The Translator

There was one girl there, 21 or 22, who the police, I’m pretty certain, well they used her locally as an interpreter and when she moved to London the police there used her as an interpreter. She could speak German, Polish, Ukranian, Russian, Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese, Urdu, several of the Indian languages, several of the South African languages ‘cos she’d been through all those countries. They reckoned that she only needed to be in a place a month and she would be fluent in the language.

When was she living here?
52? 55? You see I’m relying on memory, I couldn’t swear to it but somewhere then. I knew her to speak to a time or two but she wasn’t there very long when I was there so it might even have been earlier than that.