Four years after the Hungarian Revolution and two years following the execution of its leader, Imre Nagy (1896–1958), I enrolled in Budapest University in September 1960, to study English and Russian. There ensued five rather uneventful years ending with my graduation in June 1965.

Of course, the nine months in the factory had taught me to appreciate the luxury of having nothing to do but prepare for my classes and diligently take notes at lectures on Chaucer, Gower, or Turgenev. It was just the ideological subjects that gave me a headache: dialectical materialism, political economy and the rest with their claim of exclusivity and infallibility were hard to swallow.

However, the atmosphere in Hungary was relaxing, I felt I could breathe more freely and looked optimistically to the future.

What I did not realize until much later was that the single most decisive event in my life had actually taken place in 1961 with the purchase of a tape recorder. It was an unwieldy monster and the tapes on sale were of shoddy quality with the magnetic layer likely to flake off.

My brother, on learning of my new acquisition, paid for my membership in what was called the Australian Tapesponding Association. “Tapespondence”—the exchange of recorded messages in place of letters—may or may not have been a long-lived hobby on an international scale but it has changed my life.