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.