Author Bridget Gubbins tells all about her 1960s travels behind the 'Iron Curtain' in new book

Cold War, Warm Hearts also includes many of Bridget Gubbins’ striking photographs and maps from her time behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ in 1966.

Travelling in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia with virtually no money was not only a problem, but also an opportunity as it enabled an insight into the lives and experience of ‘ordinary’ people.

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 said: “I have a set of diaries from my travels as a young woman in communist eastern Europe in the 1960s.

“I wrote them as an inexperienced naïve girl and I tell on a daily basis who I encountered, their stories, and their hopes and fears as they lived in countries trapped in by the Iron Curtain.

“Now I am in my late 70s and I realise that I have stories to tell which are probably the only ones of their kind in these forbidden, unknown lands.”

The author grew up in the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, her family migrating to Northumberland in 1955. The book, written in her pre-married name Bridget Ashton, is due to be published on March 28.

Bridget has also written one local history book after another about Morpeth, covering the yards and alleyways, the drovers and the workhouse.