23rd September 1970

23/09/70

Dear mum and Dad

As you can see I got back to Prague safely after my trip to Germany. I quite enjoyed walking round the shops but the clothes were terribly expensive. We have decided to buy clothes in England as it is certainly the cheapest place in Europe. A dress costs £15 to £20 in Germany. Last week my old faithful watch from Spain finally stopped and as I am lost without one I bought one in the Tuzex shop. It is a stainless steel Japanese watch with a second hand which is useful for timing eggs and pulses. Tony is now convinced his watch is horrible, besides losing time, so I might buy him a new one for his birthday.

I had a nice long letter from Paula on Monday which pleased me very much- I shall try and write to her sometime this week.

As always we have had a busy life. Last Friday we went to dinner with one of the I.C.L. people, Tony A.  His girlfriend is Swedish and cooked some Swedish food for us. Several other people were invited including a couple from the embassy who go riding in Prague. They have promised to phone us next time they go as someone from the embassy acts as interpreter and they have lessons in an indoor school. Needless to say the thought of riding again pleased me very much.

Tonight we are going swimming with our neighbours to the indoor swimming baths. It has suddenly gone cold the last two days although it is still sunny.

I looked at skiing equipment in Germany and it is very cheap so we will probably buy some next time we go to Germany together. We will have a very sporty life; swimming, riding and skiing but it will be good for me after all the Czech dumplings.

We have just been to the Tuzex Shop in the foyer of the Alcron Hotel, but the watch Tony liked so much has been sold. Also there was hardly any cut glass or garnets in their shop as it is the end of season so I am not sure I will be able to buy any earrings for Paula’s birthday. We saw a silly American cowboy film called ‘The Professionals‘ on Saturday- it was quite entertaining.

We were upset as one of the shock absorbers on the VW has gone already, according to the garage where we had it serviced in Germany. It cannot be too bad as we have not noticed it but Tony will have to get it repaired when he gets back to England. The roads here are terrible to damage a new car so quickly. We hope we will not have to pay for it as it is still under the 6000 mile guarantee.

Tony and I will probably travel up to Coventry by car on the 23^rd October as Tony will meet me at the airport and we can drive via Aylesbury and Banbury. We will bring home some of our sheets and blankets as we have bought Czech style duvets. We hope you can find a spare corner in your loft for them. We will also bring over our Czech home movies to show you if you can borrow a super eight projector from some of your rich friends.

Love Tony and Gillian

Compared with modern cars those built in the seventies appear very shoddy and unreliable. Reading these letters I am amazed how often we had to go to Germany to get the car serviced. The roads were bad in Czechoslovakia but we expected a German car to be more robust than the one we bought and it had more problems in the first year of its life. It wasn’t just the miles of cobbled streets that caused such wear on shock absorbers and the like, but the harsh prolonged icy winters left a legacy of large pot holes each spring, and roads were forever being ‘dug-up’ to repair underground pipes and especially tram rails. The repair workers were not supplied with high visibility barriers, let alone night time warning lights, so it could be very hazardous driving at night especially during a blackout.

One of our colleagues, I think it may have been M.V. in his new Ford Capri, actually broke the axel driving into one such deep pot hole around a tram track repair. Perhaps he was just very unlucky because not long after, having parked his car in the main car open-air car park immediately outside the Prague Airport terminal building on route to a training course in the UK, he returned to find the car on bricks and his four wheels missing.

Burst tyres, also nothing like the quality they are today, were another frequent problem for the faster drivers amongst our maintenance engineers. Nothing to do with too much ‘Pivo’ we were assured.

We were advised not to get our cars serviced in Eastern Europe. Mainly because they did not have the currency to buy the spares needed but also because there was a possibility that an unscrupulous garage would swop parts from your car with locally manufactured parts so they could sell your genuine parts on the black market.

Two other crossing the border stories. The first was when we came back from Germany on one of our trips. We were stopped for speeding near the border in a village and given an instant fine. We did not have any Czech crowns with us only Deutschmarks and sterling. Another guard came over who spoke English. We explained the predicament and offered the guards hard currency. Had one guards been on his own he would have taken it and made a three-fold profit on the black market, but because there were two guards (one might have reported on the other) they sent us on our way. The second story again was about the engineers. As a joke the engineer left a trick bag on the front seat. When it was opened a recording played of someone laughing heartily. The joke backfired when the border guards were not amused and he spent a couple of hours being interrogated on who he was where he was going and why.

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