28th April letter

 Gill had been booked for a training course but developed tonsillitis on the plane to UK and went to Coventry so her mum could look after her. After she  got better she went on one course for a week at Cookham. These sort of things happened very quickly in I.C.L. so you could be told to get on a plane and go somewhere with very little warning. So there will be only one letter in April

Branik

28/04/70

Dear Mum and Dad

As you can see I have arrived home safely. The plane was about a half hour late taking off. It goes from terminal one which is quite useful to know as I arrived at terminal two and had to take a coach to terminal two which is only 300 yards away but with two cases and a bag difficult to walk (No suitcases with wheels in those days).

Tell nanny I will go and buy her birthday present tomorrow. I did not have time today as I have to travel across Prague to the office in Pankrac this afternoon.

There is certainly a change in Czechoslovakia since I left- all the chestnut trees and silver birches have come into leaf. The parks are full of pansies which seem to flower very early here and the tulips are just coming into bud with the Livingstone daisies. In the park where I work they have just switched the fountains on which makes it very beautiful. It appears warmer than England because we do not have a NE wind at present. I was told last Saturday was a perfect spring day and the flat was so warm last night I could not get to sleep.

I have arranged to go to Brno this weekend as we have a holiday on Friday. I have some work to sort out down there and it will be good to see all my friends rather than staying here on my own. I must wash the sheets before Tony comes home.

I had a letter from JM in Ethiopia. She says it is a really beautiful country but she does not have much work to do yet.

All I.C.L. staff are in England at the moment so it is very quiet round here. No more news- sorry it is such a short letter. I am looking forward to seeing you both in June

Love Gillian

I remember how good spring felt that year. I looked at the blue sky one day and realised I had not seen the sun for over a week. It was a very cold and possibly untypical winter that year. But the cold was somehow not so penetrating as the damp cold in England. The sudden contrast from sub zero temperatures and continuous snow to the green shoots of spring was everywhere. The spring came very suddenly. It was almost as if overnight the temperature changes and the flowers and trees burst into blossom.

Food shopping was certainly a challenge in those first few months. Much of commerce was more about who you knew than what you knew. People in particular businesses would have access to goods or services and would share their bounty with friends and family. So if you saw a shop with oranges you would queue and then buy much more than you could possibly eat and share them with your colleagues. If anyone saw a queue they would join it in the hope there was something good at the end of it. Some of our engineers would start false queues outside a shop or building and after the Czechs had joined them they would walk away and leave the people queuing for nothing.

One of our first real shocks was to find a fruit and vegetable shop, in the middle of the week, closed and displaying in its window a small wicker basket containing a few wizened carrots, potatoes and a swede, nothing else. In the winter there were very few fresh vegetables or fruit. Everything was much more seasonal. There would be bottled peas or carrots both bleached almost white by the bottling process

Gill had been brought up in Coventry, and Tony in South London. Both born during the second world war, we had known the hardships of post-war austerity in the UK, rationing, lack of clothes, fabrics and most materials, housing, and at the time important to us, manufactured toys for children. Tony would play Cowboys and Indians with his friends on the south London bomb sites with his index and second finger as a gun, taking cover in the bomb craters; or hunt for ghosts in the shells of empty bombed houses. But by the late 60’s that was all behind us. Not so in Prague. We were immediately transported back to late 1940’s post war austerity in the UK.

Near our flat in Branik was a so called ‘modern’ Supermarket. We were confronted with complete aisles filled with nothing but sugar from Cuba, or salt, or flour, or bottled fruit and vegetables (very good as it turned out), or sour milk. There was a freezer section, albeit rather small. One sniff inside a compartment confirmed that the contents had been transported by lorry without suitable cold storage.

Being part of the ‘never had it so good’ generation of young people, born in the 40’s,  schooling in the 50’s, free grants for university in the early 60’s, plentiful well paid jobs for graduates, cheap mortgages, and setting up a well furnished home in the mid-60’s, we were part of the growing consumer society. But suddenly we were living where even food was hard to come by (unless, like us, we could afford to eat in restaurants when we chose), housing & household furniture were very hard to acquire, the ‘Rock Scene’ was frowned upon by the authorities, and life seemed relatively drab & basic, and the officialdom & state control was stifling. But after the initial shock of the contrast, we adjusted and found a great pleasure in the less materialistic aspects of life that we had become accustomed to in the UK. That pleasure in more simple and basic pursuits and needs, camaraderie & helping others, has never really left us since.