Early Years

People were always curious as to how I spent my childhood. And I always seemed to give some terse reply as I believed it was beneath my interests during my years of being a politician.

But now, as an old and decaying old hag in the ever-changing state of Hungary, I finally have the opportunity to fully elaborate on my adolescent years.

I was born into a family, or lack thereof (I never met my father as stated before in an earlier post), during the holiday season of 1912 and thus my mother had trouble finding a job to support my well-being. Luckily, she persuaded the Bálint family to take care of me as she continued the process of finding an occupation in the capital city of Budapest. Months went by without her presence, and she only visited me during the holidays, and sadly, we didn’t have very many holidays. Anyhow, I was supposedly to be raised during those years by my foster father, Imre Bálint, but it was his brother, Sándor Bálint, who I labeled as my “true” foster guardian. However, at the age of six, my mother reclaimed me and then…did something dreadful.

She enrolled me into school. I. HATE. SCHOOL.

Why? I was constantly bullied due to my foreign manners and peasant condition by both students and teachers. Anyways, I gave school secondary effort (despite me being very bright in the classroom), which was repaid with some occasional quibbling and punishment from my mother. I did, however, enjoy reading, which failed to impress anybody and lead to my title as a “gentlemen of leisure”. But looking back at it, my mother did try with her utmost efforts to ensure me a higher education that surpassed her own. She worked night and day, with multiple shifts in two professions (her hands were practically worn out…disfigured actually).

Moving on, I left school in 1926 and then spent my time as a tools-maker apprentice. I was eventually promoted to assistant and after a short stint among the unemployed, joined an underground communist party that ultimately sparked my interest in Hungarian politics.