Budapest airport was hidden in freezing fog. There was no one around, except for the odd soldier, gun at his hip, blank look on his face. She went through customs without being stopped. Just as well, because her suitcase was full of Irish whiskey, which the Hungarians loved, but couldn’t get their hands on, behind the Iron Curtain. Budapest was empty too, except for faded yellow trams – and the red stars on top of the government buildings. When they got on the train to go south, she could see nothing out of the window, except for fat icicles, hanging from trees. Already she loved this place. It felt so strange. It felt like home.

The actors were very friendly. None of them spoke English, but they got by with sign language. And the whiskey and pálinka and Russian champagne, soon loosened their tongues. The Kaposvár company had worked together for years. The actors’ flats were just across the road from the theatre – and they spent all their free time in the bar, playing cards, gossiping and drinking. The work they did on stage was astonishing. Every production, a hidden subversion, giving their audience a message of freedom, when open dissent was forbidden. Hungary: the happiest barracks in the Eastern Bloc. That’s what they said. But it wasn’t true.

“We can’t travel abroad”, said her friend, through an interpreter. “Except once every three years. And only if the regime approves. Once we were invited to a theatre festival in France, but the apparatchiks said no; they said the French actors were Maoist insurgents, who would only persuade us to defect.” He laughed. But it was more of a sob, really.

But she – she had privilege. A British passport. She could travel where she liked. The company kept inviting her back, to work with them. The main appeal, she knew, was her Britishness – and that suitcase, stuffed with tea bags and whiskey. The last time she went, it was summer 1989. She got really sick, and when she went home, she knew it was forever. The Berlin Wall fell four months later. The red stars were dragged from the roofs, and a new era began. Some years after that, Hungary joined the European Union. Her British passport and their Hungarian passports were joined, under a single blue flag with a circle of gold stars.

Now everything has changed again. The UK has left the European Union. Freedom of movement is over. The Hungarians can still travel where they like. But what about her? Ah, how she longs for that slow train out of Budapest now, with snow piling at the window, contraband in her case, and a sense of something beautiful and foreign and free, just ahead of her, on the country railroad track.