The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (25 page)

This brief return to my old life also produced a stain on my character which has not been removed to this day. When I was demobilized I took leave, quite properly, and calculated that I would have to report to the Post Office on a certain day. Their calculations, however, alleged that I was a day late at the end of this 'post-demob' leave. Formally, I stood accused of being absent without leave. Nearly forty years later I asked for a record of my service, and my transgression is still shown on the civil service records: length of service: twenty years; AWOL: one day.

The Civil Service works with deliberate speed and before they would send me overseas I had to spend a year or so in more homely duties. I became an officer of the Department of Agriculture, and attempted to become an expert on diseases of the potato. My only previous experience of the vegetable had been at Outram Road, when Colonel Parker and I became unwilling gardeners for the Japanese. I could confirm now that the green leaves containing solanine are indeed poisonous. I read up on potato ailments, and drafted memo after memo about menaces to the crop. One of my main concerns was to arrange trials of new brands of potatoes to ensure their suitability for making chips. Every new variety of spud had to be registered and assessed. Fish-and-chip shops were where many British people ate their main meal, so the quality of the fried chip was of some concern to the government. One shop in Edinburgh co-operated nobly with us and very august people from the Department would solemnly sit around a table and taste chips made with different potatoes.

Eventually the Colonial Office in London accepted me as an assistant secretary, and told me that I would be assigned to the Gold Coast, the British territory in West Africa now called Ghana. I knew that I was joining the administration of an Empire which was more or less graceftiUy dissolving itself, in one of the world's more remarkable processes of decolonization. Our task in the Gold Coast was to hang on as long as we could, partly to keep the radical nationalist Kwame Nkrumah out of power as a matter of policy, and to put certain developments in place and prepare the way for an efficient and orderly handover of power to the Africans.

Meanwhile, it had begun to dawn on me that my marriage had been a mistake, for both parties. After our first daughter was bom in December 1946, my wife's own mother did not see us or the child for about six years; there was an absolute break. Her family cultivated feuds; she had relatives in the Scottish borders, for example, and few of them would communicate with her. She would often say that people in her family would never let a I slight die a natural death. I think this side of her character may have been developed in the Chapel, and it was certainly not discouraged.

The pettiness of the occasions for these vendettas was staggering. Certain of her relatives would not speak to her, because when we sent out the traditional little boxes of wedding cake to our friends and relatives at the end of 1945, they went out in two or three batches, and this meant that some people got theirs before others. And the ones who were in the second and third deliveries were infuriated because it implied that the recipients of the first wave of little sugary wedges were considered more important than them. These were people who were not even aware of their own entrapment.

This intolerance over things so surpassingly trivial was very hard for me to take. I had felt less morbid vindictiveness towards the Japanese guards in Changi than these seemingly normal Scottish middle-class people were displaying to their own blood relatives. Marriage can be like incarceration without a key, as I was beginning to find out.

Of course it takes more than one person to create what Milton called 'disconsolate household captivity', and my withdrawals into cold and blank anger in the face of hostility, pulling my shell around me and locking it tight, cannot have made things easier. Confrontation threatened my whole being, triggering flashes of memory that I could not articulate to anyone, and most tragically of all, not even to my wife.

The feeling of claustrophobia was worsened by the Chapel, where fierce feuds, outbreaks of ostentatious remoteness and snorting resentment would break out over the seating priorities. One woman who had been going to Chapel for thirty years complained loudly one day when my wife and I inadvertently sat in what she regarded as her personal pew. I could not help noticing that most of the veterans had done very little in the war; their complaints about how awful firewatching duties had been did not, under the circumstances, engage my full sympathy. I became impatient at their ignorance and their sheer hypocrisy. They would never dream of going anywhere or learning anything new. One couple kept such a tight rein on their unfortunate daughters that these grown-up women had no opportunity to meet young men, and you could see them ageing into enforced loneliness.

The Gold Coast, when I was sent there in December 1949, was in part an escape from an increasingly unhappy existence. It laid the groundwork for my later drift away from that world. Chapel and all. The death of my father soon after I started work in Africa cut other ties with the pre-war past; his second wife went on living in the house overlooking the Firth, and I never went back there.

The month of my arrival with my wife and young child was the beginning of the most dramatic phase of the independence movement in the Gold Coast. Nkrumah had just launched his 'Positive Action' campaign for immediate self-government; the country was convulsed by mass rallies, riots and demonstrations. Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the governor, declared a state of emergency in January and arrested Nkrumah in an attempt to break the headlong rush to independence. He spent the next fourteen months in gaol. But the leaders favoured by the British failed to win the hearts of the population, and eventually Nkrumah was released, hailed as the undisputed leader of his people and became our partner in the countdown to the withdrawal of our power.

I was assigned to the Department of Rural Development. We had two main tasks: to initiate the Volta River Project, and the construction of Tema Harbour. The first was a plan to build a huge dam across the Volta, the 1000-mile-long river that runs from Upper Volta, as it was then called (it is now the state of Burkina Faso), to the coast east of Accra, in the process creating the largest man-made lake in Africa and the ability to generate tremendous quantities of hydro-electric power. The electricity would help develop the country and specifically its aluminium industry; there are vast amounts of bauxite in West Africa, and a lot of electric power is used in the refining process. It was a truly gargantuan project. I prepared the first contoured map showing the reach of the water that would flood out when the dam was built, joining up dozens of 1-inch survey maps until they covered the floor of a good-sized room. Many of my colleagues refused to believe the implications of what we were doing, and I saw a look of almost terror on their faces when they saw the size of my map and the predicted spread of the water.

The Tema Harbour Project was intimately linked to the dam, and to the ambitious plans for an aluminium industry. Outside the capital Accra there was an ideal spot for a major port, and we proposed to build one from scratch. I remember how a consultant engineer put a wooden peg in the sand on the beach and announced that this was where the western breakwater of the harbour would start.

I was now part of the industrial revolution that had fascinated me for so long, and was playing a small role in the great post-war wave of industrialization. The work was satisfying, even if it now seems touched with the delusion of the time that chemicals and metals could solve almost any problem. Installing heavy industries in what we now call Third World countries proved more complicated than anyone first thought, and the problems of post-independence Africa still more difficult. But the work was well planned and well organized, and these were pleasures in themselves. I was co-ordinating aspects of the plan for the colonial administration and I met US consultants with experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other large projects, which reawakened my old passion for reading about the great railway engineers and bridge builders.

One element of the great scheme was, inevitably, the building of new rail lines. The most ambitious of these was the proposal to build a railway from Kumasi, the inland capital of the old Ashanti kingdom, all the way north to Ouagadougou in French-governed Upper Volta. This would have been a bold chapter in the story of the railway age - 600 miles of track connecting the arid savannah and semi-desert of the upper reaches of the Volta with the tropical regions of the coast, but it never left the engineers' drawing-boards. Rivalry between French and British aims in Africa and sheer pressure on resources killed the project. But there were other new railways, a branch line out of Accra to Tema Harbour, and another to link Accra and Takoradi, respectively the capital and the chief port on the western side of the country. The freight was still construction traffic on these roads; sturdy, small engines hauled wood and rocks for embankments and breakwaters; they had none of the romance of my childhood icons, but they were steam engines for all that.

I loved seeing this little railway take shape under my partial direction, and by the time I left the country some of these lines were in operation - modest 3'6" gauge tracks, only a little broader than the metre-gauge tracks that I had grown so familiar with in Malaya and Siam, with many of the same kinds of engines running on them, for the same Crown Agents bought them for the Gold Coast and our possessions and dependencies in South East Asia.

I wrote to the general managers of 3'6" gauge railways all over the world begging them, if they had any surplus engines, to sell to us because we were terribly short of them. One of the great networks built to this gauge was the Japanese system, but I could not bring myself to write to its management. I had had no contact since the war with any Japanese. I couldn't pretend that I was in a normal trading or business relationship with Japan.

Meanwhile, my wife and I suffered the loss of our son Eric, who died a day after he was bom 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 -1 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 -1 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.