10th January 1971

C/O ICL

British embassy

Boulevard Marshal

Tolbukhin

Sofia

10/01/71

I have borrowed the office typewriter in the hope it makes my letter more readable but I know my typing is so bad it will not help much. I am fully recovered from my stomach bug. I felt a fraud only working three days in my first week. So far work has been quite interesting mainly because we have several people from England on a short visit and I have been helping them. Tony has been very busy organising these visits and waiting for people to arrive at the airport as well as doing his ordinary work.

We have been out a few times this week; once for a meal at the Mekana- Veal roasted on a skewer washed down with wine. There was a whole crowd from ICL and they taught us liar dice which is like the card game ‘cheat’ only played with dice. We only played for fun not money. Last night we went to a film show at the American Embassy. Unfortunately we had seen the film before ‘Wait until Dark’ but it is an extremely good film and no so frightening when you know the ending.

Yesterday we went up the mountain and christened our skis. The ski slopes are only about an hour’s drive away. There is a very modern hotel there with good facilities. We were not very ambitious on our first trip and kept to the gentle slopes but still fell down a few times. I had a problem because when I fell down I could not get up and had to wait for a passerby to take pity on me and help me up again. There are plenty of ski lifts there for when we get more proficient and they play music over a load speaker giving the ski slope a holiday atmosphere.

The scenery is beautiful, snow covered trees and mountain peaks though you could not see the view down the valley as it was snowing and foggy. It is incredible to have a mountain and ski resort so near a capital city. As you can see our warm weather did not last long and now we have some very cold weather and lots of snow; about six inches fell last night. Today we went for a long walk in the park. All Sofia were there too, with lots of people especially children on sledges and skis. I think we will be able to get some skiing practice there in the evenings as most of the paths are lit at night.

The Volkswagen is still leaking oil but only when the engine is running. We may try to get it mended in Sofia. We are using it as little as possible and the Daf is very good in the snow and Tony can take me to work as it is near our flat and the office.

I have been thinking of you all today and wondering if you are in Belton or Duggins Lane. I must close now as my fingers are getting tired. I shall have to improve my typing before I write my memoirs. Give my love to Paula and family. I hope she is feeling better soon. Love to nanny as usual

Lots of love

Gillian and Tony

There were fewer ICL computer sites in Bulgaria than in our last posting in Czechoslovakia. The Institute of Constructional Cybernetics (ICC) was in the centre of Sofia (with an ICL ex-English Electric System 4 computer), and the Bulgarian Management Training Centre was a short drive outside Sofia. The Training Centre with an ICL 1900 mainframe computer was established by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency based in Geneva, and was funded by the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). There was another large mainframe computer at the Local Government centre in Russe, a delightful city in the north east of Bulgaria, on the Danube and bordering Romania. These three were the main customers with whom ICL had contractual obligations to provide technical support & training, but there were others. For example, there was a shipyard at the port of Varna on the Black Sea coast that owned an Elliot 803 computer, Elliot Computers being one of the several companies that over the years had merged with Leo-Marconi, English Electric and ICT in order to form ICL. For some unaccountable reason the Elliot 803 was still in its packing boxes years after delivery and was still in that state when we departed over a year later.

The first meeting at the ICC in Sofia was a rude awakening. There were two Directors responsible for the site, who jointly reported to a Government Vice-Minister. Their names were Mr. K and Mr. B. but out of earshot were known as the ‘Bear and the Fox’. The Bear was a very large, bellowing and forceful individual, whilst the cunning ‘Fox’ said very little but knew just how to quietly provoke the Bear into a strong reaction. Tony’s first progress meeting as Support Manager at ICC started at 7 am in their conference room, with a bottle of Bulgarian Brandy and a box of chocolates in the centre of the table. We were expected to down a couple of slugs of brandy with a toast to the future before negotiations began, a standard ploy aimed at extracting better concessions. It was then that the Bear would begin his usual tirade about how awful the ICL service was and how his computer had hardly worked at all since it was delivered a couple of years earlier, and that my predecessor had promised them umpteen hours training in the UK that had not materialised. None of this was actually true, but I soon learned that it was quite normal for them to exaggerate wildly and aggressively before eventually settling on a far more reasonable compromise. This was a different approach to negotiating which had cultural roots in the history of Bulgaria. Other Bulgarians understood that it was expected to exaggerate the arguments before agreeing common ground somewhere between the two opposing sides. This was a far cry from the gentlemanly reasonableness of the Czechs.