大象传媒

In 1943 I worked as a German and French Monitor for the 大象传媒. The operation was based in Evesham to start with, but in April 1943 we moved to Caversham near Reading. What preoccupied us most was not the move as such or our new working environment, but the uncertainty about where and how we would live.
We all knew we were likely to be billeted with local people and discovered that we would be taken around by bus or car by a billeting officer to be inspected by prospective hosts. I myself and a fellow german monitor were accepted quite readily by a kind couple, a couple of miles from the monitoring unit, shown to our shared bedroom and told exactly when we could use the bathroom and when and where to have breakfast - the only meal provided by our billetors.

This arrangement seemed to work remarkably well for a few weeks, until one morning I went to use the bathroom outside the allotted time span and ran into a girl on the staircase whom I had never seen before. We got talking and I discovered that she and girlfriend who worked in Reading munitions factory were also billeted in the same house. They were under strict orders not to communicate with us in any way, to maintain middle class repectability. The result of this early morning encounter was our billetors decided it was no longer safe to keep us and the two girls under the same roof and regrettably they were asked to leave.

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