Bohemia Village Voice  Bohemia Village Voice

For bohemians everywhere

I was married in a Bohemian Castle

Eva, who married Richard in Karlstejn Castle, Bohemia.

Eva, who married Richard in Karlstejn Castle, Bohemia.

Part 6 (of 8) Back to England

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 sixth part, Richard describes the period after the honeymoon. 
After the honeymoon, Eva was granted a six-month temporary exit visa (which she had to renew every six months at the Czech embassy in London) and allowed to travel to England with me. Fortunately, the Czechs had no problem with one of their women marrying an Englishman, and were reasonably helpful: one of her friends married an Egyptian and had to wait 18 months for even a temporary visa! While we were in England, my wife obtained British citizenship on the basis of our marriage, and we settled down in Farnborough in Hampshire, where our daughter was born in 1967. Eva’s widowed mother was allowed out to visit us, and she continued to visit her daughter and granddaughter for many years, right up to her death. The communist countries were always happy to allow elderly people to travel to the West; they secretly hoped they wouldn’t return, so the state wouldn’t have to pay their pensions.
 The following year, Eva’s brother Miran and his new wife Iva obtained holiday visas for a trip to visit us in England. It was not normal practice to allow an educated, married couple with no children to travel to the West together, but I think they applied to different offices and managed to fool the system somehow. Or maybe things were already easing up a little. Miran and Iva had apparently agreed in advance that they would not go back, although (without telling us) they decided not to defect in England, as they were worried it might affect my wife’s position. Instead, they went to a reception centre in West Germany and applied for asylum and eventually were permitted to emigrate to the United States. After five years they were granted American citizenship and moved to California. Unfortunately for Miran, the American dream didn’t last too much longer; Iva left him for an American dentist. He packed up all his things in a trailer, hitched it to his car and drove away from his apartment. He was never seen again and, in spite of the use of private detectives, no trace of him has ever been found.

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