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.

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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!