2023
Cold War,
Warm Hearts
Where were you in1966?
Most of Bridget Ashton’s friends, in their early twenties, were settling down with jobs and/or husbands…
She, on the other hand, was wandering the highways and byways of Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain.
Travelling in these countries with virtually no money was not only a problem but also an opportunity. It enabled a rare, and deep insight into the lives and experience of ‘ordinary’ people.
Here’s your opportunity to walk with her. In the context of the current crisis in Eastern Europe, it offers a powerful insight into the lived experience which lies behind it.
Recounting her tales with the freshness of a young person’s vision, she has created an appealing tale of these beautiful and troubled countries, where most of the time, she was welcomed with open arms..
“Bridget Ashton's travel writing is utterly authentic and restlessly curious. She is an intrepid, 'unquiet' woman adventurer, exploring in the grand tradition of Celia Fiennes and Freya Stark. Her memoir of life in post-war Soviet Europe is a vivid reminder of how much Europe has changed; and how much it has not."
Max Adams, author of Unquiet Women, In the Land of Giants and The Wisdom of Trees
Bridget Ashton has written a vivid memoir of her time crossing the Iron Curtain in the1960s. Based on her diaries and letters, and enlivened by her fresh, contemporary photographs, it shows how this fundamental barrier was never completely closed. The people Ashton encounters in the East freely show her their humanity, even as they are sometimes forced to contend with inhumane regimes. A life-affirming book.
Timothy Phillips, author of The Curtain and the Wall, 2022
Cold War, Warm Hearts transports us back half a century, to an era when a trilingual peasant woman wondered whether England also had a moon, and a young man could recall his childhood friend being carried away on a Nazi cattle truck. Through innocent student eyes, Bridget Ashton evokes the world she discovered as she hitch-hiked across the Iron Curtain, determinedly criss-crossing Eastern Europe and the Balkans on an extraordinary journey that uncovers boundless hospitality but also tensions that are no less relevant today.
Fiona Hall, author and Member of the European Parliament 2004 - 2014
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
