8th march 1970

Branik

8/3/70

Dear mum and Dad,

It was lovely to speak to you today. I have felt like talking to you all week. I am sorry my letters have not arrived. I expect it is partly due to the bad weather.

We had snow again on Wednesday as you did but the last two days have been thawing and the sun is shining brightly. I am just cooking roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for our Sunday meal (it is 5.30pm now). After I telephoned we went to the gallery of modern art in the old town. The old town itself is very interesting with lots of winding streets and old buildings. There are very many art galleries in Prague and although we have visited 4 there are still plenty more to see. The modern gallery is very good with many Czech artists you do not see in England. Tony has been inspired and is painting at the moment with the paints I bought him for Christmas. Tonight we are going to the British Embassy to see a film, ‘The Anniversary’ . Both the British and American embassy have film clubs and show very good films.

As I was ill at the beginning of the week it was not worth going to Brno so my boss sent me to a customer in Prague. It is the one I am hoping to transfer to at the end of March. I will not go back to Brno except to collect my things and hand over the work I was doing. Working with the new customer UAVT is not so difficult, mainly answering customer’s questions or referring them to London if I can’t answer them. I have some time to myself to read manuals and learn some new things. It is quite good as they finish work at 4 o clock and I can do a bit of shopping and cook dinner before Tony comes home at 6 o’clock.

Tony has moved office this week to Pankrac, the address you have already also the telephone number you have so if anything urgent happens you can contact Tony there. Tony is pleased to have me home and I am feeding him as he got a bit thin while I was away but I am getting fatter than ever.

I am trying to persuade Tony it would be a good idea if I had my own car but I am not sure if I am succeeding or not. Tony takes me to work in the morning but I come home on the tram and bus and as it is the other side of Prague it takes about an hour.

On Thursday we went to the pictures to see ‘La Strada’ an Italian film by Fellini- of course we could not understand a word but enjoyed it just the same.

In the afternoon we drove to see LB and his family with their 3 children aged 4,6 and 7 and had a nice afternoon and evening with them. Their children are very bright and I was persuaded to read ‘Pinocchio’ to them which we all enjoyed. I felt quite envious of their nice family. Two of the I.C.L. wives are pregnant at the moment so the Czech air must be very fertile.

Prague looks lovely in the sunshine and all the Czechs were out Sunday evening along the riverside for an after dinner stroll. All the galleries and museums are open on Sunday and are well patronised by the Czechs- not like the English.

I have a resolve that now we are both in Prague we must get out more. I have hopes of learning to skate, playing tennis and going riding but I don’t know if any of these will materialise. Each month there is a very good booklet which comes out giving all the concerts, plays, films and exhibitions for the month. For a capital city it is fairly easy to get tickets for these events so we should be culturally stimulated.

Love,

Gill & Tony.

One of the features of life in Eastern Europe was the role of the ‘fixer’. I am not sure how you found a fixer in the first place or whether you were allocated one by the authorities. They probably worked for the secret services in the country you were living in. Their role was to smooth the red tape, to find you offices for your company or flats for your staff. It was a strange twilight world we lived as we did not have any official status in the country, paid no taxes, business or personal. But we were needed by the countries we worked in so they turned a blind eye to our presence, gave us visas to stay which had to be renewed regularly, and did not harass us at all. The fixer got round the regulations and found a way to enable us to stay without being there officially.

Tony has started to visit other customers he is supporting. The office files have given him little background so he is being introduced to each computer site by the ICL Salesman or Senior Engineer. One of the first was the Economic University (just near the Narodni Divadlo – National Theatre overlooking the river Vltava). They had an ex-English Electric/Leo-Marconi/Elliot computer. It seemed to be well established and running along just fine so the meeting with the Professor who was responsible soon turned to his pet hobby, collecting fungi. We learnt later in the year, as we saw Czechs returning to their Prague apartments on Sunday evenings carrying large black sacks full of a bewildering variety of fungi, that this was a major Czech preoccupation, and a significant contribution to feeding the family. Being a Professor and relatively elderly, he had had many years to study the subject and had taken his edible fungi hunting to a far higher degree. Over the years he had plotted the migration of his favourite fungi in the woods and fields near his country weekend cabin, and could show exactly where he could find any particular variety. Sworn to secrecy, I was only allowed to see these jealously guarded secret maps on the assumption that being a foreigner I would have nothing other than an academic interest in their hidden treasures.

Not long afterwards we were introduced to a restaurant on Dukelskych Hrdyna called the ‘Houbavaria’ (?) that had a menu of all types of edible fungi. On our first return trip to Prague after 42 years we were delighted to see the restaurant with the same facia-sign still there, although as were passing in the tram we were unable to verify that it still specialised in just fungi dishes as it had in 1970.