Introducing the forthcoming addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 75:
Eric Lomax | THE RAILWAY MAN
Growing up in Edinburgh during the 1920s, Eric Lomax became obsessed by the great steam engines he saw shunting wagons in the city’s Portobello Goods Yard.
As a lonely teenager working as a Post Office sorting clerk, he would cycle miles to remote branch lines for the satisfaction of spotting some obscure engine parked in the sidings. Little did he know then that the building of a railway would bring him near death and lead to one of the most important decisions of his life.
At the age of 20 Lomax went to war with the Royal Signals, and in 1942 he was ordered to Malaya where he joined the retreat to Singapore as the Japanese invaded the peninsula. Following the British surrender he was sent north to work on the construction of the notorious Burma–Siam Railway. Here he and some other prisoners managed to construct a primitive radio, and Lomax also drew a map of the area which he hid in a bamboo tube. After these were discovered by the guards his real ordeal began. Cudgelled senseless, his arms and teeth broken, his ribs cracked and his hip smashed, he was driven to the military police HQ where he was tortured and relentlessly questioned for eighteen hours a day. Present at his interrogation was a young interpreter whose flat repetitive voice as he relayed the NCO’s shouted questions aroused a murderous hatred in Lomax.
Returning to Edinburgh at the end of the war, Lomax was a shadow of his former self, plagued by nightmares yet unable to speak of his ordeal to anyone, not even his wife. His anger focused on the implacable little interpreter, who seemed to stand for all the horrors he had endured. After many bitter years, blighted by family tragedy and the break-up of his marriage, in a moving and unexpected resolution Lomax was finally freed by an extraordinary act of reconciliation from the corrosive hatred that had been ruining his life.
The Railway Man is published on 1 June but we’re pleased to report that it’s available to pre-order now. Those of you who are signed up to the Slightly Foxed Editions Subscription were charged on 1 May and your hand-numbered copy will be on their way to you shortly. We do hope you enjoy it.
With best wishes from the SF staff
Isabel, Rebecca, Edie, Ruth & Jennie
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