I was slow to appreciate that adults in my childish world had per formed and endured the extraordinary. I knew they had taken part in something called ‘the war’. But that a familiar face dispensing bacon at the grocer’s may have fought his way up Italy from Anzio, dodged flak in the skies above Germany or braved U-boats in the Atlantic wastes never entered my head.
Time passed. I learned that my father had served as a doctor on a destroyer escorting Mediterranean convoys, that a local lawyer was awarded the Military Cross and that an architect friend of my parents flew Seafires off aircraft-carriers. And then there was Harry.
Harry was a charming man marked by his own self-effacement. He said little and was notable for his awkward movements and clear physical discomfort. I questioned my father and was brusquely told: ‘Harry was a prisoner in the Far East. Those men had a terrible time.’ It was left for me to discover what that time involved for the British captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942.
Thirty-five years later, memories of Harry led me to Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man (1995). At its core, this is the story of how one young man survived starvation and torture while labouring on construction of the infamous Burma–Siam railway. But Lomax takes us further. He reveals how his experience as a POW poisoned his postwar life, leaving him socially awkward, prey to nightmares and consumed by a thirst for revenge. Learning that his wartime torturer is still alive, he meets him in Thailand more than forty years after he left the country. Beautifully, he tells us how his hatred melts into forgiveness, reconciliation and friendship. It is a s
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Subscribe now or Sign inI was slow to appreciate that adults in my childish world had per formed and endured the extraordinary. I knew they had taken part in something called ‘the war’. But that a familiar face dispensing bacon at the grocer’s may have fought his way up Italy from Anzio, dodged flak in the skies above Germany or braved U-boats in the Atlantic wastes never entered my head.
Time passed. I learned that my father had served as a doctor on a destroyer escorting Mediterranean convoys, that a local lawyer was awarded the Military Cross and that an architect friend of my parents flew Seafires off aircraft-carriers. And then there was Harry. Harry was a charming man marked by his own self-effacement. He said little and was notable for his awkward movements and clear physical discomfort. I questioned my father and was brusquely told: ‘Harry was a prisoner in the Far East. Those men had a terrible time.’ It was left for me to discover what that time involved for the British captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Thirty-five years later, memories of Harry led me to Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man (1995). At its core, this is the story of how one young man survived starvation and torture while labouring on construction of the infamous Burma–Siam railway. But Lomax takes us further. He reveals how his experience as a POW poisoned his postwar life, leaving him socially awkward, prey to nightmares and consumed by a thirst for revenge. Learning that his wartime torturer is still alive, he meets him in Thailand more than forty years after he left the country. Beautifully, he tells us how his hatred melts into forgiveness, reconciliation and friendship. It is a story to prick the eyes. Born in 1919 in Edinburgh, Lomax was the only child of a Post Office worker and his Shetlander wife who raised him in ‘stern affection’. As a 13-year-old, he undergoes an epiphany when the sight of steam engines shunting wagons in the huge Portobello Goods Yard instils in him such a passion for steam that even in captivity his senses are quickened by the sight of some obscure engine at work. The terrible irony that his most agonizing days will be spent constructing a railway line has yet to be shaped. By the time Lomax leaves for war aged 20, he is a grave young man; sociable yet essentially solitary, emotionally immature yet self-sufficient. From worship at an austere chapel he has acquired an ‘armour of stubbornness’. The Book of Revelation with its vision of a post-apocalyptic world recomposed in light and happiness will sustain him in his forthcoming ordeal. Serving in the Royal Signals, Second Lieutenant Lomax is ordered to Malaya where he joins the retreat of 100,000 troops to Fortress Singapore as the Japanese invade the peninsula. Following the British surrender on 15 February 1942, he is sent a thousand miles north to sweat it out in a workshop servicing the nascent railway line. With extraordinary ingenuity, he and others construct a crude radio, and Lomax also draws a map of the area which he hides in a bamboo tube. His account from this point makes for such painful reading as to leave the reader astonished that human beings can inflict, and survive, such cruelty. On 29 August 1943, a search of the captives’ quarters uncovers four partially constructed radios. The map is found later. Immediate punishment is predictably brutal: one man is ordered to stand at attention for fifty hours, another for four days. Lomax is untouched but knows his turn will come. What happens next will cast a malign shadow over the rest of his life. Three weeks later, he and four other officers are driven to the main camp at Kanburi where, one by one, they are cudgelled senseless to the ground by guards wielding pickaxe shafts. Lomax’s arms and teeth are broken, his ribs cracked and his hip smashed. Between them, the men receive 900 blows. It is only the start. After crude hospital treatment Lomax is woken at 4 a.m. and, still crippled by his injuries, driven to the local HQ of the feared military police unit, the Kempeitai. Here, he is locked in a cage 5 foot long, 2½ foot wide and less than 5 foot high. He is 6 foot tall. By the afternoon, the bug- infested cell is a baking oven. Dragged from the cage, Lomax is relentlessly grilled by a muscular NCO for up to eighteen hours a day. The NCO’s shouted questions are translated by an expressionless young interpreter whose flat, repetitive voice arouses in his victim murderous hatred. Finally, Lomax is tied to a bench and his broken limbs beaten with a huge stick before water is poured down his windpipe, filling his lungs and stomach. How long this continues he cannot recall. Lomax is later transported back to Singapore only to endure a new circle of hell in the notorious Outram Road jail, ‘a place in which the living were turned into ghosts wasted down to their skeletal outlines’. By the time he is released following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, he is so thin he can circle his fingers round his upper arm. While his body will regain its strength, his mind is grievously damaged. Returning to Edinburgh, Lomax marries a pre-war sweetheart only to find that the lingering effects of his captivity erect an unbridgeable barrier between them. He cannot speak of his experiences, he is intolerant of others’ mistakes and he feels emotionally impassive: ‘I was living in a world of my own; the privacy of the torture victim is more impregnable than any fortress.’ Above all, Lomax’s nights are plagued by nightmares of Outram Road. Outram, however, was a shared ordeal providing no dominant figure on which to focus his hatred. Kanburi was personal. By day, his anger turns to the ‘hateful little interrogator’ whose implacable questioning stands for all the horrors he endured. He wants to drown him, cage him, beat him; only retribution will exorcise his rage. Postwar, Lomax works as a colonial administrator in Ghana and later in the UK as a lecturer in personnel management. These years are blighted not only by the corrosive legacy of his imprisonment but by personal tragedy: a baby son dies, his daughter is left disabled by a brain haemorrhage and finally his marriage collapses. He is saved by a chance meeting – aptly, aboard a train – with Patti, the partner with whom he will spend the rest of his life. Slowly, the wheel turns to an extraordinary denouement. Following his retirement, Lomax determines to uncover the identity of his torturers. Meanwhile, his sudden icy rages and hostile withdrawal of affection sour his relationship with Patti. For the first time since imprisonment, he seeks specialist help and is diagnosed with long term trauma. Gently and sensitively, he is put on the road to mental recovery. His desire for a reckoning with his tormentor, however, remains undiminished. In October 1989, while visiting a fellow wartime prisoner, Lomax is handed a photocopied article from the English-language Japan Times about a former Japanese intelligence operator so consumed with guilt at the treatment of the railway POWs that he has dedicated his life to their memory and erected a Buddhist temple in atonement. The article features a picture of a slight elderly man quoted as saying he remembers a Kanburi prisoner accused of possessing a map who was subsequently tortured. Lomax’s search is over. The man’s name is Nagase Takashi. It is another two years before Lomax agrees to Patti writing to Nagase to suggest a meeting between the two men. In that time, he has read a memoir by the repentant interpreter in which he vividly recalls the torture session, writing: ‘I still cannot stop shuddering every time I recall that horrible scene.’ Nagase replies that he is willing to meet, telling Patti in his broken English: ‘The dagger of your letter thrusted me into my heart to the bottom.’ Nagase’s poignant response produces in Lomax a cathartic emotional realignment. ‘Anger drained away,’ he writes. ‘In its place came a welling of compassion for both Nagase and me . . .’ A year later, in sight of the River Kwai bridge which had cost so many lives, Lomax watches as a tiny man in a straw hat, kimono-style jacket and trousers approaches him. Clearly agitated, Nagase bows while Lomax wishes him a formal good morning. Nagase looks up at him through eyes clouded by tears, and repeats ‘I am very, very sorry.’ Then, unselfconsciously, he strokes Lomax’s arm. He says: ‘For what purpose were you born in this world? I think I can die safely now.’ Lomax’s journey is done. The remaining pages of the book explore the blossoming relationship between the two men until they part in harmony, never to meet again. Redemption has conquered the suffering with which the book is suffused. The Railway Man is about the strength to survive, the stoicism to endure and the humanity to forgive. In Lomax’s final words: ‘Sometime the hating has to stop.’Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Patrick Welland 2026
About the contributor
Patrick Welland is a retired journalist. Although he wishes he was younger, he is grateful to have been brought up amid a generation of astonishing fortitude.
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