27th July 1970

Branik

27/07/70

Dear Mum and Dad,

Thank you for the two letters. I was glad to hear the tickets arrived safely. I am sorry they caused you so much trouble. You seem to be having a good time with your American visitors. I shall look forward to seeing your films when I am home again. Mr and Mrs F and family must be somewhere in Europe now. We are expecting them on Friday. We will be quite pleased to see how our films have turned out. We keep meaning to take some film of Prague as we have not managed it so far. I think it will take a whole weekend and we never have time to devote solely to filmmaking. It would be good to film at different seasons to show Prague throughout the year.

We have just finished cleaning the flat and I have all the bed clothes ready for the incoming F hoards. I hope they like Smetana crème, smazony syr and knedlicky.

Last weekend we went to Brno for A and V’s wedding. We had to get up at 4.30 to arrive get changed and be ready for the wedding at 12 noon. I was surprised how nice the service was translated into English. A. wore a long dress and veil and her sister was the bridesmaid. The town Hall was a fabulous setting with a vaulted Norman ceiling and bare stone walls. The actual words were similar to a Christian wedding replacing ‘God’ by ‘our socialist state’. The funniest part was the interpreter who came with several quaint phrases like ‘put aside all inhibitions when closing this marriage’ There was a mixture of Czech and English traditions. A cup was broken in front of the couple as we saw at the wedding we witnessed at Kutna Hora. The bridegroom must sweep the pieces symbolising he will help his wife with the house work. At the reception afterwards the bride and groom have to share a soup bowel, another Czech custom. However Czechs do not have confetti or the traditional wedding cake. After the formal reception there was an informal party at V’s parents flat which went on quite late into the night.

We came home on Sunday after a long lie in. On the way home we picked some cherries which were lovely. The shops are full of fruit and veg now (unlike in the winter months) pears, red currents, cherries, apricots and new potatoes, carrots and cauliflower. I don’t expect it will last long.

Work is progressing as usual. I have had another pay assessment though I don’t expect .......THE LETTER ENDS here with a missing page do we will never know what Gill did not expect

The cherry trees grew along all the roads in Czechoslovakia. If they belonged to someone there was a piece of material tied in the branches. Those who did not have an owner could have the fruit taken by anyone. You would often see people standing on top of their lorry cabs picking the fruit. And the lorries themselves were always the same, flat-bed with side flaps (and sometimes with canvas over-mantels), a separate drivers cabin, never washed and painted the same dull grey brown, probably made in some vast factory deep in the USSR.

Quite a few of the I.C.L staff married Eastern Europeans and many of the marriages have stood the test of time. One of the married English engineers in Brno started an affair with a Czech girl and decided to smuggle her to England. He hollowed out the back seat of his car and she hid there. Amazingly they crossed the Iron Curtain and passed through all the border crossings in Germany, Belgium and France (all in those days strict individual passport-checking and car inspecting places) only to be discovered at Dover. The girl asked for political asylum in the UK. The last I heard she was working on a supermarket check-out. I wonder what happened to her? I hope some of my old ICL friends are reading this blog?