Bohemia Village Voice

Richard Slater.

Part 4 (of 8) Business & pleasure in Bohemia

St Peter’s Road resident and technical author Richard Slater recounts his days in Bohemia. [Bohemia is the western province of the Czech Republic; the eastern one is Moravia.]  In this fourth part, Richard describes the period when he met his first wife, Eva. 
In early 1966, I flew to Bohemia to install a 503 system at a service bureau in central Prague. I remained there, apart from a couple of quick trips back to England, from mid-January to mid-June. It was a very large and complicated installation and took a long time – quite unrelated to the fact that I had met my future wife, Eva Fránková  (in Slav languages, women add -ová or -á to the male surname; Eva’s father and brother were called Fránek). It also has to be said that Prague is a beautiful city and, unlike most of central Europe, undamaged during the Second World War. After another return trip to London, I went back to Moscow for two weeks in July 1966 to add extra equipment to the Gosplan system, and from there I flew straight to Prague to get married. But first we had to visit the British Embassy to notify them, so the marriage would be recognised in the UK, and it was then that I received a sharp reminder that Czechoslovakia had been occupied during the war. Most people think of occupation as invading troops and secret policemen, but mostly it’s just the same old bureaucrats: my wife was born in 1944 and so her birth certificate was in German and carried the Nazi eagle and swastika stamp of the occupation government. I also remember that visit because the vice-consul we saw was a very capable-looking individual and my wife commented on how well he spoke Czech. Some time later, back in England, we read a small paragraph in the paper saying that the British vice-consul in Prague had been expelled ‘for activities incompatible with his status’, as the saying goes. We assumed it was the same man, and that he was an MI6 agent. Very John Le Carré!

Eva Frankova.