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We moved our office today so the Pankrac address is no longer valid.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