大象传媒

(This story was submitted to the People's War site by Ceri Walker of Oxford on behalf of Lois and Felicity Foster Carter and has been added to the site with their permission. Lois and Felicity Foster Carter fully understand the site's terms and conditions.)

During the Battle of Britain, Felicity Foster Carter remembers taking her School Certificate at Wychwood School in Oxford and wondering what was the point, if England was about to be invaded. She did not then realise what a vital part she and her sister would play in ensuring that that invasion never happened.

Lois Foster Carter was seven years older than Felicity and had joined the ATS at the beginning of World War 2. As soon as she could, Felicity also joined up, and by coincidence they were both asked to serve at Station X, the top secret signals and code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, fifty miles north west of London. Those serving at Station X (and there were thousands) were so strongly impressed of the need for silence about their work that none of them ever spoke of it even long after the War had ended. The young girl school leavers (some of them only 14) who worked on the machinery were warned that if they talked, their boyfriends might be killed as a result. Consequently nothing got out. Lois recalled her sense of shock when she heard the centre mentioned in public for the first time in the early nineteen seventies: 'I nearly broke the television in my amazement'.

Lois and Felicity's job was to listen to the call signs, to follow the patterns and to be aware when the pattern changed. On one occasion someone (rumoured to be an American) lost the call sign book and all call signs consequently had to be changed. This was particularly exciting and difficult.

Neither of the girls was involved with the 'strange but brilliant folk' who were the code breakers, but they describe Bletchley Park as a 'Heath Robinson type of place'. 'People poured in off the trains and huts sprang up all over the park' recalls Felicity. 'I felt that if a German officer had come in and put up his own hut, no-one would have noticed! Of course now we realise that Station X was in fact making the world's very first computer.'

Both Felicity and Lois agree that it was strange to be in an atmosphere where, as Felicity put it 'They even censored the colour of your toothbrush'. It was particularly hard for Felicity when she had to type the reports that came in on her night shift. Next day she found it difficult to recall what she had learnt from the reports and what had come through on the news from the 大象传媒, so she made it a rule not to breathe a word about either.

The sisters were made redundant as soon as the European War was over, but they preserved their vow of silence for the next thirty years.

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