19th Dec 1971

19/12/71

Sofia

Dear mum and dad

Thank you for the Christmas card and the ones from Nanny and Paula and also for the letter. We have just come back from a weekend in Thessaloniki. The weather was lovely. We watch the sun setting over Mount Olympus the sea turning all the colours of mother of pearl. We went there to buy a new battery for the Daf and it is now running very well. We did some shopping and bought lots of fruit, tangerines, oranges and bananas ready for Christmas. We really do like Thessaloniki – it is such a gay friendly town and we really had a good weekend there.

Tony is wrapping up Christmas presents for our friends here. Last week we both had a bad cold but we are better now. We went to Russe last week and had a pleasant meeting there. In the evening we went out for a meal with the R’s who teach at the English school there.

We have decided to drive home and leave the Daf in England for the next six months. There are no planes flying 31^st December 1^st or 2^nd of January because of the New Year celebrations so we thought we might as well drive. I don’t know when we will arrive in England- it will depend on the weather. At present there is no snow in Sofia so we might not get a white Christmas.

Our course in Brighton is at the Hotel Albion from the 3^rd to the 7^th January so I don’t expect we will get to see you until the weekend of the 8th. I shall have to go to Putney on the 10^th and return to Sofia on the 11^th. I am hoping to have a month in England in March so you will see plenty of me then.

Tony had a good rise of £300 so we are quite content to stay here for a while and make a bit more money. I don’t know what we will spend it on though.

I shall do my family Christmas shopping after Christmas as I think I shall be very busy next week.

How is Dad managing his retirement? I don’t expect he will realise it has happened until after Christmas. The children should keep him busy next week.

We shall have to arrange a holiday for you in a German speaking country so mum can practice her language skills.

I had better close now. I hope to get this posted in England so I wish you all a very happy Christmas and New Year

Love to everyone

Gillian and Tony

We cannot remember why we contemplated leaving the Daf in the UK at that point in time. We were reunited with it later as we drove it in our next country- Holland. It had a long and happy life. After our eventual return to the UK we kept it for several years until Tony got a job with a company car. We then gave it to Gill’s sister Paula who was in a small village in Leicestershire with three young children and no transport. She donated it to the technical college where it was used by students studying car maintenance. The Daf factory was eventually bought by Volvo and the Daf transmission, which used a strong belt and gave you an infinite number of gears, was used in some of the smaller Volvo cars.  It was ideal for driving in icy conditions and Gill can only remember skidding once, driving in Greece in the New Year on a beautiful sunny day and hitting a patch of black ice on a shaded bend.

We can remember the magic of driving home that winter over the Alps and through the mountain villages, blanketed in snow. On New Year’s Eve all the grave yards had lighted candles by the graves giving a ghostly glow to the village churchyards as we drove through the evening. We reached Frankfurt on the night of the 31^st December, tired and travel worn to be kept awake by the fire crackers let off in the street to keep away the evil spirits and the drunken celebrations which lasted till the early hours. Of course we had to take both cars with us but by now we were used to driving everywhere in tandem.

We had an interesting ICL training session for people working behind the iron curtain at the Hotel in Brighton and met up with lots of old friends from Czechoslovakia and other eastern European countries. The people who worked for ICL were always more non conformist compared with the typical IBM employee and we made some good friends from those days.