Hegedűs Ádám: Hungarian Background

At four in the morning with Linz behind us, I was still travelling on credit. I had left London with a suitcase, a portable typewriter, a raincoat, a ticket as far as the German-Austrian frontier, and a few pounds in my pockets. To travel from London to Budapest, via Ostende and Germany, is to me as much a matter of routine as for a commercial traveller to go to Liverpool or Manchester.
I took no foreign money with me. In Belgium they accepted English silver, in Germany I sold my last half-crown and decided to spend the night at a hotel on the Austrian frontier where there would be an exchange office. But when I arrived at the Austrian frontier - towards one in the morning - I found that if I were to spend the night there I would be unable to get a good connection. I made  a rush towards the station exchange so that I should be able to pay for my ticket from Passau to Budapest. To my horror it was locked. The situation seemed serious. Here I was on the frontier with no railway ticket and no Austrian money to pay for it.