Fourth lnstalment

After a few day's we went to Zagreb to get another car, Ernie, James, Clive(who was new from Switzerland) and I went as they all had foreign passports apart from myself as I had left my passport in my bergan in Laslovo. We arrived in Zagreb and stayed with one of our friends from the press center in the intercontinental Hotel, he had a room so it wouldn't cost us anything, James and Clive took it in turns to try and hire a car which was difficult because we were going to a war zone, only James was successful and had got a VW golf, small but at least it was ours for now, before we went back we needed flak jackets, blue lights to go on tops of the cars and paint to camaflauge them. We found somewhere for the jackets but were told that we would have to come back to find out the price. The paint was the next thing on our list so we walked further down the road and eventually found somewhere, there was nothing that was too much trouble for the people in this shop especially as we told them we were from Osijek, they got the paint and we paid for it, we asked if they knew of anywhere we could buy the lights and instead of saying no they went out of their way to help us and used the phone directory to phone around looking for somewhere that sold them. The man in charge seemed to know everything about us from watching TV and was very grateful to us for coming to Croatia and fighting for them, so grateful that he took us for a coffee in a bar a few doors away from his shop, while talking to Ernie he invited us to his home for a meal the next time we were in Zagreb, we thanked him for the offer and went back to the shop. We were told by one of the assistants that there were only two places that sold those types of lights, one was closed due to stocktaking and the other was sold out. We thanked him for the coffee and his help, took the paint and left, the amount of hospitality we were being shown in Zagreb was very hard to believe, but it was a very nice feeling to know that the Croatians were grateful to us, that meant more to me than any wages that I might receive. We left to return to Osijek taking the new car with us, we had only paid for one days hire as we were going to inform the company that the car had been destroyed in the war zone so therefore we could use the car without worrying about paying for it, it was a hire car whose head office was in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia so we didn't really care about lying as Serbians were the enemy, a small victory for us. We now had two cars, it was better but we still didn't have enough transport, so shortly our first visit we went again to another Serbian based company and this time it was a Mazda. The swiss Clive hired it this time so now we were up to three but our original car was in a bad way and had to go for repairs. We took the other two cars to the barracks where we could paint them in one of their empty garages. About that time a British freelance photographer was visiting us and asked if he could come along, there were no objections from me as I would have someone to talk to about what was happening back in the UK, his name was Peter Jefferson and spent most of the day with us as we were spraying the cars he was talking photos. The Mazda was the car that I would drive so I painted it myself, I was determined to make it look good and when it was finished it looked like a staff car good enough for a general. The other was painted but not as good as mine, we took the paper off and drove the cars out without waiting for them to dry, they looked great, much better than anything else in Osijek, Peter was surprised when he learnt how we got the cars. Over the next few days we aquired a lorry and Ernie told us we were going to a place just outside Osijek called Brijest where we were going to have a more permanent base.