The Railway Man

  Lance Thew had disappeared again, removed from Outram Road in May. The Japanese must have been desperate by then for skilled radio men. I never saw or heard from Thew again, though I know he survived. But of Bill Williamson, the calm and competent linguist who had escaped our punishment at Kanburi, there was no trace at all. It was as though he had vanished, somewhere up the railway.

  I tried to draw up a full record of prisoners who had passed through the military section of Outram Road, determined to log all the names so that others could account for them. I read the medical records and spoke to all the survivors. I wanted to get the facts on paper and into the hands of South-East Asia Command before we were all dispersed. We were being split up and assigned to different units around Changi in preparation for going home. When I started to type, on an ancient manual machine, I discovered that my right arm and hand would not work properly, so I tapped away very slowly.

  I also drew up detailed complaints about our treatment at Kanburi, taking statements from the survivors. Major Slater, as the senior officer among us – suddenly ranks mattered again – signed the statement. The Kanburi Radio Affair, we called it in our statement after we agreed a final version; the designation began to seem a kind of euphemism. We were becoming history, and we could tell how close we were to being forgotten already.

  The good can be forgotten as easily as the bad, even more easily, so I also typed out a commendation for Signalman O’Malley, that heroic toban from Outram Road. I described what he had done in the unemotional language of an army memo, but it still recalled him carrying paralysed men into the sunshine, caring for the sick and doing his utmost to ease conditions for the damned.

  This meticulous, orderly registration of witnesses and participants and descriptions of the criminals was a wonderful displacement of anger and revenge. It still astonishes me that there were not more spontaneous outbursts of summary justice on the guards, but our normality reasserted itself very quickly, and that did not include lynchings.

  I kept copies of all these documents. Today they are almost faded, but not quite. O’Malley’s commendation is typed in faint pale violet on the back of an Admiralty telegram form; the complaint against the Kanburi Aerodrome Camp Commander and his NCOs on some heavy green ledger paper, and you can see the jumping keys and how faded the ribbon was. I have a list of some of the civilian prisoners from the blocks at Outram Road which we seldom saw, written on POW toilet paper – a thin, fibrous transparency covered in small pencilled capitals. The typed list of prisoners evacuated from Outram Road to Changi is almost illegible, with neat dotted lines separating the categories, on thin tan paper which once surrounded a toilet roll, the black serifs of the type nearly cutting through it. You can still read the label: ‘Red Cross Onliwon Toilet Tissue’.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE RANDOM HAZARDS of captivity gave way to the orderly regime of the army. I was once more a serving officer, and I was being sent home. I had not seen my family for over four years; I had been around the world and had witnessed things that had not been dreamed of for centuries in the world I had left behind. My ‘unpleasantness’, as I often called it, for we survivors almost competed with each other in laconic understatement, seemed to have ended with the surrender of Japan. I was more worried about my physical injuries: my arms, my exhaustion, the skin diseases which I could not eradicate; I still had ringworm when I left Changi. I didn’t understand yet that there are experiences you can’t walk away from, and that there is no statute of limitations on the effects of torture.

  The rush of reorganization, the excitement of departure and the concentration on gathering the evidence for the high command of what had been done to us held other thoughts at bay. The past two years had seen so many fresh invasions of fear and anxiety that it was difficult for the mind to dwell on particular episodes, and although I had had enough angry hours to think about Kanburi, the discovery and betrayal and the Kempeitai interrogations, I was now almost too busy to remember. Instead there were the latest and the last of the wartime partings from friends I had come to admire. Jim Bradley, who was in the next bed to mine in HB2, was still very ill and was sent to a hospital ship; Macalister rejoined the Australian Air Force; Fred Smith and the others were sent to different parts of the jigsaw-puzzle army around Changi. After we were broken up, many of us never saw each other again.

  My 5th Field Regiment, which had been left in the lurch at Kuantan in 1941, was by then in Formosa, but we were expected to be attached to some body of men and to make ourselves useful, so I was sent to help take charge of the Indian troops, of whom there were thousands in the city, leaderless and disorganized. Colonel Parker, with whom I had grazed potato leaves, was now my commanding officer. We organized some big parades, checking names and identities of men who had been used as labourers and survived, remnants of the once-proud Imperial Indian Army. Some of the assembled men had joined the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, and could have taken part in the abortive invasion of India in early 1944; these men were denounced by their comrades who had stayed loyal to their original commitment. The INA men were arrested and passed from our hands.

  One day I was simply told to get down to the docks with about fifty men and to take them to Calcutta. I said goodbye to Malaya, as abruptly as that. We sailed on a converted liner called the Devonshire and reached India in less than a week.

  In Calcutta I was sent to a place called Belvedere, a magnificent residence used by the Viceroy of India when he stayed in Calcutta, which had been turned into a reception centre for returning POWs. It resembled an enormous Italianate English country house, the sweeping staircases and colonnades of the façade rearing massively in the heat of Bengal. The loggias and caryatids of this massive palace were now shrouded in purplish camouflage. The ballroom with its acres of springy wooden flooring had been divided into offices for a paymaster and the Red Cross, a canteen, a bar and a post office. It had splendid rooms, full of heavy English chairs with thick legs, long polished tables and sideboards laden with blue china. The windows were enormous, letting in the afternoon light of an Indian autumn on to young men unable to believe their luck.

  It was run by ‘lady volunteers’, brisk self-confident women used to servants and to getting their own way but on the whole wonderfully kind to us. Most of them, at least. One afternoon a woman joined me and another officer who had been on the railway as we drank tea on the veranda, looking out over the green, watered grass and the rose bushes and still marvelling at our recovery and the sheer pleasure of amenities that made this place a paradise to us. She was a vigorous breezy memsahib, and thought it right to speak her mind, as she would no doubt have described it. She was sure, she said, that as we had been prisoners-of-war during most of the fighting she expected that we would be eager ‘to do our bit’ now. There wasn’t a trace of irony in her voice. In it you could sense her picture of the camps in Siam and Malaya as places full of bored, underemployed and shameful men. We held the sides of our chairs tightly and said nothing. At the time I thought that this was one insensitive civilian, but I soon discovered that you have to have seen things with your own eyes before you believe them with any intimacy, and that there are some things which many people do not want to know.

  After a few days of rest I began to feel weak, fainting and generally exhausted. The sudden requirement to do nothing was more than my system could bear. A doctor put me to bed for three days in a military hospital and I slept for fourteen hours a day.

  After my brief convalescence I was sent on to Mhow, in central India, where the kit I had left in 1941 had been kept in a store manned by Italian prisoners-of-war. From there I sent my mother a birthday telegram. The prospect of seeing my family again was becoming real, the remoteness of their faces diminishing, but it was still hard to see across the gulf that the war and Outram Road had put between us. I looked forward to my parents’ house in Edinburgh as one does to a bracing plunge into a clean, cold pool; it represented normality and the pleasure of an unexciting k
indness.

  I felt other anticipations too. In Mhow I had a gold wedding ring made for my fiancée. I assumed that she would still be there, and that time would have stood still for her while so much had happened to me. I had no idea how much the world had changed, or how much I had changed – and how little some people had moved from the ruts they had made for themselves before the war.

  From Mhow there was a train to Deolali, and a delay while I and other stray officers were allocated to a ship returning to England. We were sent down to Bombay and found ourselves on the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, a requisitioned Dutch ship heading for Southampton.

  On board I was approached by some former POWs from Siam who had officers in charge of them who had not themselves been POWs. They were being allocated ordinary ship’s duties by regimental officers who had no conception of what these men had been through. My robust lady volunteer back in Calcutta had co-thinkers in the army, it seemed. The ex-prisoners felt that they had done as much forced labour in the previous three years as they wanted to do for a while: they wished these officers in hell. These were broken-down men, ill and in need of rest and great care. I went to the ship’s adjutant and argued that they should be treated as passengers, not as working soldiers. He agreed, but carelessly and offhandedly, an ominous sign of the complete ignorance that was being drawn over our experiences like a veil.

  Apart from this the voyage was eventless. I read day after day. We reached Southampton on 31st October 1945. The band had played ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ when we arrived at Singapore in 1941, but our landfall was quiet and subdued, in the chill grey weather of the English coast at the approach of winter. Some mail came on board and my name was called. I was handed a letter from my father telling me that my mother had died three and a half years before, about a month after the fall of Singapore. She was sixty-four years old. She had died thinking that I was dead, because I had been reported missing. And my father also told me he had married again.

  I knew the woman he had married. She had been an old family friend for years; or rather, a friend of his. I had never liked her much; she had always seemed an insincere and acquisitive person. All the calmly-constructed images of home which I had been nurturing on the voyage back simply vanished. I was so shocked that I could not tell grief and anger apart, sorrow for my mother almost eclipsed by my response to what seemed like a betrayal by my father. It was a quick and brutal indication that I was not returning to anything I would find familiar. I felt exhausted again, physically and emotionally, remembering her seeing me off in that darkened street in Scarborough; remembering all the times I had thought of her, and her already dead. There were things I could probably have told her that proved hard to share with others.

  I spent ten hours on the train the next day too numb to plan much. When I got to Edinburgh there was no-one to meet me, and this may have decided my course of action. I did not go home. I couldn’t bring myself to turn up as a stranger to find my mother’s place taken, and be dependent on that woman and my father, so at the station I took one of the cars driven by women volunteers to my fiancée’s family and went down the next day to my father’s house in Joppa, my base secure.

  My reserve must have been palpable. Over my natural formality was now laid the instinctive caution and blankness of the prisoner used to hiding his feelings. I hardly knew it then, but I had begun the process of shutting down my emotions, pulling back into cold anger at the first sign of confrontation rather than expressing myself. My father and his new wife – I could hardly bring myself to think of her as my ‘stepmother’ – were welcoming, but I was not. They wanted me and my fiancée to come with them on a holiday to the Lake District, but I evaded the invitation.

  I don’t mean to be unkind to my father. He was in his sixties then, and retired from the Post Office, and he told me later that his friend had saved his life by marrying him, that he was going downhill fast after my mother died so suddenly. I couldn’t grudge him that, but I could not reconcile myself to what he had done, thinking that the second Mrs Lomax cannot have been indifferent to his good pension and comfortable house when she took him on. Within two days I was in a world that seemed cynical and petty compared to the companionship and the seriousness that comes from facing death which I had found in the camps and Outram Road.

  Three weeks later S. and I were married. We were as innocent of each other as could be, and I was led into it by my own docility, her eagerness and a romantic idea of her that I had sustained through thick and thin. I was in love, yes, but with what? I was taking a leap in the dark every bit as risky as that jump on the stairs at Outram Road Gaol. I had been six years in another life – in another world, for all she knew – while she had gone on in the quiet certainties of a strictly religious provincial family. Edinburgh had suffered the usual privations of wartime Britain – rationing, blackout, the evacuation of children – but it was not as damaged as parts of London or some of the Midlands towns had been by German air raids, and I could hardly believe that it had been in the war at all.

  She was the nearest safe haven I could find from my father’s betrayal and the pain that I could not get rid of or understand. I was already living in a world of my own; the privacy of the torture victim is more impregnable than any island fortress. I could not have begun to understand that in 1945, for I did not have the words to describe what I was going through.

  Nor did anyone I knew; and certainly not the army. The entire extent of my attention from the British Army after the war consisted of a brief medical examination at an army centre in Edinburgh in November 1945. I could walk across the room, was warm to the touch and had no incurable diseases, so they turned me loose. Get on with your life, the doctor seemed to say, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. The wounds were not on the surface, nor detectable by stethoscope. My rush to marriage was a symptom of their presence.

  The prison camp had become a familiar world to me. I had hardened myself to survive in it, and now I was separated from it, burdened with experiences that I could not describe, cursed with the gifts of deviousness, prevarication and impassivity that had been so essential during my captivity, and expected to resume a normal life.

  One of the principal difficulties of the ex-prisoner-of-war is finding the strength to resist the force of circumstance, to say ‘no’ to unwanted suggestions and commands. I think that I had particular difficulty finding the will to dig in my heels, though I also had deep reserves of stubborn energy. But being swept along by events, especially in those first months of freedom, demanded less of my depleted powers. And combined with this negative force was the positive desire to settle, to find an emotional sanctuary as caring as Changi had been of my other injuries in 1944.

  Prisoners-of-war don’t find it easy to settle. Today, fifty years after the end of the war, I know a man of about my age, who was also a prisoner in the Far East, and who leaves his house each morning and goes walking, walking, walking until it is dark. He cannot sit and relax. He has become a well-known figure in the town where he lives. For years he controlled this agitation with drink, which kept him close to the pub and a kind of peace, but his alcoholism began to destroy him and he sobered up. Work was always difficult for him, but it too provided a kind of anchor. Now that the alcoholic foundation has been taken away and he has retired, he drifts like a boat, always moving on his own secret current. It’s as though the restlessness which he has been suppressing all his life since his return from the Far East now has nothing to keep it in check, and it has taken him over.

  My experiences had put a huge distance between me and my previous life, yet I behaved – was expected to behave – as though I were the same person. In the legal and civil senses I suppose I was, but that was about all. Here was Eric Lomax playing the part of the newly-wed, pretending he was what he had been in 1941, before he left for the East, when his innocence and much of his emotional life had not been ripped out of him. That young man’s life had been mapped out by his obsession with trains an
d other relics of the industrial age, which were more alluring to him than the history recorded by conventional scholars. The cry of a locomotive had been like an invitation to get away from himself, but the obligation undertaken by that now vanished young man held me in its honourable grip. I had grown up appallingly in the years I had been away. I was much harder, less able to enjoy other people’s pleasures easily and certainly less able to sympathize with their smaller misfortunes. Yet I stepped back confusedly into the tide and it carried me away, as it did so many other young men in that winter of 1945.

  We were married in the Chapel, of course, and I was as passive about being drawn back into it as I was about everything else. J. Sidlow Baxter was still in command, still denouncing sin and evil with his evangelical bookkeeper’s fervour, and he was glad to enter me again on the credit side of his flock. The wedding ring I had commissioned in India turned out to be too small for my bride’s finger.

  We were happy, at first, as excited as any young lovers can be, but we did not know each other well enough to have signed away our lives together. She was pretty, articulate and gifted with a fine singing voice, but her culture was limited by the nature of her upbringing. Her only world had been that of the Chapel and her parents’ friends. She had stood still in the quiet, determined way that people who are sure of themselves, and who have never been exposed to influences from outside their circle, can sometimes do for their entire lives.