George Szirtes reads his award-winning memoir about his mother, Magda. Her turbulent life reflects the drama of the 20th century.

She survived incarceration in two different concentration camps during the Second World War and then settled in Hungary - but fled with her family in 1956. Arriving as a refugee in London, serious illness forced her to abandon professional work and to live at home as a housewife, where she began the process of “Englishing” her family.

The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life told backwards, from the depths of Magda’s final days to her girlhood as an ambitious photographer in Budapest. The woman who emerges is beautiful, energetic, direct, warm and passionate. It is a book born of curiosity, of guilt, and of love.

In this second episode, George Szirtes describes his mother’s attempts to make her family fit in, once they arrive in England.

“We were Englishing ourselves as best we could. But my mother’s firm ideas about dress could be hard on us. She abhorred the way the English dressed their children: the long flannel shorts, the sloppy woollen socks. We had to wear white sandals and white socks. Your shorts will be short, continental length, she decided. We were a laughing stock, but not to her…”

George Szirtes is a poet and translator who escaped to Britain with his family after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. He’s the author of some 25 books of poetry. The Photographer at Sixteen won the 2020 James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

Read by the author, George Szirtes
Abridged and produced by Elizabeth Burke
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4 Show less