. I’m a lifelong aficionado of big, bustling cities and for a long time London was the best. Countless corners of it hold memories for me.