5th January 1971

C/O ICL

The British embassy

Sofia

05/01/71

Dear Mum and Dad,

We arrived here about 12 o’clock midnight on Saturday because our plane was delayed at London airport for about five hours due to fog.

So far we have done nothing very exciting. Tony has been working very hard. I did not start my work so well as I went to work yesterday but had an upset stomach so had to stay home today to recover. It must be something I ate on Sunday. This afternoon I am feeling better so I expect I will go to work tomorrow.

The Volkswagen does not seem to have leaked any more transmission oil while we were away so it only appears to leak when it is being driven. I expect we will go to Greece fairly soon to get it mended. I bought some spare gaskets and oil seals and 12 pints of oil in London so we should be OK for a bit. We had a big surprise when we arrived in Sofia as the temperature was 7 degrees above freezing. While the rest of Europe is shivering there is no snow here and mild spring weather. There have been terrible gales before we returned.

I hope mum’s ‘efficient German’ arrived safely. I have started to try and learn Bulgarian but it is very difficult mainly because of the Cyrillic alphabet. Once I have mastered that it will be easier. There appear to be fewer cases to learn than in the Czech language.

Thank you again for the lovely Christmas. We both enjoyed it. I hope you have recovered from the hard work- Nanny too of course.

We did not manage to buy a typewriter before we left. I will have to try again on my next trip home. I think it would be really useful especially as it would mean you could read my letters more easily. Tony is trying to type some letters on the office machine and it takes him ages. He has to look for each letter on the keyboard and was using only his right index finger. It’s quite painful to listen to him. Still I hope he gets quicker with practice. I don’t think he trusts me as he thinks I will make too many mistakes.

The water has just been cut off- one of the joys of living in a communist country. I hope it comes back on in time for tea. I had better close now and will write again when I have more news. Love to Paula and family. Love to you both and Nanny

Gilly and Tony

The VW gear box was to be ongoing saga which lasted for several months. The main difficulty we encountered with the Bulgarian authorities was the fact that we were in Bulgaria on tourist visas (unlike Czechoslovakia where we had a residence visa). As such we had the car registration stamped on our visa and technically could not leave the country without it. The VW was on Tony’s visa and the Daf 44 on mine. The only easy way to leave the country without the car was to travel by plane when the car could be left in a bonded customs compound at the airport until you returned. The oil leak was so bad that we could not consider driving anywhere like Greece or Austria with it and just hoped we could get the problem solved in Bulgaria with the right spare parts.

Our first impressions of Sofia were that it had the flavour of the East, very unlike the European Middle Ages feel of Prague. The centre of the city was paved with yellow bricks and there were many grand buildings like with the old Alexander Nevsky  cathederal with its domed roof. During the night, even in freezing temperatures, the Bulgarians hosed down the roads in the centre with water tankers making them very slippery when you went to work in the morning and causing many accidents. After a late night party somewhere we were surprised to see it was Gypsy & Turkish women who were carrying out this unenviable task in the freezing temperatures. Both Gypsy and the Turkish minorities were treated very badly in Bulgaria at that time and only given the most difficult unpopular manual jobs to do.

Tony was the technical manager in charge of all the ICL computer installations in Bulgaria and the one in Bucharest, Romania. Gill was the contracted programmer for one of the main customers ICC (Institute of constructional cybernetics.) who had bought a System 4 computer and who had their offices in the central square. The previous onsite support programmer, Chris C, was still in Bulgaria and able to do a hand over the to Gill (unusual for ICL). He was completing some programming that had been contractually agreed when the computer was purchased.

One of the first tasks we had to undertake was to sort out the ICL office. There had been no secretary for some time and there was no filing system or any system for that matter. We can remember working on a Sunday to set up files and folders and wade through the accumulated post, notices, manuals etc that lay around in random piles and create order out of chaos.

Our flat was much better than the one in Prague and in an equally beautiful setting. It was in a post- communist block of flats, with two double bedrooms, a kitchen, shower room and a balcony overlooking the park in central Sofia. We had squirrels and deer outside our flat on occasions and it was lovely to be able to go for a walk in the evenings without needing to drive anywhere.

Our fixer in Bulgaria was Vasil I. originally from Czechoslovakia who found us the flat and the office. We remember having to bribe the estate agents with two bottles of whisky to smooth the transaction. With the flat we paid extra for a cleaner, Dancha who spoke hardly any English. An ideal job for a spy you might think but Dancha appeared to be a simple, warm hearted lady from a small village outside Sofia who I cannot believe would spy on us, although others most certainly did.

Letters from Bulgaria introduction

BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN –LETTERS FROM SOFIA

This blog is collection of letters written by an English husband and wife team working for ICL (International Computers Limited) behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1970s.

It is a follow on to the blog ‘Behind the Iron curtain- letters from Prague’ which charted out first 12 months behind the Iron curtain based in Prague and Brno. The letters were sent to Gill’s parents and were kept by her mother until her death in late 1990s. Gill and Tony have added comments from their 40+ year old memories of working and living behind the Iron Curtain.

Looking back on a year in what was then Czechoslovakia, we can easily recall the warmth & enjoyment of the kind & cultured Czech people, the lack of materialism, the feeling that the state was looking after everyone with equanimity from cradle to grave, and that perhaps communism had something to offer the rest of the world. That view was to change quite rapidly during a further year in Bulgaria and Romania. Here were nations of people brainwashed to think they lived in utopia, never travelling to other countries not just because they had no hard currency but because they genuinely believed they lived in the garden of Eden (and frequently said as much), who walked slowly and quietly to major football matches fearful to even smile let alone cheer in case the ever present police might arrest them, who distrusted foreigners in their midst, and who were ruled by a ruthless  authoritarian hereditary oligarchy running a police state.

We had come to Eastern Europe a year earlier with generally a left wing British Labour Party outlook. We had seen both positive and negative aspects of communism in Czechoslovakia that left us still reasonably sympathetic to the idea. The Bulgarian experience, and to some degree the early Chouchescu years in Romania, were to lift the veil for us. But initially at least our impressions were favourable.

Bulgaria was, and is, a very beautiful country. There were mountains, lakes, fields of roses, ancient monasteries and churches. The superb golden onion domed churches, the cleanliness of the glazed yellow-tiled streets in central Sofia, the sunshine and lack of pollution, the mountain ski resort on our doorstep, the (then) brand new Black Sea holiday resorts just a few hours car drive away, all initially beguiled us.

The food in shops was more plentiful than in Czechoslovakia especially in the local markets where people from the countryside came to Sofia with their fresh home grown products and sold them on the black market. The supermarkets often had whole shelves just with Cuban sugar bags for sale. The wine was cheap and of good quality. The hotel food was very good but the service was more like Russia and very very slow. We took to playing cards and dice in between courses and it was quite common for it to take two hours to serve a two course meal. We had a group of local shops about a hundred metres from our first flat and if you could buy fresh bread it was wonderful for the first 6 hours but rapidly went stale and by the next moring you could build a house with it. The shops also sold the local natural yoghurt in little earthenware pots. At first we had to add fruit or jam to sweeten the yogurt but eventually got the taste for it. We were used to the sweeter Smetana crème sold in Prague.

In Bulgaria there was fewer ICL staff so we did get to know the Embassy staff but mainly from the American, French and Austrian embassy. The British embassy had a club for ex pats on a Friday night and both the American and British embassy showed English films which were much rarer in the Bulgarian cinemas. Sofia was a meeting of roads between the West and East with a culture somewhere between the two. Many interesting people passed through Sofia on their way to other places. The customs guards were fierce and vigilant always on the look out for people and drug smugglers. It could take quite a while to get through the border.