march 1972

March 1972

Dear Mum and dad,

Thank you for the letter. I am sorry I have not written for so long but I have been trying to catch up on the letter I owe to other people so I am afraid you have been rather neglected. Also I have had a bad cold since returning from Amsterdam but I am much better now.

Tony is going to England on Thursday via Amsterdam so he will post this when he reaches London. I expect you will be seeing him in the next couple of weeks.

It looks as if we will be moving at the end of next month. We had a telex from ICL Holland to say they have found us an unfurnished house in Amsterdam for rent. So Tony will stop and look at it on the way to England. If suitable we will have our furniture shipped there and then Tony will drive the Daf back to Holland with the belongings we have left with you and then fly back to Sofia. We are quite excited about the prospect of living in Amsterdam as it is a very interesting city – full of life. I hope we will be settled in for mum’s winter holiday as it would be nice to have you visiting us.

We went to Greece last weekend and it rained solidly the whole time. We went down to Kavalla visiting Philippi on the way-where St Paul preached. Kavalla is a nice little town even in the rain. And we had some nice meals of squid and crayfish as well as steak and spaghetti. We went to the pictures Saturday night and saw ‘The Statue’ which was the only English film showing. It was quite amusing with David Niven and Napoleon Solo.

It is getting boring now in Sofia as we are just waiting for someone to take over from us so we can leave. Of course ICL are messing everything up as usual but we are getting use to that by now.

I think I had better not write any more as Tony will tell you all the news when he sees you. I will remind him to bring the brandy for Nanny and I will try and buy something for auntie Kath tomorrow.

I am glad mum’s literary tastes are developing. We have several Steinbecks and Durrells here you can read. I have just started a book on Tutankhamen which is interesting. Hope I shall see you soon

Love from both of us

Gillian and Tony

The Daf was left in the UK and the aim was to register it in the UK and finally obtain a log book. We spent a great deal of our life driving around in cars which had the steering wheel on the wrong side for the country we were living in. I guess it made us more careful drivers and less likely to overtake.

Tony rejected the Amsterdam house and was shown a possible house to rent in Voorhout, just inland from Noordvijk, only a few miles from the sea  and convenienty situated between Amsterdam and The Hague. It was a three bedroomed terraced house with a small garden, a definite improvement on the small flats we lived in behind the iron curtain. The only similarity with Prague was the fact there was no bath , only a wet room. The other difficulty was that it was unfurnished but ICL agree to pay for our furniture to be shipped from storage in England. We looked forward to getting our own meagre belongings reunited with us after over two years in furnished rented accommodation.

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The experience of living in Eastern Europe made us far less dependent on television than if we had stayed in the UK. We did not buy our first TV set until 1978- after eleven years of marriage. Reading was our mainstay, though finding English books in Prague or Sofia was not easy and we would stock up on titles every time we were somewhere with an English bookshop. It often led us to read authors we would have otherwise not tried. We also played a great deal of cards and dice in Bulgaria learning many new games. They were useful when playing with multilingual groups with no language in common. Gill was also a big fan of scrabble and would ask any visitors from ICL back to her flat for a game.  We remember one sad occasion when an ICL employee from Putney headquarters visited us to sort out an administration problem. Mr M was of Irish descent and enjoyed his evening with us playing scrabble. He had a really bad cold but insisted on carrying on working and left Bulgaria to travel to Russia on another task.

The next time we were in London we were shocked to find out he had died of pneumonia. His cold had got worse but he refused to take time off and when he finally went to the doctor it was too late for the antibiotics to work. One of the engineers Jim M also had pneumonia whilst he was in Sofia and we visited him in hospital to keep his spirits up. These incidents made us aware that dedication to work should not take precedence over the need to look after your health.