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On holiday at lake Balaton. My father was the deputy chief cashier in the control cash-desk of a large post office. This was a position of trust and great responsibility, because they dealt with very large amounts of money. As a worker at the post office, he was a government official with every benefit which that entailed. He got a photo identity card, we could travel gratis by train, we could receive something like twenty parcels a year, gratis.
In those times the postal service had a private health-fund with private surgery, and it had a private hospital with very good doctors. And there was another interesting thing. Siofok started to be a health-resort at the time when I was ten years old, so this would have been in 1928. Only in the summer was there life in Siofok, so they decided to place a post office there during the summer, and three or life four reliable post-officers were sent there to manage this post office. It included free hotel accommodation, free meals, free beach ticket, plus their salary. There was, I think, something extra beside their salary; so my mother and I went there and stayed there the whole summer. It was not a bad thing. On top of this, my father, as a government official, had some other 'little' advantages such as the fact that he was creditable: we used to buy absolutely everything with easy repayments. Daddy would get his salary, pay everything, we wouldn't have a buck again, and then everything started again from the beginning. But we got everything on credit and easy repayments, because the postal job was such a good guarantee. Still, we lived simply.
