Alexander Tomský

“Well, I accompanied the Austrian chargé d’affaires, we passed in between the tanks and he took a kind of… well a kind of unusual road somewhere in the woods which was no normally taken, and they opened up the bars for him as he had the diplomatic immunity and he drove me to Linz. There I knocked on the door. Unfortunately my uncle was no home, I hadn’t seen him ever, he was on holiday but there was his son, who was dressed in the uniform of the Austrian army. I spent a week with them and then I got visa to England in Vienna, I had to hitchhike, as I didn’t have much money. I got some money from my distant relatives but it was not much. And they refused to give me visa, because the English closed their embassy too and said I didn’t have my close relatives there. But I had two distant aunts, cousins of my father, there was the brother of my grandfather, the only one of ten children to have survived the shoa, the war, as he was on a business trip in London. I managed to persuade, in a very funny way, that lady that although I didn’t have a brother, sister, father or mother in England, I had many relatives in London – four distant cousins and one great uncle, the brother of my grandfather – that they could compensate for one direct relative. She laughed and suddenly I saw the name Winternitz on her lapel. My uncle in London married a German Jew whose name was Winternitz. I asked, “You come from Prague?” And she replied, “Yes, my grandfather comes from Prague.” Well, and suddenly I was a relative. And I got the visa.”

“I was terribly exploited by the English. They had a terrible conflict with the trade unions in the 1960s and 1970s, that is they had a conflict with labourers, who, at that time, were still organised in trade unions, and then Thatcher destroyed the unions. But this was still distant. I served as a kind of connection between the management, who spoke quite different English from those at the bottom. The communication between the two layers was desperate and I was a kind of easy connection, I went and learned cockney, the city slang, the speech of these people. As a foreigner, I was more acceptable for them than a young boy with a tie, and Englishman who worked up there with the masters. In the 1960s and 1970s there was really a class antagonism which later caused the tragedy that was the collapse of the English economy. It was nationalised by socialist governments and then came Thatcher, who turned it the other way round.”