The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (6 page)

I had considered volunteering for Shetland, but the thought of a 115-mile trip still further north by trawler in mid-winter through one of the worst stretches of sea in the world was too much even for me. The attraction of that Viking outpost was strong; my mother's voice spoke whenever I remembered its harsh moorland and its ocean light. But the other voices were insistent, and I missed the chance that might have kept me marooned and safe on a little archipelago while the deluge lasted.

Orders arrived, in March 1940, instructing me to report for preliminary training before I could go to a Royal Signals training unit for officer cadets.

Sergeant Ferguson and I left Stromness on a fine March morning, and the St Ola, the same awful steamer that had brought us to Orkney, chugged out of the harbour into Hoy Sound where the wind, rain and sea ripped into us. In the huge sheltered bowl of Scapa Flow, with huddled islands all around the horizon, the weather was bearable, but once out of its shelter and into the Pentland Firth, the gale threw the steamer around like a toy. Ferguson and I settled down in the lee of the funnel, where there was a memory of warmth and shelter, and before long we were soaked through, frozen stiff and nauseated. I was violently sick over my sergeant's greatcoat, but he didn't seem to mind; he was in another world.

I had made my choice; I was to be an officer.

For two months I sat with a fellow NCO in an upstairs room in a drill hall in Edinburgh being given intensive personal tuition in radio work by a lieutenant in the Royal Signals. Our text was TTie

Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy, a theoretical tome in two volumes. Each radio set also had its own manual, and we worked hard, hard enough to satisfy our conscientious instructor. By the middle of May I was on my way to Catterick Camp in Yorkshire, the headquarters of the Royal Signals.

I arrived at the Mame Lines and was promptly stripped of my rank. I was now a cadet, my white shoulder tapes and cap bands telling the world that I was neither officer nor man. It had all been too much for one boy: I had barely arrived before I was turned out on parade with the other 250 cadets for a funeral. A cadet on an earlier course had shot himself after being told he was 'RTU'd', the worst humiliation: being returned to your unit.

With this sober beginning, we settled down to seven months of training intended to turn us into effective Royal Signals officers. It was the most demanding and intense period of study I have ever undertaken; the Royal High School seemed child's play by comparison, and of course it was. We learned about radio, telegraphy and telephony to a level beyond the Post Office's dreams, and were taught about military organization, how to use quite heavy machine tools and even about intelligence work.

In June 1940 the British Army was evacuated from Dunkirk, and for the first time the war began to touch us. We were told to expect troops and refugees, and prepared beds and mattresses in halls, gymnasiums and every large building where there was room. After a couple of weeks the emergency passed; the army had retreated in surprisingly good order and it survived. A cloud lifted. Our beds were not needed, the evacuees went elsewhere.

The war then made another stealthy, silent leap in our direction, like a storm threatening to come in off the sea. It was feared that the Germans would follow up their advantage and invade, catching the exhausted troops who were the core of our army at their weakest. That summer, I spent a lot of nights on a little platform at the top of a very high wooden tower, with orders to keep watch for enemy parachute landings. I forced myself to stay awake, looking up at the fields of stars and hoping that I wouldn't be the one to see drifting silk crossing them. But once again the war stayed away, withdrew beyond the coast; nothing happened.

In fact, the worst that happened to me on this marvellous course was pulling an extra drill for my entire class by attempting to poison the company commander. Captain Knowles was a stickler for inspections, and liked to check things in turn; bootlaces, rifle barrels, the insides of hats. One day, he decided to inspect the No. 13 Course's kit. There we were, shaved and washed, loaded with rifles, gas-masks, haversacks and water-bottles, and he ordered us to present the bottles as we would our firearms. He pulled the cork out of mine and took a deep whiff, and staggered backwards into the arms of the company sergeant-major, who was unfortunately an exceptionally small warrant officer. Dignity was not maintained.

It was not a happy situation, and it resulted from my desire not to leave anything behind that could be usefijl, a habit that I would have unlearnt then and there if I had known what it could bring down on me. On an exercise out on the moors, I had been appointed cook and at the close of the exercise I had not wanted to waste the leftover milk, so I poured it into my water-bottle. I strongly recommend stale milk, fermented for three weeks in a British Army canteen, as a harmless substitute for gas.

Weathermen talk about an area of low pressure, the cold air pushing out the warm, the threat of rain and winds of enormous force. I was living all the time now on the edge of such an area. The war kept coming closer, and not content with knowing it was out there, I went out to meet it. Towards the end of 1940, a notice appeared in Daily Orders, inviting volunteers for service in India.

I volunteered, not without thought, but I broke the old soldiers' rule for a second time, and have wondered about it since.

The anny can be inscrutable and it was to be some time before I learned whether I was going to India. Meanwhile, the pace quickened. Late in December 1940 there was an urgent demand for more signals officers, apparently even including young and inexperienced ones. No. 13 Course was brought to a swift close, lopping off the last two weeks. We got into our new uniforms and kit and were sent into the world as officers. I was now Second-Lieutenant Eric Lomax, No. 165340, allocated for the time being to a base at Great Leighs in Essex. We were taken to Darlington Railway Station, climbed into blacked-out trains and were dispersed throughout Britain.

After a few weeks in a unit of Scottish Divisional Signals, under a vigorous Glasgow businessman turned colonel, who was an excellent commanding oSicer, I felt that I was becoming a real soldier, helping to protect the east coast of England immediately north of the Thames; but the War Office unfortunately hadn't forgotten my rash enthusiasm and I was soon sent to a holding battalion in Scarborough - the first step in the long journey to India taking me back up to the north of England. Such are the ways of armies.

Our battalion was responsible for the defence of this vulnerable seaside town, and while I was on duty one evening the war finally made its leap across the coast and put out a finger for me. I was speaking to a policeman on the edge of a public park, and the familiar air raid warning and drone of aircraft engines - which always turned out to be ours - was suddenly augmented by a high whistling sound I had never heard before. The policeman and I were equally quick, and when the bombs dropped around us we were flat on the road. Not quite: I was flopped across a sandbag, my bottom a few inches in the air. And that was enough for the lethal blast of air, travelling just above the earth, to give my behind a blow that felt like a whack from a giant oar. The policeman had to inspect my rear, which he did with great kindness, before I would believe I was not seriously damaged.

I was lucky, probably saved by a couple of inches and some quirk of air-pressure. The people in a large block of flats nearby were buried under the rubble of their building. The storm was no longer a report on the radio now, it was filthy weather all around me.

My parents came down to Scarborough, and we could so easily have died together. They had taken a room in a house run by a Miss Pickup, and I took meals with them when I could. One evening, the three of us were sitting in Miss Pickup's lounge when we heard a loud rattling, like a box of tools falling over in the attic two storeys up, and then a crash. The ceiling over our heads burst open and a small cylinder fizzing viciously with flames and giving off fiightening heat fell on to the landlady's carpet. I knew enough to recognize that it was a magnesium incendiary bomb, and that it would bum the house down and us with it. I dashed out into the back garden, found a large spade, ran back inside and scooped the bomb up and ran for the garden again. In those few seconds, just as I got outside, the incendiary burned through the steel blade of the shovel and fell near my feet.

This devilish firecracker tossed carelessly into a harmless parlour was a new twist. I can still hear the dry rattle it made as it hit the roof and worked its way through the thin ceilings towards me and my parents. Luck, perhaps some fault in the bomb, saved us. A neighbouring house received the same kind of hit and was ablaze, so fiercely that when two or three other men and myself tried to put out the fire we had to retreat, with minor shocks firom wet electrical fittings.

Plans for the movement of the battalion to India began to take proper shape. Perhaps inevitably, I was put in charge of the baggage arrangements, which consisted of working out how many covered goods vans we would need when we pulled out of Scarborough for the port from which we would embark. We were not told the name of the port; I simply made my calculations and hoped we would get the wagons we needed.

In the middle of March 1941, we finally assembled late at night in this blacked-out Yorkshire resort. The battalion filled a street in firont of silent hotels and the boarded-up shops. An army trying to be quiet, we made a hushed rumble around the war memorial, young men in heavy boots, laden with canvas and metal, glancing seriously at the monument to the dead of the last war.

The movement was supposed to be secret, but in the dark streets crowds of townspeople had come out, as well as parents who had come firom all over England, mine among them. They stood smiling, even laughing, but doing it with the tense hilarity of people who are determined to be remembered well and know that they are now playing against firightening odds with their love for their children. My mother stood there in the crowd, and I suppose she waved. She looked distraught. I never saw her again.

We marched to the station through the darkness, the NCOs barking orders in stage whispers. A special train had steam up, exhaling its gases carefully, the distinctive sooty smell of steam-raising Welsh coal penetrating as it burned with the smoke into our nostrils and uniforms. The carriages had black blinds drawn over the windows; in front of the carriages, the three goods vans I had ordered were drawn up.

When we had disposed of ourselves in the coaches, and stowed all the kit in the string webbing of the luggage racks, the engine got under way, taking a mighty pull on the hundreds of tons of vehicles and humans as the driver swung his long regulator handle and released steam into the cylinders, the pistons thrusting back and forth, and hot gas shot along the copper intestines of the boiler and up the chimney.

As the train moved out of Scarborough into the total darkness of the Cleveland Hills, all we knew was that we were going north. I guessed that we were on the east coast main line. In the middle of the morning, stiff from a night in a crowded and heated carriage, I looked out the window and recognized Joppa Station, a quarter of a mile from my home. My mother and father were two hundred miles to the south. The moment felt very empty. I knew then that our final destination would be the Clyde, where our ship would be waiting.

I was about to leave Britain to go to a war in Asia, defending the eastern borders of the Empire. I thought I had learned so much and that I was ready for anything, but before leaving Scarborough I had done one last thing. I got engaged to S., the young woman from the Chapel in Charlotte Street.

She came down to stay at Miss Pickup's; my parents arrived, and found the engagement a fact they had to live with. They did not approve, but accepted it as my final declaration of independence. My fiancee was all of nineteen, I was twenty-one. We were children, emotionally, though the Chapel gave us a false sense of rigid maturity. I felt that it was the right thing to do. We were so young; we barely knew each other.

THE TRAIN TRUNDLED on through Edinburgh Waverley and later that morning the southern outskirts of Glasgow, running past sidings and factories. That afternoon we slowed into Greenock, on the eastern end of the Clyde estuary.

Out on the water, in the chill wind of late winter, lay a great armada of ships. I felt part of a heroic expedition, seeing those vessels strung out down the estuary. There were four splendid P&O liners, a captured French passenger ship, the Louis Pasteur, several destroyers and two battleships. These looked immense, even at the distance I was standing from them on the dockside. I remembered going to see HMS Hood when it came to the Firth of Forth in 1938: the awesome power, decks as long as fields, the grey gun turrets the size of houses. It made you feel small and safe to have this weight of firepower on your side.

After the usual milling and shouting, and the unpacking of my goods wagons, we formed up on the quay in the deceptively casual disorder of armies on the move. But we knew we were highly organized; we felt our power. Tenders came to take us to the ships, we embarked quickly and soon we were slapping through the choppy water towards the long line of vessels. Our tender pointed through the spray to one of the nearer ships, a big P&O hner which we discovered was the Strathmore.

Most of us would never have imagined that we would ever step aboard this floating country house. It was an imposing environment, all polished wood and brass, but its spotless decks and its cabin windows seemed deserted, as though the diplomats, the administrators and the gilded travellers who normally used it had abandoned ship at the sight of these boyish invaders in rough khaki. Feeling like pirates, we were soon allocated to cabins or mess decks by our senior officers and by the crew.

Although this was a military adventure, we were still guests of the ship. The Captain was still very much the captain; we were passengers. All our activities had to fit in with his organization of the ship. So on this strange peacetime basis, we set about our warlike duties.