Letters from Prague December 69/January 70

 A YEAR IN PRAGUE from letters home

INTRODUCTION

This was a golden time for us. When we married on September 2^nd 1967 our honeymoon was a cold week in Yorkshire in a stone built farm cottage.  There was a thunderstorm the first night and we awoke to find mum and dad’s car up to the running board with flood water. I started to drive down to the farmyard to let the farmer know the stream was blocked, only to find the brakes not working. I managed to pump the brake and apply the hand brake and come to a stop just short of a dry stone wall.

 After we came home, Tony carried on working for I.C.T. where he had been working for the year prior to our marriage, while I completed my B.SC Nutrition.

I start a scary new job as a grade two lecturer in Nutrition and Food Science at the College of Food and Domestic Arts, Birmingham. A job I had no training for which proved difficult and stressful.

 Always super organised we drew up a five year plan with several goals. This included Tony completing an M.Sc sponsored by the I.C.T. and us wanting to work in other countries. The other goal was to teach Tony to drive which my mum and I achieved after we had purchased a left hand drive Daf 33 for £120. Tony passed first time- obviously due to the excellent teaching he received. We lived in Meriden and spent weekends with friends and visiting my Mum and Dad nearby in Coventry and my sister Paula and her family in Belton.

Our first big holiday in the summer of 1968 was a trip to the island of Elba on a package holiday. It was good to relax in the sun and visit the places of historical interest. It set the standard for holidays to come. Tony’s parents were still upset we had got married and so we did not see much of them that first year after the wedding.

Tony started his MSc in October 1968. I had changed my job by then and was working as a trainee programmer with English Electric writing the coding for the PERT Resource Allocation programme on System 4 computers. The month I joined, I.C.T. and English Electric merged to form a new computer company, I.C.L., meaning we were both working for the same company in the same field. This made our goal of working abroad easier to fulfil.

In the summer of 1969 we took Tony’s parents on holiday with us to Tunisia to heal the rift between us. We also took a short camping trip to Belgium and Holland on our own when Tony finally handed in his M.Sc. thesis in September. We hired a tent but it turned out Tony was allergic to it and spent the whole night sneezing so we only camped for a couple of nights and then moved into hotels in Holland. It was good to see we could organise a trip ourselves and cope with independent foreign travel.

We began actively looking for work abroad with the new merged company I.C.L. I remember travelling to London to meet people from the overseas division in I.C.L. We had a surreal interview where my boss from Birmingham, who also had an urge to travel, was interviewed at the same time as Tony and me, having to discuss our strengths and weaknesses in front of each other.

Because we did not have a foreign language we could be offered work in South Africa, The Gulf States or Eastern Europe. We thought Eastern Europe would be best as we would probably get into trouble in S Africa as strong opponents of apartheid and I did not think I could cope with the restrictions on women in the Gulf States.

The offer came quicker than expected. At that time when computers were sold, the customers contracted a certain number of hours of onsite support from the computer manufacturers to help them set up their systems. This included programming, systems and engineering support so every time a computer was sold behind the Iron Curtain a group of Western ‘experts’ were sent to help get their systems started.

This was October 1969- a year after the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia to suppress the liberalisation of the Prague Spring movement. On the anniversary of the Russian’s arrival there were large Czech, anti Russian demonstrations in all the major cities. One of our programmers based at a System 4 site in Brno was out shopping that day and was picked up by the police. It was convenient to blame the demonstrations on foreign agitators- similar to the situation today in Libya and Syria. They were deported back to the UK but the customer was shouting to have his contractual programmer back.

I was offered the job and Tony could be accommodated in Prague. They said after 3 months when the contract in Brno finished, I could relocate to Prague. We upgraded our car to a second hand Daf 44; this time, ironically right hand drive. We sold our maisonette, put our furniture in store and set off on the adventure which would lead to us spending 2 and half years behind the Iron Curtain. We sat at my Dad and Mum’s house and plotted a route across Europe to Prague.

The story of our year in Czechoslovakia is told in the letters I sent home to my parents.
I will post one a week with some additional comments on life behind the Iron Curtain
(Thanks Indy for the editing advice)