Wednesday, October 21, 2009

A letter from Czechoslovakia 1989

When I was preparing for the Goldenford Sense and Sensitivity Workshop, I went rooting through a box of letters to find an airmail letter. I was trying to prepare a tableau of things that would evoke ideas for a piece of creative writing. Other items included an old bunch of keys, a fan, a bottle of pills - come to think of it, there are some good ideas there, I might try it here at home.

At any rate, the first letter I identified as being an airmail letter was actually twenty years old. (There's no filing system in this box, and letters get thrown in and shunted around at random.) It was from my son, when, in his early twenties, he took a trip to Czechoslovakia, as part of an exchange with people from his university - Sussex University.

The following is an extract from his letter, dated 10th September 1989.

...We changed at Stuttgart for a Czech train. The only eventful thing was crossing the border. Here soldiers boarded the train with dogs and a succession of officials asked for various bits of paper and if wanted to declare anything. He looked very bored and I got the impression he was willing us to say ‘no’ so he didn’t have to bother to do anything. I declared my camera and he wrote it on some bit of paper. I didn’t tell him about the two personal stereos, legitimate though they were, because he didn’t ask me – always best to keep your mouth shut.


The first week in Czechoslovakia (or to be more precise Bohemia) was spent looking around Prague (or Praha) as it should be called.) Some things are very modern. Their underground puts ours to shame. It is really very good. It is very quiet for a capital city. There is no huge crush of people like in London. There are no massive traffic jams. There is no-one trying to sell you anything. That is sometimes very nice and sometimes very inconvenient. I am sure it is possible to get anything you want here – judging from Sarka’s flat. It’s just not as easy as nipping down to the shop and buying it. Often the shelves are empty and something, whatever it is, is difficult or impossible to get. You have to wait for a few days. However, the only real big differences in terms of what you can buy are food and electrical things. Sarka showed me Prague’s biggest supermarket and it really wasn’t very good at all. Sainsbury’s is about 100 times better. As for electrical things, watches stereos, televisions, they are there, but they are very, very expensive. I worked out they are about five times the equivalent in England would cost, and that doesn’t take into account the lower Czech standard of living. And they are the technology of fifteen years ago. None of those things really matter though – there is nothing very interesting on the television. Actually I have seen loads and loads of satellite dishes while I’ve been here – much more than in England. Food is always prepared from the basics. This makes it a time consuming process for Sarka and her mother, but they enjoy it and the results are always wonderful. Dumplings (or keneglik) are a speciality and my favourite are the (very filling) plum covered dumplings with sweet cottage cheese. We eat meat a lot – not so much fruit, in fact they haven’t really discovered health food yet –they take what they can get I suppose. I thought food would be sparse but I am eating a huge amount. I have a room to myself in the flat. The block of flats stands with several other blocks of flats in an area of Prague called Motol (in West Prague). They are I suppose like sixties flats in England, and although the inside of Sarka’s flat is very nicely decorated I really don’t like the design at all of the estate and buildings.


Everybody drives in Skodas. There are thousands of the things. You can get foreign cars but parts etc make it very expensive and not practical to do so. Very occasionally you see a Merc. Worth ten times the price of the Skoda. Nothing in between though. The inequality is very pronounced.


Getting anywhere when you are not in Prague but in the country is a problem. For the last five days I have been in South Bohemia. Not in the same mountains as we originally planned but with friends of Sarka’s called Marik and Kate (Anglicised). Marik was a scientist who was very gifted at music and so I got on well with him and said if he was ever passing through Woodingdean he should drop in. (He is planning on going to England.) We picked wild mushrooms and we had fresh eggs (from a hen!!!) and honey (from bees) from a hive next door. We did a lot of walking and climbing.


My son's visit was before the dramatic changes, which occurred only a couple of months later in the same year, to quote from Wikipedia:


The Velvet Revolution (Czech: sametová revoluce) or Gentle Revolution (Slovak: nežná revolúcia) (November 16 – December 29, 1989) was a non-violent revolution in Czechoslovakia that saw the overthrow of the Communist government.[1] It is seen as one of the most important of the Revolutions of 1989.

The Czech girls who had earlier stayed at Sussex Uni, and had also visited us here, with my son, were quite adamant at the time, that Czechoslovakia would not take the route of other East European countries, where the collapse of Communism had already started on its irrevocable journey.

About a year later, my son visited Russia, where his then girlfriend, a student of Eastern European languages was working ... and look what happened there.

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