2nd May 1971

C/O British embassy

Boulevard Marshal Tolbukhin

Sofia

02/05/71

Dear Mum and Dad,

I am very sad that my trip to England was cancelled. Still we will both be home in July and see you then and the new baby I hope. Has Paula heard if it will be one or two yet? We have just come back from our weekend at the black sea. We ‘did’ Bulgaria in true style driving over a thousand kilometres in the last few days.  First of all we visited our customer in Russe which is north of Bulgaria on the Danube. Here we had a very pleasant surprise after our meeting on Thursday (Tony is distracting me by dancing round as I type to our Mongo Jerry LP) the director said he would show us round Russe. He had hired a car and took us all round the sights finally ending up with dinner at a little fish restaurant by the river. Then on the Friday before we left he presented us with a miniature painted barrel like the one we bought for Dad- altogether a very nice customer.

The countryside in the interior is really beautiful, full of spring flowers and blossoms, wild lilac and laburnum. We found the coast a little disappointing. First of all the scenery is very like England. The resorts that have been developed are just a lot of big modern hotels on a sandy beach miles away from anywhere. We probably got a bad impression of these places as Golden Sands and Sunny Beach were almost deserted and there is nothing more depressing than a holiday resort out of season. Also the weather was bad on the coast, cold winds and fog. The other off putting thing was the Black sea really did look black and murky. You felt if you swam in it your skin would turn black too. We felt it might be good to spend a weekend there later on in the year as the hotels and air fares are so cheap. We did see some interesting things there, orchids growing wild, two stoats, a natural petrified forest of fossil wood, several storks and two snakes- dead I am glad to say. I think we have a good idea of where the best places are to visit now.

We are looking forward to our holiday in Greece now as I guess you are your trip to USA. We still aim to go to Turkey later in the year and have checked with the British embassy and they say it should be OK. We will avoid the trouble spots and stick to the coast.

We have just been for a walk in the park and spent a happy hour watching the other people walk by and commenting on them. I expect we shall go to the film at the embassy tonight, we have become regulars now.

I am sorry I have not written to Paula lately but I am finding it difficult to find time to write as we are so busy. Last Tuesday we went to dinner with the first secretary of the British embassy and Next Friday we are going to dinner with the head of ILO here. In between we are always entertaining ICL visitors and we have had rather a lot of them lately. As well as this we have our trips to Austria and the Bulgarian coast plus the odd car cleaning session.

Talking of cars the VW now seems to be behaving itself and the only trouble we have with it concerns the alarm we had fitted in Austria to stop anyone breaking in. If it is tampered with at all the horn goes off. We set it as usual when we were in Russe and went to bed. About 12.30 some youths were passing by and accidentally set off the alarm. Instead of leaving the car they were fascinated with this and started rocking the car and leaning on the bonnet. The noise soon woke us and Tony had to get a policeman before order was restored. The alarm is burglar proof but not Bulgar proof. Tony says that last pun deserves a second sheet of paper but I am not sure I can fill it up. I will continue tomorrow.

Monday

We have been invited to a party tonight so I better finish this quickly and post it or it will never arrive. The film last night was not very good, an American comedy- need I say more?

I hope the camping carnet arrives before our holiday but I think it should.

I hope you had a nice time in Belton on May Day, we thought of you watching the maypole dancing.

I must close now and get ready

Love as usual

Happy birthday to Nanny for tomorrow and I am still looking out for a few things to buy her.

Love from both of us

Gillian and Tony

The ICL computer customer in Russe was the local government, housed in a grand stone ‘Stalinist Realism’ building, fronted with large columns & statues of heroic workers nearby. Being quite remote from Sofia they had gained little attention by our staff in the past and were delighted to have new technical support staff visiting. We had found people in Sofia often quite unpleasant to any foreigner in their midsts. We were regularly ‘blanked’ by our immediate neighbours on the occasions when we were not sworn at, and had random malicious damage to our cars (unlike the locals’ cars). Seeing our foreign car number plates, in a city centre traffic jam it would not be uncommon to have pedestrians step of the pavement and kick the side of our car. The indifference and shear deliberate awkwardness of bureaucrats was also difficult to stomach at times (but as previously mentioned was not unknown at the British Embassy either). But not so in Russe; the people we met were a delight, both at work and in public places. They were very friendly, courteous and eager to talk. One quite alarming story we were told by an old lady in Russe was that a few years earlier, during an especially harsh winter, the Danube had frozen over. As a result the already hungry wolves from the Romanian forests on the opposite bank came across the ice in packs to find food in Russe.

After leaving Russe on this occasion, and travelling to the Black Sea area, we visited Varna. No progress was made on the Elliot 803 computer still in its packing cases. I remember ‘the Fox’ at the ICC installation in Sofia saying that he had been brought up in Varna. He had very brown teeth we recall. On this trip to Varna we discovered that in those days almost everyone living in the Varna region had brown teeth due to the high level of natural fluoride in the local water. It naturally colours the teeth, but excessive exposure to fluoride also induces greater decay by breaking down the tooth enamel. Not a lot of people know that!

At the embassy dinner we remember the husband going out to make the coffee and the sound of violent banging in the kitchen. ‘Don’t worry’ said his wife. ‘He’s just killing the cockroaches’

There is a big gap in the letters because at this time we had a wonderful holiday Greece and Crete. We spent the first week on the mainland and drove to Athens via Philipi and the plains of Marathon. After a few days seeing the sites in the capitol, we drove to a camp site on the other side of the country  on a Peaceful lagoon. We were able to visit Delphi and Mycene from there and were impressed with the Corinth canal. Then we went on to Crete by boat from Pireas.  Crete was very underdeveloped at the time with only Agias Nikolaos being a tourist destination. We stayed at Chania, Rhetimon Agias Nikolaos and Heraklion and visited many of the Minoan sites and museums. We found ample reading material about Sir Arthur Evans and his excavations at Knossos. Gill had been fascinated by Crete after reading mary Renaults book ‘A Bull from the Sea’ as a teenager. There were few tourists and the road system was only developed in the North of the island. In the South we found colonies of hippies living in Cretian villages in bunk beds. We drove back to Rhetimon along unmade up roads with only the occasional goat or donkey for company stopping to ask directions at a village with no electricity. An old man bought out an ancient map with hardly any roads on it and tried to tell us it was too far to travel in one evening. He had probably only ever gone there by donkey.

We also visited the cave of Zeus in the central plateaux. A guide came and suggested we might need his services. He was an old man and we took pity on him. The first thing he did was buy two candles and some old newspapers. We followed him to the cave entrance to find there was no lights or steps in the cave and we had to scramble down a near vertical slope with only the candle light to guide us. When we reached the bottom the guide lit the newspaper and threw it in the air to give us a view of the size and complexity of the cave. When it was excavated many artifacts from the Minoan culture were found including statutes of the female godess with snakes writhing round her arms and the double heading axe symbol of the royal Minoan kings. The cave had definitely been a Minoan shrine but I guess earlier gods than Zeus were worship there. On our return to England  made a point of visiting the Ashmolean museum in Oxford.

The VW was working smoothly at last and we were beginning to rebuild confidence in its abilities.