The Railway Man

  Meanwhile, my wife and I suffered the loss of our son Eric, who died a day after he was born in Takoradi. It was terrible for her, and it led to a deepening of our unspoken estrangement.

  I stayed in my post for six years. For the last year I was on the west side of the Gold Coast as Assistant Government Agent in Sekondi, acting more like a traditional, old-fashioned district commissioner. I had my own district, the most important in the whole country at the time because it contained Takoradi, the principal deep sea port. I was a little governor; I was magistrate, deputy coroner, chairman of the board of visitors of the gaol (which looked exactly like a small version of Outram Road) but for all that I did not have the vice-regal powers of an old DC, who ruled his district with absolute power. I was one of the last of the British colonial officers, and we knew we were on the way out. Decolonization was an agreed strategy, so I simply improvised my various roles as best I could. As magistrate I had to assume that everyone’s evidence was unreliable, from both claimants and defendants, and sort things out on the basis of common sense. In child custody cases, for instance, I would let the children decide who they wanted to be with.

  Kwame Nkrumah was the man of the hour, at that time the most celebrated nationalist in Africa apart from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. We had accepted his accession to power as inevitable, his popularity in the country invincible. I met him when he came to Sekondi. My superior, who was responsible for the whole of the western side of the country gave a dinner for him, and I was invited. I found him amiable and articulate, but out of his depth; I felt he had no training for the immense responsibilities he was about to take on, like many demagogic MPs in Britain and elsewhere. On another occasion he expressed a desire to go swimming, so I lent him my trunks. This is perhaps the closest I have come to the seat of power!

  * * *

  We came home, finally, in 1955, with work on the harbour and the dam well under way, the grant of Ghanaian independence only two years off. I took early retirement – I was thirty-six years old – and cast around for something else to do. Since this is not an account of my career, I will record briefly that I went on a personnel management course in Glasgow for a year, my interest in what these days would be called ‘human resources’ aroused by my experience of marshalling men and materials in West Africa, and then worked for the Scottish Gas Board, with their industrial relations branch. I became interested in the teaching of better industrial relations, and at the end of the Sixties I became an academic, lecturing at the University of Strathclyde and all over the country on personnel management.

  I had to behave all the time as if the past had not occurred. I did not think that I was any different from anyone else, despite my terrible nightmares, which I refused to acknowledge as a problem. I wanted to believe that it had all been buried, yet Outram Road kept coming back, night after night. Silence, disease, hunger, fear, above all the intensity of the uncertainty and fear. It was almost always that terrifying scenario of being inside the gaol again after the war, and since there was no reason for my imprisonment, this time there could be no reason for getting out. My wife did her best to reassure me, but the distance between us was hard to bridge. I would cry out at night, wake up sweating as though I had run up a hill with a heavy load and shake with relief when I found myself in the damp heat of Sekondi or the cold Edinburgh night.

  Curiously I recognized the symptoms in others, especially in one man in the Gold Coast who had been in Germany as a POW, and was now nervous, defensive, in bad health. But nobody ever spoke about it and I never brought it up. The only way in which ‘my war’ came up would be around the subject of the Japanese, when I could and would say that I hated them with absolute totality.

  It isn’t easy to describe the more subtle ways in which Kanburi and its aftermath lived on inside me. I found it difficult to tolerate grey areas in my life, to accept ambiguity or uncertainty of any kind, and I could not easily forgive the mistakes of others, what is euphemistically called not suffering fools gladly. Trifles bothered me, or perhaps it is truer to say I could not be bothered with them, and I would find ways of procrastinating over the small irritations with which life bombards us. For example, while my professional work was extremely organized and I brought real energy and dedication to it – I could organize my thoughts and speak without notes with military precision – I found bills, circulars and, especially, demands for personal information more or less unbearable. They were contingencies, distractions, irruptions of uncertainty into a life that craved regularity. It was better to concentrate on one thing at a time. I would often ignore bills with mistakes, unable to face the confrontations and idiotic bureaucratic obstruction I knew I would have to go through to sort them out.

  I was often inward-looking, a victim of a strange passivity that made me absorb experiences like blotting-paper but which made it difficult for me to give; it made me appear slow, yet I was anything but lazy. I felt sometimes like a guest in my own house. When confrontation came, I would resist with immense stubborn energy, revenging myself on the Kempeitai and the guards in every encounter. Although I could not have admitted it, I was still fighting the war in all those years of peace.

  I began to worry, a little later, that the sins my captors had sown in me were being harvested in my family in more ways than one. Among Far Eastern ex-prisoners-of-war there is a rumbling of belief that our children are damaged, in some way genetically harmed. It seems to us, when we get together now as older men, that we have bequeathed some strange problems to our children. It is interesting that some American scientists suggest that the notorious ‘middle passage’ of the slave trade may have caused intolerable genetic stresses which damaged the immediate descendants of slaves. I don’t know whether it is good science, but we murmur these things among ourselves, caught between rumour and doubt. Who knows, too, what effects our suppressed feelings may have had on the psychic development of our children?

  My elder daughter Linda fell ill, struck by a brain haemorrhage at the age of twelve; to begin with a doctor thought that it was simply a fainting fit, but she did not recover consciousness. She lost the power of her right arm and hand; mercifully, she was left-handed. She had been a promising pianist, with real talent at the age of ten; and now she would never do anything two-handed again in her life.

  Linda then had a whole sequence of attacks, nearly dying on several occasions, and she had to live the rest of her life aware of these little bombs always threatening to go off in her head. She achieved her aim of working in a big insurance company, investigating suspicious claims and worked diligently on these cases. Her good humour, so terribly shadowed, could make her friends forget her condition; but she could not escape her congenital weakness. She died at the age of forty-six.

  My second daughter was born in 1957. She enjoyed a normal and healthy childhood and became a successful nurse and mid-wife.

  My frequent absences on the lecture circuit were a contributory factor, no doubt, to the breakdown of my marriage, but they were also a symptom of its failure. I wanted to get away. In 1970 I moved out for six months, later drifting back, but it was never the same again. In 1981 I left for good.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WORK AND THE strong pull of the currents that run through everyday life – no matter how threatening they can seem to someone whose memories are bad – give the illusion of sweeping us away from the past. Like many men who went through Japanese prisons, I found I could allow my professional life to crowd out my desire to settle those old accounts.

  Although I relived the past more often than I wished and had, again like many of my wartime comrades, accumulated a library of books about the campaigns in Malaya, the Burma-Siam Railway and the camps, I still felt a certain reluctance to confront that past directly. In the 1970s, my friend Alex Morton Mackay – by then living in Canada – found my address through an ex-POW organization and wrote me an affecting letter in which he described how I had been an example and an inspiration to him, with my arms in splints and m
y specs taped together; but if I recognized myself in his description, I knew it was not the whole story. No one is a hero to themselves. I found it difficult to reply to Mac, but we did eventually correspond and one day, after a service of remembrance for those who had died in the Far Eastern war, we finally met again. Fred Smith joined us for lunch in London. It was my only reunion with these two men who had meant so much to me.

  But that past was not easily denied. The need to know more about what had happened to us in Siam was not some idle curiosity, and it asserted itself powerfully whenever I had time to think. After my retirement in 1982, I could put off no longer the need to know, the desire became more intense than ever. I wanted to find out what had really happened; why the Japanese had made the search of our hut on that particular day, and if somebody had tipped them off. I wished to establish the exact sequence of events. I also wanted to find out more about the Japanese responsible for the beatings and murders, apart from those already brought to justice, and above all more about the Kempei personnel who had tortured me at Kanburi. I knew nothing about their units, their names or their fate after the war. The prospects of finding the right men, of finding them alive, even of making a start were so remote; but as the events receded the obsession grew. It was like trying to reconstruct a coherent story from evidence reduced to tattered rags, faded documents, bones and rusty rails. And memories, which are even less durable.

  Perhaps I was trying to recover something of what I had been before being sent to war and put to work on an insane railway. I also admit that I wanted to make them pay, pay more than they had already done. The more I thought about it, and thought about it, the more I wished to do damage to the Kempei men if I could ever find them. Physical revenge seemed the only adequate recompense for the anger I carried. I thought often about the young interpreter at Kanburi. There was no single dominant figure at Outram Road on whom I could focus my general hatred, but because of his command of my language, the interpreter was the link; he was centre-stage in my memories; he was my private obsession. His slurred and struggling English; his endless questions; his repetitiveness; the way he gave voice to the big torturing NCO: he represented all of them; he stood in for all the worst horrors.

  By the time I had hardened my desire to search out the truth, I had already met Patti. I was still lecturing to audiences about industrial relations around Britain, and one day in 1980 I found myself standing on the platform at Crewe Station, that great and historic railway junction in the centre of England. I should not have been there at all. I had gone to Chester to view a book auction – the old collecting urge was still as strong as ever – and went to the station to take the train back to Manchester, then on to Edinburgh, only to find that the train was cancelled. I am still grateful for that blockage on the line, whatever it was. Instead I took a train to Crewe, where I knew I could meet a train going up the west coast to Scotland. I had not spent a lifetime learning about railways for nothing.

  At Crewe I was just in time and as the Glasgow train pulled in at the platform I ran for it and climbed aboard. I had a first-class ticket, so I entered an old-fashioned carriage with a corridor and separate compartments. The third compartment was occupied by a pleasant, good-looking woman sitting alone and that was the compartment I chose. I was suddenly aware that I had let myself become a bit shabby, with my old prisoner’s teeth and good but wellworn clothes, even though I looked younger than my sixty-one years. She made me feel awkward, this slim, handsome, dark-haired person who looked at least fifteen years younger than me, a glamorous and confident woman from a different world. Her face, however, had so much trusting kindness in it that I forgot about age and fashion.

  She was consulting a little book. The Observer’s Tourist Atlas of Great Britain, which she balanced on her knee as she traced her journey up the west coast. She was English, and had worked here as a nurse, but had lived in Canada for many years, and this was a journey of rediscovery for her. I was pleased to learn that she had run an antiquarian bookshop in Montreal. She was on her way to visit a friend in Glasgow. I was soon discoursing about the history of the towns we were passing through, hoping that I was not boring her. But there was a kind of instant rapport between us that made me go on.

  Two men got in. I refused to move my raincoat off the seat, coldly and stubbornly. The captive’s ability to obstruct could be very useful; I did not want an audience for what I now realized was a very important conversation. Three hours later the train drew into Carstairs and I screwed my courage up and asked her if she would have lunch with me the next day in Glasgow. She said yes.

  It emerged quickly that we were both living rootless and not altogether happy lives; her marriage was as reduced as mine. We saw a lot of each other, and spent some good time together in Somerset, where she was staying during her British holiday. And then she went back to Canada. There were many letters and long-distance calls after her return. At an age when changes of emotional direction seemed impossible, and when I was already brooding on my vengeful quest, I had fallen in love. And then we were together: she came to live with me in Edinburgh. I was now part of a second extended family, Patti’s sons Graeme, his wife Jeanne, Nicholas and Mark welcomed me. They gave me hope for the future. Quick thinking about the movement of trains can have strange outcomes, though it failed to surprise me that my meeting with the woman who would play so great a part in changing my life should take place on a railway.

  I did not tell Patti all at once about Malaya and Siam during the war, but it came out slowly. She was discovering for herself that she was living with someone with unusual problems, but meanwhile I carried on with my quest. In January 1985, I published an article in the London ‘FEPOW Forum’, a news-letter for ex-prisoners-of-war, appealing ‘before it is too late’ for information about the events at Kanburi in 1943. I asked for eyewitness accounts, for information about the ‘American’ interpreter and the Dutch doctor. As for the seven officers, I looked around and they were all dead, Mac having died a few years before, and ‘Daddy’ Smith, the frailest of all of them, living until the age of ninety before passing away in 1984. And I could tell that Fred was dying: ‘My chest has been very bad lately and the cough is getting worse’, he wrote to me that year; in the same letter he admitted something which he had always been able to keep concealed: ‘My nerves were cracking during the nights, always at night-time.’ Fred’s heart – that indestructible rock of support – gave out five years ago.

  About twenty letters, almost all of them kind and considerate, came back after the article was published. One of them came from T. C. Brown, who had been a sergeant in the Royal Norfolk Regiment:

  Your article in Forum brings back horrific memories of that night … I remember you all lined up in front of the Guard Room and the night of the bashing the Kempei came rushing to our hut and pulled up the bamboo bridge over the drain to our hut, we thought we were in for a bashing but of course you were the victims, what a night, the cries of mercy was terrible and there we lay not being able to do anything but pray for you, it was dark so we could not see what was going on … The following day two of you were missing off the ‘parade’ outside the Guard Room if I remember right it was the tall slim officer and a small officer in your party … After the Japs surrender a Cpl Johnson of the Foresters told me that he knew the two missing officers were buried behind Guard Room, apparently he was on fatigues over the Jap Quarters and found an Officers Cap there soaked in blood … Never will I forget the mess you people were in after the bashings, I was NCO i/c Sanitation and saw quite a bit of you on your journey under escort to the latrines.

  There were many letters like this, which touched me but gave me no information of the kind I was seeking.

  Then a letter came from Henry Cecil Babb of Oxford, a former regular army chaplain who was now almost eighty years old. He had served in Malaya since December 1940 and been captured, like the rest of us, at the end of that disastrous campaign. He arrived at the main POW camp at Kanburi in August 1945 just as
the war was coming to an end, and he was told by some junior officers that about two years earlier, two unidentified POWs, who had been involved in the operation of a radio in the railway workshops camp nearby, had been killed and their bodies dumped in a latrine near the guardroom. The officers had asked him if, despite the passage of time, he would conduct a formal service. Babb agreed, and read the prayers for The Burial of the Dead, the first time he had ever done so without knowing the names of the deceased. ‘For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.’ It was good to think of poor Hawley and Armitage, the ladies’ man and the scholar, being commemorated in that squalid place where no-one seems to have remembered them.

  I wrote to Babb and told him the names of the men he had prayed for, and when he replied he told me that after the war he had not returned to England immediately, but had volunteered to take part in an official War Graves Commission party which was setting out to travel the entire length of the railway, all 258 miles of it, in a search for rough cemeteries and for the bodies of missing men. The group had been organized by the Allied administration in Bangkok and consisted of sixteen British and Australian troops, together with a young Japanese interpreter. The expedition left Bangkok on 22nd September and went as far as Thanbyuzayat in Burma, travelling on open wagons fitted up with attap roofs, and returned on 10th October 1945 after locating 144 cemeteries – mostly trackside graves in the jungle – and over 10,000 bodies. Babb recalled conducting another burial service, for the entire crew of a USAAF B29 bomber which had been shot down just before the end of the war in the mountains on the Burmese side of the frontier.

  Babb had lost touch with all the members of the search party, but he told me that the interpreter had recently sought him out and that he might be able to help me in my search for information. Would I, he asked, be willing to let him make enquiries on my behalf? I asked specifically for information about the identity of the men who had beaten me so meticulously and of the hateful ‘American’ interpreter who had supervised the beatings; I was trying to tie down the history of the murders first, and I confined the questions which I passed to Babb to that night in the main Kanburi camp. I hardly expected to receive any news from so unlikely a quarter and was glad that Babb was acting as an intermediary. Direct correspondence with a former Japanese soldier would have been impossible for me.