late october 1970

Thursday

October ?

Thank you for the letter. I am afraid I carried the last one round with me for about a week without posting it so you may have had a gap without any news from me. .I have been very busy since Tony left going out to dinner nearly every night. I went to a concert last night and enjoyed it very much. Unfortunately I had a cold this week and have been feeling sleepy. Last week I went to Brno for 4 days and stayed with A.L and V.L.. I spent a whole day giving a lecture on discs and another trying to solve PERT problems. On Friday night we went out for a meal to the restaurant in Brno castle. I had a very nice Chinese dish- quite a surprise to see it on the menu. All the I.C.L. people were there. We have some extra programmers from London actually programming in the hope they can get the customer programmes working in time. We drank wine and listened to the gypsy band and afterwards went back to V.L.’s for coffee. It was 3 am when we finally got to bed.

On Saturday after a late start we went out in the countryside near Brno. The autumn tress were fabulous- just at their best with the sun shining on them, We found one mushroom in the woods, a bedela which I had for breakfast on Sunday- delicious not unlike our mushrooms. Now the trees are past their best- too many leaves have fallen but last weekend they were perfect.

On Sunday morning I helped with some apple picking and of course it reminded me of the orchard and home. I flew back to Prague Sunday afternoon so I had time to do some housework. This week I have been quite busy at work but remembered to post Auntie Dorothy and Nicky’s birthday cards. I sent Nicky’s card to your address as I thought Paula would probably be staying with you. Give her my love and say sorry that I have not replied to her letter yet. It is difficult with this extra person, Tony to write to in England. I hope Paula will be with you the weekend of the 23^rd as I would like to buy her something practical like clothes or shoes for Paula and Nicky’s birthdays.

Have you been bothered by the co-op insurance man at all? I suddenly realised I forgot to tell him we would be leaving England so I must be a little behind with my payments? I also realised the other day I had not collected my co-op dividend- I hope it is still there. I was also thinking (see what happens without Tony- all this thinking) I ought to have my eyes tested again as it is about 4 years since I had them done. Could you make me an appointment at the co-op or elsewhere on Sat 24^th October or Monday 10^th November and could you post any new glasses I needed to me later? I always seem to have a long list of jobs for you whenever I write. What would I do without my ‘agent in England’

I had better close now and look as if I am working!

Lots of love to everyone

Gill remembers giving the lecture on disc technology in Brno. Discs were the cutting edge technology of their time, and the ability to go to a piece of data without having to read through all the preceding records quite revolutionised the speed of processing programmes. These were not CD type discs but large and heavy 15 inch diameter things, housed in fridge sized cabinets. Initially such discs were ‘Fixed Discs’ that were not interchangeable. These were similar to huge magnetic ‘drums’ which were just coming into use (  We had one at a customer in Holland a couple of years later). The race was on to develop more immediate access to data to avoid trawling through large magnetic tapes when the data you needed might be at the very end. There were even machines (still largely prototype at the time at the UK Post Office I recall) using Magnetic Cards of about 4 by 8 inch held in a carousel and then picked up and projected at high speed along narrow shoots to be wrapped round a cylindrical reader before being whizzed back to the carousel for filing.

Gill gave a talk on the even newer exchangeable disc drives. This was quite amusing and typical of the way I.C.L. operated. She had the technical manual not given to customers and was able to tell them how the discs were organised and controlled but had never as yet written a programme using one.

The Czech and other European countries were very keen to use Pert and resource allocation. It fitted in very well with their central planning. Gill was lucky to have worked on the PERT Resource Allocation package for the smallest system 4 computer. Nowadays it would only be a fraction of the computer power in a mobile phone. She remembered having to reduce the coding to the minimum to fit into the main memory store. She was particularly proud of her coding to predict and take account of leap years. We wish Microsoft would be so diligent when writing their software which these days takes up more and more computer power and memory- always forcing you to buy the latest machine.

14th October 1970

Branik

14/10/70

Dear Mum and dad

Thank you for the letter we just received. He had a very interesting week this week. On Friday we went to dinner with some Czech people who live near us. They do not speak English but we had a good time and managed to communicate quite well. On Saturday we went to Lidice and found it very moving. There was a museum there which included photos of the old Coventry cathedral where a memorial service was held for the victims of the massacre. The rose garden was very beautiful but for some reason was home to thousands of mice. If you stood still you could watch them scurrying round with their little wufferly noses. It made us think of our hamsters. As a coincidence on the drive home to Prague we saw a pet shop with some hamsters for sale in the window. We are tempted to buy one when we get back from our UK trip in October. After Lidice we went to Krilokrat castle. It is situated on a hill.

..........page missing.............

Henry, the old English sheepdog puppy came too. He is not quite house trained and does not appear too intelligent. L and M B are leaving Prague for a job in Jugoslavia with I.C.L.

As usual I have some requests for you to do. I am going to stay and extra day in England so I can go to the doctors and dentist. Could you make appointments for me on Monday 9^th Nov?. One for the dentist. I think I need two teeth filling and a clean and polish. Could I also get an appointment with one of your doctors? I would like a TAB job against typhoid paratyphoid and tetanus. I would also like a check up to make sure I am sound in wind and limb. The problem with the injection is I think you need two jabs a week apart. If so could I have the first one the previous Monday early in the morning or better still the previous Saturday or Sunday if the doctor could be persuaded to do it as I don’t want to miss any of my courses. I can pay in hard currency sterling or Tuzexs (joke). I am looking forward to coming home and seeing you all and I shall have fun shopping for presents before I come. Last time I came to England I did not have enough notice so I was not able to look forward to the trip. I may take the VW to Germany next weekend and get it serviced. Tony can’t come with me at the moment as he has not got a valid visa but this should be sorted before our trip to England.

The BBC world service has been very good lately and we heard ‘The Winters tale’ the last 2 Sundays in two parts. We really appreciate the news and comment on England and the rest of the world. I am reading the biography of Mao-Tse-Tung and it is extremely interesting. I am quite ignorant about that part of history. I will send Auntie Dorothy a card for her birthday but is there anything she might like from Czechoslovakia? Jewelry, cut glass, pictures or anything else you can think of just let me know.

No more news. Love to Paula, David, Nicky and Christopher. I hope Nanny enjoyed her holiday in Wales and that she had good weather.

Love to you both

From

Tony and Gillian

Lidice was very moving. The whole village had been raised to the ground after one of the inhabitants was thought to be involved with the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German Reich Protector in 1942. The men were lined up outside the church and shot, whilst the women and children were sent to concentration camps. Very few survived to the end of the war.

 For the most part our work of supporting early computer systems in Eastern Europe revolved around trouble shooting and helping the customer to design & develop fairly complex software systems from scratch, together with chasing up administrative issues such as whether a training course had been booked or an urgent hardware modification had been despatched. The few reliable software packages that were available did not always fit the larger scale of a centrally planned economy. Whist some software packages could be adapted, that was a tricky business given the relatively fragile nature of bespoke packages. Most software systems were developed locally were unique to that particular industry. Due to the communist central planning approach, any particular industrial sector would be well integrated and ultimately report into one government ministry. The scale and amount of data to be processed by the systems was often greater than businesses in the West. It could even be bigger than had been anticipated in the original specifications for an ICL Package or excede hardware design limitations. Whilst we could often resolve software problems locally, there were many occasions when we needed urgent communication back to the UK to speak to the original software designers & programmers.

With the long delays in phoning anywhere outside the country, the standard communication was via a slow ‘Telex’ machine. The message had to be written down and then laboriously typed into the Telex machine. At least you’d get a hard copy, but an answer often came the next day or later. In the UK a secretary had to tear off each message from the continuous role of paper, divide it up and get it to the appropriate ‘expert’. It wasn’t easy and meanwhile we’d be taking all manner of flack from a frustrated customer. There were no on-line communications facilities, no Internet, no e-mail, no international telephone dialling codes we could access, so the Telex it was!

6th October 1970

Branik

6/10/70

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you for Tony’s birthday card which arrived yesterday- unfortunately he is in England at present so we won’t be together for his birthday. I have bought him a record of West Side Story as part of his present but I don’t know what else to buy him- probably a large Chinese meal when I get to England.

I have not had time to feel lonely since Tony left on Friday the neighbours have ‘taken me over’ feeding me taking me out and amusing me. Friday I went to  Honza and Mila’s flat to watch TV- an ice hockey match and everyone was happy because CSSR won. Afterwards we played cards and talked- in Czech of course. On Saturday I went shopping with Mila in the morning and took her son Marek, 16 months old to the zoo. It was lovely as all the animals were outside, the little boy really enjoyed it. He calls me ‘Tatta’ Czech for auntie.

On Sunday I did the washing and tidied the house and read. I read two books over the weekend and really enjoyed it- not feeling guilty about Tony with no one to talk to.

Last night I went to some different neighbours and helped their daughter with her first English lesson, mainly to help with pronunciation. Just imagine a Czech girl speaking English with a Coventry accent. As usual I was given apples and cake- I have hardly had to buy any food since Tony left. Today I had a telex from Tony saying he had arrived safely so I don’t need to worry about him having an accident en route.

I have bought Auntie Dorothy a broach as I had a feeling she did not wear necklaces. I also managed to get Paula’s earrings at last. They match my ring. Don’t tell her- I want it to be a surprise. However I am having trouble with your candles as I can only find plain ones in the shops at present-I think the pretty ones are made nearer Christmas- I will see what I can find.

I have a busy week ahead. Tomorrow a friend from work is coming to dinner. Tonight I am going to the pictures or swimming. On Thursday I am going to Brno for a few days to give a talk on discs. I may stay the weekend with A.L. as V.L. is working away in East Germany. Next week have already an invitation to dinner and a concert arranged besides two parties on Friday night- quite a hectic social life. Still better than sitting at home brooding! Of course I am really looking forward to coming to England and seeing you all again.

We moved our office today so the Pankrac address is no longer valid. The new office address is

I.C.L.

Ricanova 44

Praha 6

Brevnov

In case you need to contact me urgently. It is in a nice villa but unfortunately on the other side of Prague from us. I had better close now and will see you all very soon for a nice long chat and all the news.

Lots of love to you all

Gillian

PS Thanks for arranging the dentists for me. I hope I can get some new pills from the doctor.

I.C.L did have some excellent training courses. We spent quite a bit of time travelling from Prague to UK by plane or car. We found we could do the trip in two days easily if we stuck to the German motorways and did not digress down the picturesque river valleys. Looking at this year of letters illustrates how communication has changed during the last 40 years. I tried to write every week. In my recent travels abroad living in Holland in the 1990’s I would telephone my mother every day but rarely write to her. I have even stopped sending post cards when I go on holiday where it was a vital part of keeping in contact with friend and family back in the old days. Nowadays its Facebook, and texting on mobile phones that take precedence over writing. Even e-mail use is diminishing as it takes too long in our instantaneous world to write an e-mail compared with a posting on Facebook or a tweet.

Gill’s job at UAVT (a Ministry of Technology organisation with its building grounds of the old international exhibition site at Vystaviste in Prague) was an example of the ICL ‘instant expert’ syndrome. Gill was sold to them as a COBOL expert but had only had a one week course as part of her initial training. Any problems with the Cobol compiler she would always ask for a core dump. She had learned the low level language usercode and had written programs for the PERT software so was able to interpret machine code. She had a flair for debugging and could usually narrow down where the error had occurred. She then had to relate the area of the core dump back to the COBOL instruction that had malfunctioned. Doing this meant she could telex the Cobol compilers in UK and alert them to the error and possibly suggest an alternate way of programming to avoid the error. The customer appeared happy with her results but I guess she might have solved the error faster if she really had been a COBOL expert.

We’ve mentioned before that the first line of defence for our maintenance engineers when a hardware fault occurred was normally to take of the cover of which ever large metal box was playing up, and carry out some deft Hoovering. It was at this computer site in Vystaviste, in a large sealed air conditioned computer room, on a 15 inch raised floor, that a particular fridge sized printer had an intermittent fault. Removing the outer cover and noting an unusually large amount of fluff & dirt inside, the Engineers Hoover did its job displacing a family of mice who had taken up residence. The printer worked perfectly thereafter.

27th Sept 1970

Branik

Sunday 27^th Sept 70

Dear Mum and dad,

We are just starting our Sunday night tasks of cleaning shoes, washing hair and writing letters. Tony is getting ready to go to England- making lists of all the things he has to do and buy there. We had a busy week. On Wednesday we went swimming at the big pool on the river road. It is a fabulous place- very clean and well organised. There are two large outside swimming pools and one indoors. Although the weather was really cold the pool outside was very hot and it was very pleasant swimming under the stars in the open air. Tony is progressing real well with his breast stroke- he will soon be swimming as well as me. After our swim we had our first experience of a sauna bath, a Czech variety rather than a Swedish one. It is a very hot steam room that you sit and sweat which brings all the dirt out of your skin. The swimming bath included hot showers to use before and after bathing and hair dryers for hire.

On Friday V.L. and Andrea L. came up to Prague for the day and stayed the night with us. It is the first time we had seen them since their wedding. We spent a pleasant evening with some of the other I.C.L. people listening to records and chatting. Andrea.L. plans to come to Prague in a fortnight’s time and will probably stay with me then. I have all sorts of people to visit while Tony is away in England.

I have had a good time last week buying presents to take home. However it is impossible to buy any garnets at present so they will have to wait until Christmas.

Today we got up very late after an evening with the neighbours. I am finding the book ‘Colloquial Czech’ very useful as the vocabulary is good for everyday conversations. However my grammar is still terrible. I was very warm today without a cloud in the sky. We drove in the Slapy direction but stayed the same side of the river as our flat and stopped by a small tributary of the Vltava. We walked for about three hours up a wooded valley. There were lots of Czech summer cottages in the woods but they blended in with the scenery. We came home ravenous and I cooked roast beef with green beans for Sunday dinner. I am looking forward to some roast lamb when I come home. I don’t think we have eaten lamb since April. The concert season has started again in Prague with some very good operas and ballets being performed so I am looking forward to the winter here.

I had better close now and wash my hair ready for work in the morning

Lots of love as always

Tony and Gillian

Our neighbours were lovely and really took me under their wing when Tony was away. I wish we had kept in touch with them but it was difficult when we did not speak good enough Czech and they did not speak much English.

If you read this, Thank you Mila and Honza. I hope Marek grew up in a lovely man like his parents.

 We became friends with several of our wonderful Czech neighbours who benefited from their informal network of friends and relatives who told them when meat was available at a particular butcher, or vegetables somewhere else. In this way Czech families helped each other to survive this difficult time, and took pity on two poor foreigners living in their midst by passing on information about where we could find the provisions to live. Over the years since we have both travelled the world, and between us we have lived & worked in many other countries, but we have always held the Czech–lands people in special regard for their incredible quiet fortitude in the face of oppression, resilience against the apparent stone wall of Russian strength, and above all, despite their desperate position, the willingness to help and succour English alien immigrants in their midst. How easy it would have been, as we have more recently seen in other western European Nations, to blame all ills on foreign workers taking their jobs. What a great nation.

Tony particularly remembers the swimming pool at Branik. It was late September and there had been an early snow fall. Tripping across the ice cold tiled floor to the get into the outside pool, we remember the mist evaporating from water surface and the contrast in temperatures once in the water. But his strongest memory was the from the large open area men’s changing room. Being a rather modest Englishman at the time, with several other naked and near-naked Czech men around, it was a shock to see a lady cleaner ambling around with a meter wide ‘squeegee’ broom quietly manoeuvring it around the men present, even asking them to step aside to make room for the broom.