The Railway Man

  It all seemed admirable, but I read about these things with a surprising sense of detachment. I had expected to feel some more powerful emotion, but apart from the eerie feeling of being present at my own torture as an onlooker I felt empty. And I wondered at his feeling that he had been forgiven. God may have forgiven him, but I had not; mere human forgiveness is another matter.

  I put the book aside. After a few days, Patti picked it up and read it slowly one afternoon. The passages which I’ve quoted on Nagase’s trip to the War Cemetery at Kanburi filled her with anger, much more than I had felt. She wanted to know how Nagase could feel pardoned. How could his sense of guilt simply ‘vanish’ if no-one, and me in particular, had pardoned him?

  Patti’s sense of indignation was such that she wanted to write to Nagase immediately and asked my permission to do so. She drafted a letter which was sent in late October 1991, enclosing a photograph of me. Now there could be no thought of a sudden confrontation between him and me.

  Dear Mr Nagase

  I have just finished reading your book Crosses and Tigers. This is of particular interest to me because my husband is the Royal Signals Officer who had been arrested, along with six others, in connection with the operation of a radio in the railway workshop camp near Kanchanaburi in August 1943. My husband also had with him a map of the railway. He is the man you describe on page 22 of your book, being tortured so terribly.

  His mother did die at home in Edinburgh, one month after the fall of Singapore. A relative has told me that she died of a broken heart …

  My husband already knew who you were, having recognized you from the article which appeared in the Japan Times of 15th August 1989.

  He is most interested in having contact with you for he has lived with many unanswered questions all these years, questions to which perhaps only you can help him to find the answers. Maybe you also have questions about the Kanchanaburi Radio Affair? … If you are willing, perhaps you would agree to correspond with my husband?

  My husband has lived all these years with the after effects of the cruel experiences he suffered and I hope that contact between you could be a healing experience for both of you. How can you feel ‘forgiven’ Mr Nagase, if this particular former Far Eastern prisoner-of-war has not yet forgiven you? My husband does understand the cultural pressures you were under during the war but whether he can totally forgive your own involvement remains to be seen and it is not for me, who was not there, to judge …

  Yours sincerely

  Mrs Patricia M. Lomax

  * * *

  On 6th November when Patti went downstairs to collect the mail which was lying on the floor just inside the front door she saw an express airmail letter from Japan. It was addressed to her but she brought it to me unopened. I sat in my pyjamas on the edge of our bed and opened the tissue-thin envelope.

  Dear Mrs Patricia M Lomax

  I am now quite at a loss after reading your unexpected letter. And I am thinking that it is very natural indeed for me to expect such this letter. The words you wrote to me ‘If this particular former Far Eastern Prisoner of War has not yet forgiven you’ has beaten me down wholely, reminding me of my dirty old days. I think having received such a letter from you is my destiny. Please give me some time to think it over and over again.

  But please tell your husband that if I am a bit useful for him to answer any questions that he has had in his mind, I am willing to answer them.

  Anyhow, I am beginning to think that I should see him again. Looking at the picture, he looks healthy and tender gentleman, though I am not able to see the inside of his mind. Please tell him to live long until I can see him.

  Most sincerely yours

  Nagase Takashi

  p.s. Please let me know your Telepone number.

  p.s. 2 Excuse that my mind has confused after reading your letter and I could only write what you read here. I will try to find out the way I can meet him if he agrees to see me.

  And thank you very much for your taking care of him until today for a long time.

  The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.

  Patti thought this was an extraordinarily beautiful letter. Anger drained away; in its place came a welling of compassion for both Nagase and for me, coupled with a deep sense of sadness and regret. In that moment I lost whatever hard armour I had wrapped around me and began to think the unthinkable: that I could meet Nagase face to face in simple good will. Forgiveness became more than an abstract idea: it was now a real possibility.

  As the days went by it seemed that Nagase’s sincerity might be utterly genuine. I began to appreciate more fully how damaged he must be by what he had done, however unwillingly; an interrogator suffering in retrospect with his victims. Nor was his concern to make reparation some occasional thing; it was truly almost a way of life; I learned later that he had been back sixty-odd times to Thailand since 1963. He had also become a devout Buddhist, and his creation of a temple at the bridge was obviously a tremendous achievement for him.

  He must have had a terrible fright when he received Patti’s letter, a letter from beyond the grave. Patti replied later that week, and I took another step towards him. She enclosed a personal letter from me. Patti’s letter was splendid and from the heart, setting out briefly what had happened to me since the war. My letter was brief, cool and formal; it was the best I could manage. My letters are always somewhat formal nowadays.

  I asked him at first for information: were the searches made specifically to look for radio sets? What made the Japanese Army suspect that there were sets in the camps? And who gave the orders? I was still determined to establish an indelible historical record of what had happened.

  Nagase’s reply supplied little new information, for he had been briefly in Saigon at the end of October 1943 and by the time of his return we were already in ‘the monkey houses’, as he described those cages in the Kempei’s back yard. He thought that they had not been tipped off, but that they were looking for radios, and that they were apprehensive that we were communicating with Thais outside the camp (their great fear was that there were so few of them to hold so many of us in subjection). He thought, finally, that Captain Komai, who was hanged after the war, gave the orders for the beating. He added: ‘I know his son lives in the north of Japan, having dishonour.’ He closed by saying that he wanted to meet me partly so that our meeting would explain ‘the stupidity’ to the world, especially to those Japanese ‘who still want to have aggression toward foreign lands’.

  It took us a year to arrange our meeting. Neither Patti nor I are wealthy, and we are both retired, and it is difficult to afford expensive air travel to South East Asia. (My arms and hips are in such a state that the cramped conditions of economy-class seats make long flights impossible.) We hoped that we might be able to obtain funding from the Sasakawa Foundation, which encourages understanding between Britain and Japan, but delayed doing so because there was still a possibility of the documentary film being made, and though I was now more sensitive to the danger of turning myself into an entertainment and wanted to meet Nagase independently of whatever our television friends wanted, I insisted that the film should be made for the Medical Foundation, which would play a large part in the documentary.

  Nagase and I wrote to each other, but it is difficult to carry on a sustained correspondence with someone you have only recently stopped hating enough to kill, and sometimes all the old resistances welled up. I was frank with him, telling him that I found it difficult to write to him, and he was kind and understanding, always replying promptly to my letters. We wanted to meet in Thailand and afterwards he wanted me to come with him to Japan at the time of cherry blossoms in Kurashiki, which he assured me were very beautiful.

  In the end, believing that Nagase and I could not wait much longer and that the world of film would wear us down, I went to the Sasakawa Foundation and they agreed to help to finance our trip. They also felt that the proposed documentary would have some effect in promo
ting their aims of reconciliation and understanding, and agreed to loan money for that too. I agreed, as long as the Medical Foundation could own the film when the costs were recovered. With these organizational contingencies at last out of the way, I was ready to face my old enemy eagerly and in good heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BANGKOK WAS NOT the city I remembered. After the nine-hour flight in refrigerated comfort the heat closed around us as soon as Patti and I emerged from the plane.

  Escaping the heat was easy; this time I was an honoured guest, and they had sent an air-conditioned Rolls. Bangkok’s skyline was now all semi-skyscrapers and glass buildings. I remembered a deathly emptiness in the streets and our prison truck making a great deal of noise; now there were six-lane freeways with an endless honking column of cars and lorries. It reminded me of TV pictures of Los Angeles. Everything seemed so hot and slow despite the busy rush of vehicles. It took us no less than three hours to reach our hotel from the airport.

  Two days later, feeling tense and irritable as the moment came closer, we set off for Kanburi. Bangkok Noi Station is on the west side of the city, another once-great cavern from the steam age which, in its time of glory, linked Bangkok to Singapore. Those days ended in 1927, with the opening of a new bridge across the Menam River, and the station became a backwater – an appropriately stagnant place from which to send trains to the Burma-Siam Railway. The trains still run from here to Kanburi and beyond it to Nam Tok, but there the line peters out less than a third of the way to its original terminus in Burma, and Bangkok Noi has become a little more neglected. But a thriving market stretches alongside the station, women traders selling everything from fruit to pieces of vivid coloured cloth, and has expanded on to the old carriage sidings and the tracks themselves, where we browsed along the stalls. The last time I had walked through a railway station in Siam it was with a rope around my middle, my arms in splints and the possibility of a death sentence ahead.

  The train to Kanburi, a big diesel locomotive pulling seven coaches in blue-and-white livery, runs through flat, fertile land crossed by irrigation ditches and green with rice, fruit and palm trees. I looked at the countryside intently, but it gave back little enough to help prepare me for what I was doing; I was remembering the past while hoping for a different future in the years that remained, and it was not easy to reconcile the two.

  At Nong Pladuk, the train passes through a little station with one platform, very neat, tidy and bright: boxes full of red and yellow flowers and small shrubs in wooden barrels give it the look of a model station, a toy. There is no trace of the camp to the north of the line, behind the platform, where the first POWs from Singapore set up the first camp for the construction of the railway. But on the south side of the line, in sidings tattered with dry grass and weeds, there are rows of covered goods vans like those used for moving POWs up the line. Some of them have almost certainly survived and stand there in the heat with their doors open, as they used to when they were underway packed with thirty prisoners and their baggage.

  Above the sidings there is an old-fashioned wooden water-tower on stilts. This is the original built by the Japanese Army for watering the engines, mainly those imposing C56s; here is where they were gathered, fuelled and repaired. I saw one of the first big fleets of them on my way to Bangkok for our trial.

  To the west of Nong Pladuk near Ban Pong the single track divides in two; the line on the left is the old main line to the south, which ends at Singapore; the line to the right is the proper beginning of the Burma-Siam Railway. It looks peaceful today, a clean and well-kept track swinging off towards the wild uplands of Kanchanaburi Province and Three Pagodas Pass, the border with Burma. Just before the two tracks diverged I looked hard at the ground beside the railway on the north side. The railway stores and the temporary workshop camp were just beside the line. Thew made the first radio there, and brought back his stolen Buddha to our hut. There isn’t a trace of the camp now; pleasant houses, gardens and a large school seem to occupy the same ground.

  From Ban Pong to Kanburi for thirty miles the line runs through villages and more flat rich land, even a few factories with their own sidings: a use has been found for this section of the railway, at least. As the mountains rose up wooded and indistinct in the haze, we reached Kanburi. The big railway workshops have disappeared like everything else, and I stared at the nearly empty sidings as though I could make some evidence appear, but I saw none.

  Out in front of the station, on a deserted piece of track, stood a magnificent old locomotive. It was a Garratt, an engine legendary for its mighty hauling power in the last decades of steam, a giant handsome workhorse with two sets of eight-coupled wheels; why it had been placed here I couldn’t imagine, but it had the aura of a great piece of human effort and it awakened all the old passion in me. The big Garratt’s iron strength looked fragile against the green of the trees and plants around it in this hot, damp weather, the sheer power of the forest which had so appalled Nagase when he was searching for graves in 1945. There is some fatal sadness about these machines in the tropics: they embody so much failure and tragedy, and decaying beauty.

  A short run beyond Kanburi brought us to the platform at the River Kwae Bridge; the train was longer than the platform, so we got down on to the track itself and walked beside it, next to the dried and oil-stained timber of the sleepers. The heat was ferocious and the smell of diesel rose up from the track. We came to a broad area in front of an open level-crossing which leads on to the bridge. The engine, its siren blasting, growled across the bridge, the seven coaches slowly moving through the girders of the eleven spans set on their concrete piers, and then the train disappeared westwards towards the mountains. Silence rose up, and was gradually drowned by the noise of lorries and motorcycles resuming their journeys as the level-crossing opened again. The bridge piers in the brown muddy water were cracked and pitted by the fragments of bombs dropped in 1944, when the US Army Air Force damaged the bridge. They looked as though they had not been touched for fifty years.

  We booked into a hotel across the river from the town, and had lunch in the River Kwae Restaurant, where we met Tida Loha, its remarkable proprietor. She had had the generosity and imagination to give Nagase a plot of land next to the bridge so that he could build his temple of peace, and she is an astute and diplomatic woman. She has met many ex-POWs and Japanese ex-servicemen over the years, and knows a great deal about the fierce hatreds that were played out between strangers in her town during the war.

  Time was now running out. Nagase and I had arranged to meet in the morning, on the opposite side of the bridge near the little museum devoted to the railway, and I could not bear to alter the arrangement even a little, so that when he and his wife arrived at his hotel at six in the evening instead of at midnight, as planned, there was a kind of panic. Ian Kerr, an associate of the Medical Foundation who had come to the meeting in case there was a crisis, saved me from having to stay in my own room, a prisoner once again in Kanburi, by taking Patti and me out for dinner, to a floating restaurant where I played with a friendly cat and tried to forget about the next day. It was late when we went to bed.

  In the morning we crossed to the other side of the river and walked up the steps to a broad veranda overlooking the bridge. I sat down to watch and wait. I was dressed rather formally in a shirt and slacks, and wore a Sutherland tartan tie – surely the only tie for miles around. The sun was climbing and the air was oppressively hot, though it was not yet nine in the morning.

  From about a hundred yards away I saw him walk out on to the bridge; he could not see me. It was important for me to have this last momentary advantage over him; it prepared me, even now that I no longer wanted to hurt him. I walked about a hundred yards to an open square, a kind of courtyard overlooking the river, where we had arranged to meet.

  A huge smiling figure of Buddha dominated the courtyard and as I sat down I realized that there was another benign presence throwing a shadow on to the wide expanse of terr
ace: a carefully preserved locomotive, a veteran of the Royal Siamese Railway, built in Glasgow, I noticed, in the year of my birth. This exquisite relic could have come from a brightly-lit dream, with me sitting on an empty square, a silent steam engine close at hand, waiting for something to happen.

  He came on to the terrace, walking past the engine. I had forgotten how small he was, a tiny man in an elegant straw hat, loose kimono-like jacket and trousers. From a distance he resembled an oriental carving, some benign wizened demon come to life. He carried a shapeless blue cotton shoulder bag. As he came closer I could see that he wore around his throat beads of dark red stone on a thick string. I remembered him saying to me again and again ‘Lomax, you will tell us’, other phrases he had recited in the voice I hated so much …

  He began a formal bow, his face working and agitated, the small figure barely reaching my shoulder. I stepped forward, took his hand and said ‘Ohayo gozaimasu, Nagase san, ogenki desu ka?’ ‘Good morning, Mr Nagase, how are you?’

  He looked up at me; he was trembling, in tears, saying over and over ‘I am very, very sorry …’ I somehow took command, led him out of the terrible heat to a bench in the shade; I was comforting him, for he was really overcome. At that moment my capacity for reserve and self-control helped me to help him, murmuring reassurances as we sat down. It was as though I was protecting him from the force of the emotions shaking his frail-seeming body. I think I said something like ‘That’s very kind of you to say so’ to his repeated expressions of sorrow.

  He said to me ‘Fifty years is a long time, but for me it is a time of suffering. I never forgot you, I remember your face, especially your eyes.’ He looked deep into my eyes when he said this. His own face still looked like the one I remembered, rather fine-featured, with dark and slightly hidden eyes; his wide mouth was still noticeable beneath cheeks that had sunken inwards.

  I told him that I could remember his very last words to me. He asked what they were and laughed when I said ‘Keep your chin up.’