Holiday In Bulgaria, Golden Sands, August 1972

A peachy holiday. Mum, me, Denise, Steve & Tony Lytton.

Oh boy did the memories come flooding back.

Just before the end of 2020, I tracked down Steve Lytton, with whom I hadn’t been in touch for many decades, on the back of a memory trigger about limbo dancing:

My Very Brief Junior Career As A Limbo Dancer, The Peacock Club, 10 August 1975

We had a very enjoyable e-chat. At one point, Steve said he couldn’t remember how we met, but I remembered it clearly. We met as a chance encounter between our two families in Golden Sands, Bulgaria, in August 1972.

Our parents got on well with each other. Steve and I got along well too, which I’m sure pleased all four parents, as Steve and I were both only children.

Not only did our families hang out together a lot during that holiday but (unusually for holiday friendships) that connection continued for a good few years when we got home, despite the Harris family living in Streatham and the Lytton family living in Hendon.

This was not one of our more photographic holidays, but still there were half-a-dozen pictures from this holiday in “Mum’s maroon album” and I managed to find an envelope with a few more pictures of varying quality/vintage, some black and white from “my camera” (I was only allowed simple stuff at that age; dad wanted me to prove my bona fides as a photographer before letting me use better equipment and materials) and some contact prints, I’m guessing from the Lytton collection. I’ve put them all (16 of them) in the following Flickr album – click here or below:

There is also just a couple of minutes-worth of cine film. The Lytton family feature as much or perhaps even more than my own family in the film. I think dad possibly shot more, but some of the film got sun-damaged – there’s some slight evidence of that damage in the surviving film.

You get 15 seconds of the previous year’s holiday (Port Leucate in Occitania, South-West France, since you asked) as well as the couple of minutes of Bulgaria. A fair bit of clowning around, but the highlight of this movie is unquestionably the beach football, in which mum takes a tumble and then Steve, rather than assisting the injured player, cynically takes possession, playing on. Shocking sportsmanship, caught on film for ever.

I had a few abiding memories from this holiday, despite this holiday being 18 months or so before I started keeping a diary. But the very best of the memories was triggered by Steve, when we e-swapped reminiscences.

Let’s start with my abiding memories and use Steve’s wonderful recollection as the grand finale.

Abiding Memory 1: A Standing Room Flight

My first memory is about getting to Golden Sands. We flew on the Balkan Bulgarian Airline:

In those days they were using Ilyushin Il-18 Soviet Russian planes that had shown a recent propensity to crash, apparently, although mercifully we were in blissful ignorance of that fact when we flew:

What I especially recall, though, was the “standing room only” short hop from Sophia to Varna in one of those. People were standing in the aisles of the plane holding on to grab-handles like passengers on a bus or tube.

Abiding Memory 2: Viennese Waltz Chicks

Was it really the music of Johann Strauss II that touched my heart, or did I have a kiddy-crush on these lovely musicians? I’m well over the Strauss now, anyway, but here’s the piece that particularly sticks in my mind from that holiday:

Abiding Memory 3: The Olympic Flame

There was a great deal of excitement when word went around that the Olympic flame, doing a circuitous route from Athens to Munich via several Balkan/Eastern European countries, would be staying outside OUR hotel, The International in Golden Sands, for the night.

Detective work on my part tracks down this museum record – click here – which suggests, if I understand the dots on the map correctly, that we are talking about 12/13 August 1972.

We had rooms overlooking the front. I am pretty sure I joined my parents on their balcony to watch the excitement unfold.

A crowd within and without the hotel, pregnant with anticipation.

Then cries from within and without:

Es kommt…Sie kommen…Hier kommt es…

…that sort of thing. The vast majority of tourists in Golden Sands in those days were East Germans.

The torch bearer ran up some steps, ignited the “eternal flame cauldron” where the Olympic flame was to repose for the night, stepped back down to the sound of tumultuous cheering and applause…

…while the Olympic flame petered out in the cauldron.

There was a rapid inspection and rejigging of the cauldron, then the ceremony was repeated, this time successfully.

I was just shy of 10 and was already aware that Santa doesn’t exist. Now I learnt that the Olympic flame is not as eternal as the authorities would have us believe.

Bird’s Eye View Of A Nudist Beach

Thanks to Steve, I have recovered another wonderful memory of this holiday.

We all had rooms with excellent views overlooking the seafront. But Steve’s room, at one end of the hotel, had an especially splendid view. It overlooked a sectioned-off nudist beach.

Steve, very kindly, shared this world of wonders with me. We would sneak off to Steve’s room whenever the opportunity arose, to have an ogle and a giggle. Steve was around 11, I was coming up to 10 – I’m pretty sure neither of us had a clue what we were ogling at or where all those moving parts might go.

Fortunately for genteel readers, I have no images from that aspect of the holiday and am averse to Googling “1970s East German nudist sunbathers” for fear of the dreadful dark recesses of the internet that such a search might reach.

However, the image of dad, above (modestly attired in shorts, of course) gives a sense of the size and scale of the (mostly) East German gentlemen who frequented that beach. And I have managed to find a similarly modest but suitably scaled East German woman shot …

Anyway, I do now recall that my mum liked to dine out on this story for quite a while. Apparently both sets of parents wondered why Steve and I seemed so keen to sneak off to Steve’s room. I fear that it was me that blew our cover in this innocent yet guilty secret pursuit, by asking to borrow dad’s binoculars.

The parents worked us out, caught us out, made light of it and shared in the humorous side of this story. Dad taught me that quality rather than quantity is what matters when observing the human form, a lesson that has served me well in art and in life.