In England, the stereotypical family is husband and wife and 2.4 children, so they say, and a dog and a cat. We have two cats, by the way. They were my cats, but when I left to come and live in Hungary, I took them to my mum, who wasn’t overjoyed at the time, but now she quite likes them. We used to have a dog, a big golden labrador, but he had to be put down ‘cause he got very sick, so that was quite sad. The English stereotypical family of husband and wife is, I suppose, changing now because there are a lot of one-parent families. A lot of people get divorced now and live on their own and bring up their children on their own. What about my parents? Well, my mother never worked, she was a housewife, and she and my dad lived in Sri Lanka and India for much of their married life, ‘cause my dad was a businessman. He’s retired now but used to import, I think it was whisky and fertilizer, from England to Sri Lanka. My mum brought up two children there, so both of my brothers were brought up in Sri Lanka and India. They must have had a very idyllic childhood – I heard stories about them swimming in tropical seas and going on expeditions to tea plantations, and it sounded really nice. I was born a year after they moved back to England, near London, so that’s a bit different from exotic Asia. I suppose in a way we conformed to the typical stereotype of a family, in that my father was the breadwinner and the head of the family, and my mother was a housewife and brought up children. Nowadays in England, most women seem to want to go out to work, and even if they have children, they send them to a nursery or a crèche at a very early age and go back to work to resume their careers. Also, quite often now just the immediate family live together, and a lot of old people live on their own, not usually with their children and their grandchildren as used to be the case.
Vivien
I live in Budapest, in a flat in the centre of town, on the third storey, the third floor, of a building. It’s a typical Hungarian building with a courtyard and a big stairwell. There’s no lift, unfortunately, which means I have to stagger up three flights of stairs every day, a couple of times a day. It’s quite a small flat – I don’t remember how many square metres it is but it’s pretty small.