The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (24 page)

I don't mean to be unkind to my father. He was in his sixties then, and retired firom the Post Office, and he told me later that his firiend 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 firom 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 firom 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 fi"om the British Army after the war consisted of a brief medical examination at an army centre in Edinburgh in November 1945.1 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 fireedom, 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 and 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 conunissioned 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.

It cannot have been easy for her; she really had no idea of what she was taking on. One of the first things she found herself doing was rubbing special cream into my infected skin. Ringworm and eczema were among my contributions to the honeymoon. I can see how hard it was, despite our later estrangement. I was broken down; her own romantic ideas were rubbed up against the reality of this nervous, pale and debilitated young man. She was as much a victim of the war as me.

One of the first unbridgeable distances between us was created simply by our inability to talk. I have spent most of my life unable to talk about my experiences in South-East Asia, but I am pretty sure that in those early years of intimacy with my wife I wanted to try to tell her, to explain to her what it had been like. It was hard for her to be interested. I was expected to behave as though my formative years had not happened. My fumbling attempts to begin a description of the effects of what my comrades and I had experienced in Kanburi, or to talk about the Japanese who had done these things to us, were brushed aside. She naturally felt that she had had a hard time of it too: for civilians there had been the difficulty of getting eggs, the air raid warnings, the waiting in lines. She simply did not know, and I am sure that tens of thousands of returning soldiers walked bewildered into the same incomprehension. It was as though we were now speaking a different language to our own people. The hurt I felt silenced me as effectively as a gag. It was hard to talk, but my wife made it easy not to.

The nightmares began soon after my return. They were usually about Outram Road. I would be left in a cell on my own, with no food or water, starving and suffocating and crying out for release, and in the dream's compression of time months would pass while I was ignored, and I knew I was never going to be released. Or I would be doing something perfectly innocent and would suddenly find myself back in Outram Road, the victim of some arbitrary justice, this time with no prospect of ever getting out again because there was no reason for me to be there. At other times I would fall endlessly and painfully down the iron staircase covered in disgusting sores. They were all the same dream.

In the cold light of day my anger was more often turned to the Japanese who had beaten, interrogated or tortured me. I wanted to do violence to them, thinking quite specifically of how I would like to revenge myself on the goon squad from Kanburi and the hateftil little interrogator from the Kempeitai with his dreadfiil English pronunciation, his mechanical questions and his way of being in the room yet seeming to be detached from it. I wished to drown him, cage him and beat him, to see how he liked it. I still thought of his voice, his slurred elocution: 'Lomax, you will be killed shortly'; 'Lomax, you will tell us'; you remember phrases from encounters that have hurt you, and my meetings with him were cast in a harsh light.

The Kanburi Radio Affair was already a footnote to the history of the war. Lance Thew had been awarded the British Empire Medal and the rest of us - living and dead - were 'mentioned in despatches'. Then one morning I read a small paragraph in the Daily Telegraph stating that Captain Komai Mitsuo and Sergeant-Major lijima Nobuo had been hanged the day before at Changi Gaol for their part in the murder of two British POWs, Lieutenant Armitage and Captain Hawley. Other people had suffered more than we had - the horrors of the European camps and the scale of the massacre of the Jews were beginning to sink into the minds of an unbelieving population - but that did not entirely explain the relegation of our experience to the bottom of the page. The British public was not very interested in the Far Eastern war crimes trials, in general, and official policy was to downplay them for the sake of reconstructing Japan as an ally of the West. The Kanburi trial was a very minor tribunal.

But it was not minor and not a foomote, of course, to anyone concerned with the crimes which it judged. I knew that my statements had helped to hang these men, and I felt a cold twinge of satisfaction. The trial seemed infinitely fairer than any judgment they had ever made on us. I regretted that there were not more of them going to the gallows; I felt that thousands of them were guilty. There was unfinished business between me and the Japanese people as a whole, and a few of them in particular. The administrators of Outram Road and the men who coldly worked so many to death on the railway were more guilty than the drunken sergeants who beat us at Kanburi. But most war crimes trials were about cases of actual murder, so I felt satisfied, as far as this one went. Hawley and Armitage were revenged. I was not sure that I had been.

No trace of my interrogator or his brutal superior the Kempei NCO, who had irritated me so personally, was ever reported. I had never even made a statement about them, though I remembered them more than the killers of Hawley and Armitage who to me were simply a faceless bunch of club-swinging thugs; I remembered the faces of the Kempei men almost every day.

The army was my other safe haven. I signed on for another two years afl:er my return, deferring my life for a while; I was not in a good state to make important decisions. So I applied for and got the post of Signals Officer at the Edinburgh University Senior Training Corps, which would allow me to live at home and continue working in as peaceful a military environment as possible. I spent the next two and a half years teaching undergraduate officer cadets how to operate radio and line communications.

This organization for turning students into officers was an important and active part of the University - Britain still maintained powerful armed forces, the Cold War was beginning and storm clouds were already gathering over Malaya again, as the communist insurgency gathered strength. Most training corps had a full-time army commander as well as a few warrant officers, but I was one of the few signals staff officers in any university. After volunteering for so many things that had caused me so much grief, I felt I deserved this less arduous posting.

It was a genuine respite for me. I lectured the cadets about radio telegraphy, and took them away into the Highlands to teach them how to turn theory into practice when hills intervened between receiver and transmitter, and how to communicate in fog and rainstorms. I put them through it, organizing programmes that gave everybody a chance to discover the joys of cable-laying, switchboard work and despatch-riding. Most of the work revolved around radios now, much more sophisticated versions of the sets with which I had started the war. I could barely recognize them at first, and had to teach myself how to use them from the manuals. No more Line Assisted Wireless for me; and I hoped that these boys would never find themselves stuck in a place like Kuantan as blind and deaf as we had been. Occasionally I took them for a fortnight to Catterick, tlie Royal Signals headquarters camp, to show them some real army life.

Not being able to share memories was, as I've said, a common affliction among those who returned from the war and I could not talk about what had happened to me with a soul. The single and partial exception was anyone who had been through similar experiences; but in the crush of everyday life there were few encounters with ex-POWs. I became close to one former POW, however, and we could talk to each other, guardedly and euphemistically. I saw in him some of the same traits that I had developed, his capacity for enthusiasm and joy replaced by surface coldness and docility. When I applied for an appointment in the Colonial Administrative Service, he did too. I felt he was drifting, as I was in a different way, and I had become briefly part of the tide that was pulling him along. He was following me passively instead of determining his own fate.

I wanted to enter the Colonial Service because I needed to move, and because it offered variety and excitement, and an expansive alternative to the stultifying routines of office life, which I now dreaded. The Service needed people who were self-reliant, who were good administrators and were willing to learn about different things, and of course it would allow me to see more of the world. I had not lost my desire to escape confinement.

As if to remind me of what life could have been like, I had as a formality to rejoin the Post Office Telephones in 1948. This was the job which had been kept for me since I left it in 1939, and I had to turn up to claim it so that I could be transferred away from it. Such are the ways of bureaucracies. I was there for all of a fortnight; and the first thing that was handed to me was that file, fiill of my notes and memos on garage accommodation. When the deluge recedes, the most banal things are found drying out in the light.