The Railway Man Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Map

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Eric Lomax was born in 1919. During the Second World War he was captured and tortured by the Japanese Army and forced to work on the notorious Burma-Siam railway. He met and forgave his torturer in 1995. Eric Lomax died in October 2012.

  FOR

  ELIZABETH SUTHERLAND LOMAX

  (1877–1942)

  AND HER GRANDCHILDREN, LINDA,

  ERIC AND CHARMAINE,

  WHO NEVER KNEW THE STORY.

  AND FOR MY WIFE PATTI

  WITHOUT WHOSE SUPPORT

  THE STORY WOULD NEVER

  HAVE BEEN TOLD.

  This book owes an immeasurable debt to the creativity and skill of Neil Belton. His invaluable contribution to the final text far exceeded the usual relationship between author and publisher. It is true to say that without his help I would not have been able to give final form to so much that I have reflected on for the past fifty years.

  Eric Lomax

  THE RAILWAY MAN

  I am alive, and was dead … Write therefore the things which thou hast seen.

  Revelation, I, vv. 18–19

  CHAPTER ONE

  I HAVE A PAINTING in the hallway of my house in Berwick-upon-Tweed, by the Scottish artist Duncan Mackellar. It is a large work set in St Enoch Station in Glasgow on a dusty summer evening in the 1880s. A woman in late middle age, dressed in dark and modest clothes and carrying a parasol, is standing tense and distraught, looking out beyond us, oblivious of any other presence. Behind her the high smoke-grimed glass and wrought-iron walls of the station rise up. She is gazing off the edge of the platform at a vanishing train, so that we see her through the eyes of a receding traveller, and she has the flat restrained face of a person who has learned to swallow grief. Her sudden loneliness is captured as she strains to keep an image of her child, or so we assume, who is on the train heading for the emigrant ship or a colonial war – India, Afghanistan, the Gold Coast.

  Although it is a conventional image, it is genuinely moving. I have always loved it. Railway stations have always attracted me, not just because trains are there, but because they are also ambivalent places, echoing with completed journeys and shrill with the melancholy noises of departure. Mackellar’s painting is about the inevitability of separation, the cost of journeying. And we have never created any sound so evocative of separation as the whistle of a steam locomotive, that high note of inhuman relief as vaporized water is blown off and meets the cold air.

  Once in the 1970s I went to St Enoch and stood on the platform at the spot that Mackellar’s painting creates for the viewer, and the back of the great shed, like an enormous Victorian conservatory, seemed hardly to have changed. The station was not yet quite disused and silent, though a few years later it was destroyed, like so many of the other steam cathedrals. That age is gone now, finally, but the reality of grief, and the consequences of grief, of which Mackellar caught something in his painting, are not so easily banished.

  The passion for trains and railways is, I have been told, incurable. I have also learned that there is no cure for torture. These two afflictions have been intimately linked in the course of my life, and yet through some chance combination of luck and grace I have survived them both. But it took me nearly fifty years to surmount the consequences of torture.

  * * *

  I was born in 1919, the year the World War formally ended, the year that Alcock and Brown drifted down out of the rain over the Atlantic and landed their frail bomber in an Irish bog. I remember being told about this feat of aeronautical engineering and skill at a very young age, and thinking about the two intrepid pilots as I was walked along the grey promenade of the seafront at Joppa, to the east of Edinburgh. ‘Joppa’ is the name of the biblical town where Jonah went when he was fleeing God, and from which he took ship. I discovered soon enough, though it was a long time before space on that scale meant much to me, that this sea was a sheltered inlet, the Firth of Forth, and that even though the distant Fife shore could only be seen in fine weather there were worse seas out there behind the fog and wind.

  John Lomax, my father, was a quiet, disciplined, serious man who knew what was best for his wife and child and was unused to taking no for an answer in his own house. Until the age of fourteen he worked for a pawnbroker in Stockport, on the fringe of industrial Manchester, and then in 1893 somehow got into the Post Office, an institution he stayed in until his retirement almost half a century later. He started as a ‘telegraph messenger’, the most junior post then available and even lower than the entry grade which he would choose for me when I was sixteen. By the time I was born he was a middle-grade civil servant, a manager of staff in the Edinburgh General Post Office, a stable and trusted official.

  My father moved to Edinburgh, a city of politics, law and services in 1909, but all his life remained a child of the industrial revolution, full of vivid memories of coal, smoke, smog and steam power, of great mill engines and railway locomotives and the Manchester Ship Canal. It is hard to explain to young people born in countries that have almost forgotten heavy manufacturing just how awe-inspiring the very processes that shaped our lives could be; for my father, and for me later, great machines were not fearful or distressing but things to be celebrated, as fascinating as the natural world, creatures made by men.

  By the time I was able to notice such things, he was part of a reading circle of fifteen or so, men and women, who would visit each other’s houses and read papers on such topics as the novels of Arnold Bennett, which my father devoured as the nearest thing he could find to a literature of his boyhood world, or the Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott. My father was also the regional editor of the Journal of the Institution of Post Office Electrical Engineers, to which he contributed local news. And, like all dedicated believers in improvement and discovery, he read H.G. Wells. He had a little library of such books. On his shelves I remember Oliver & Boyd’s Edinburgh Almanac from the 1830s, some books on popular science and Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers.

  I also remember my father’s copy of Hendrik Willem Van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, which came out in 1931. It was an inspiring narrative of achievement and progress, and as a child I absorbed its tale of optimism and invention, each new break-through seeming to promise more speed and ease and excitement. One of the most intense events of my childhood was finding the secret chart of ‘The Great Discoveries’ hidden inside the decorative dust-jacket of Van Loon’s book. I was convinced that there were thousands of readers who had never looked at the back of the jacket, and that this wonderful branching tree of human ingenuity was for me alone.

  My first memory of a world beyond my infant needs was not of an animal or a park, but of a strange mechanical assembly. One of my father’s frequent destinations on those walks beside the sea was the Joppa Tram Terminus, which was situated where the historic main road from Edinburgh to London touched the Firth of Forth. On one of these walks, when I was a very small child, we rounded the corner of Di Rollo’s ice-cream parlour and found Joppa Road blocked by a huge barricade of tram cars, a wall of maroon and white metal. Each tram was an elegant two-storeyed coach-house, with delicate looking wooden frames surrounding the windows, and each was two
-headed, its end windows arranged in a five sided prism. The trams had open platforms at each end from which right-angled stairs disappeared tantalizingly into the open upper decks. They were waiting to take the crowds coming from a race meeting in nearby Musselburgh back into Edinburgh. I stared at this herd of machines. I didn’t know there were so many trams in the world.

  Joppa was, unfortunately for my awakening fascination for vehicles that ran on rails, a tram heaven. It was a terminus on one of the last cable tram systems in the world, its cars attached to their bases by ropes of steel wire up to five miles long running in a conduit between the rails, the cables paid out by big stationary steam engines in the depots. Soon after the revelation of the massed tram cars, my father took me to see an oily trench below the surface of the roadway at the Joppa terminus. This chamber was the cable pit, and in it was a large flanged wheel round which a steel hawser revolved, pulling in the car from Portobello, the nearest suburb to the west. Every few minutes a tram would arrive, detach itself from the eastbound cable and, after gripping the westbound cable, head back to Edinburgh at a stately twelve miles an hour.

  There was something infinitely reassuring in the predictability of this system: the heavy double-decked trams drawn through the streets, moving widely but never randomly around the town, cruising steadily through the mill of bicycles, horse-drawn delivery wagons and pedestrians. It was as though the trams laid down an orderly grid on the chaotic life of the city.

  The antiquated cable vehicles gave way, soon after I became aware of them, to electric trams. When I was about four, I was with my mother on the promenade when she pointed out what she told me was the first electric tram heading for Edinburgh. The big steam engine in the local depot shuddered to a halt late at night about a month later. My father told me about it the following day; I could tell that to him this was a solemn moment, the end of something, and that it made him sad.

  As children we loved playing on and riding the trams, learning the personalities of the conductors, some of them not exactly friendly to boys, and discovering that the drivers now had personalities too, for the fixed jogging pace of the old cable trams was a thing of the past and some of the drivers put the handle down and ran their sparking wagons like demons. A tram one day jumped the rails on the curve of King’s Road in Portobello, broke through the wall of Portobello Power station yard and ended up hanging over the railway line that fed the power station with coal. It was a sight, that big green tram car poised so weirdly out of place: a hint that orderly communication between one place and another could be violently interrupted, that the world could be a dangerous place. Still, electric trams were progress, and every advance was greeted in those severe and frugal years with more acclaim than regret. We were entranced by progress, in a way no-one now is. Little did I know where it was taking me.

  My mother was not so taken with mechanical wonders, which is not surprising in someone who grew up one hundred and fifty miles from the northern Scottish coast, in the Shetland Islands. She was a very gentle woman, with a dignified manner and a visionary quality that I’ve always associated with her growing up in a community which still spoke a dialect of Norse. She was the fifth of eight children. No greater contrast with my father’s background can be imagined. Generations of her family had gone to sea in small fishing boats. Her father had built up a substantial fish business, had come south and was a prosperous man in Leith, Edinburgh’s port, by the time he died in the year before my birth.

  My mother’s dreams and traditions were also very different from my father’s. She talked about lonely crofts, herring fishing, peat fires and the never ending sound of the sea; she described a summer daylight that lasted twenty-four hours, hay-making, banks of sea-pinks on the white mica-sand beaches; and the ferocious winds that rip everything but the most twisted and flexible forms of life out of the ground in the winter months. Her family, the Sutherlands, had their own chronicle of disaster: her ancestor John Sutherland was one of 105 fishermen drowned in 1832 when eighteen open boats were overwhelmed in a July storm; and two more Sutherland men were lost in another Shetland summer storm in 1881. The family lived close to death in a way that city people could not understand. My mother nurtured the romanticism of a person displaced from a hard rural community, though she knew there was no going back. For all that, she was probably homesick throughout her life in Edinburgh.

  She gave her child a sense of mystery. Even the place-names of Shetland seemed intangibly beautiful: where else were there islands with names like Vaila, Trondra, Balta and Unst? My mother had modest literary ambitions, and wrote what she called ‘essays’ and poems; she read a lot of books. The dour realism of Arnold Bennett could not do justice to the extremes of an island imagination, and my mother’s favourite reading was probably the work of Jessie Margaret Edmonston Saxby, Shetland’s most famous writer, who she knew, and who was already in her late seventies when I was born. She would still be alive in the first year of the Second World War.

  My mother cared for me deeply, and was probably over-protective of me, and a little possessive. I had a demanding streak, loved making lists, writing things down, collecting cuttings from newspapers, and my mother tolerated and encouraged all this and kept up a supply of stationery for me. She called me ‘The Peerie Professor’: ‘peerie’ was Shetland dialect for ‘little’. I loved her, but perhaps the kind of world into which I was born did not encourage identification with her nostalgia for the past; something harder bit into me and led me into my father’s world, and after all this was what was expected of boys in the 1920s.

  One lasting effect of my mother’s influence was the situation of the house I was born in, on a terrace in Joppa that offered a magnificent view of the Firth of Forth. I think she wanted to be near a stretch of water that had no visible landfall, most of the time, and from our terrace you could look out the window over the sea, which was usually grey and cold. Its short restless waves sent a bracing chill into our bones, reminding us that we were lucky to be on firm ground, never quite allowing us to relax into the illusion that we were in command of the earth.

  Childhood was a time of stern affection. I was sheltered by serious and old-fashioned people who cared for their ‘only child’, the term implying a slight misfortune, as though single children were deprived, the lucky product of some fault in the hereditary material. I may have been a surprise to my parents. And I’ve often thought that it was just as well there was only one of me.

  My father had a carefully organized routine and I still have an image of him leaving the house each morning to catch the No. 20 electric tram to the GPO in Waterloo Place in Edinburgh. He was meticulous about timetables and journey times, a trait I have inherited, a need to know that I can arrive and depart predictably.

  He took us on holidays, to places like Aberdour in Fife and Glenfarg in Perthshire, crossing the high and wide span of the Forth Bridge in a carriage drawn by one of the beautiful Atlantic locomotives of the former North British Railway. To be trundled across that bridge was to be moved through a rattling world of steel and cold air, the high cantilever towers soaring above us and the water far below, visible through the metal struts. The bridge was a greater wonder than the Pyramids, the most wonderful bridge in the world: as every Scottish boy knew, it was about a mile long, contained eight million rivets and employed twenty-nine men full time just to paint it.

  When I was still very young, my father took us to Shetland. This was a real expedition, a five-hour train journey to Aberdeen for a night crossing by steamer to Lerwick. The steamer was called the St Sunniva, the pride of the sonorously named North of Scotland and Orkney and Shetland Steam Navigation Company Limited. It was an elegant vessel, a converted cruising yacht, well able for the North Sea.

  I think my mother must have known the chief engineer, because when we were out to sea I was taken to the engine room, from which I was extracted only with considerable difficulty. It was another of my childhood epiphanies: a rapture of hot oil, of enclosure in vibrating en
ergetic metal, the loud rhythmic thunder of the pistons in their cylinders, the warm vibrating air, the smell of burning coal, the ingenious swimming movement of the rods as they moved back and forth. If this was a machine, I wanted to be near one again soon.

  We stayed in the Shetland Islands for a month. I remember falling into the sea, and running around half-naked all afternoon while my trousers were spread to dry on a rock in the sun; and playing on a beach at Lerwick and skipping flat stones over the water. One stone was a piece of bottle-glass, which ripped open the end of my finger. But it was all perfect, the stiff transparent sheen of salt on hot skin and the seaweed smell of the sea. The high ceremonial point of the holiday was the visit to Great Uncle Archibald, who was no less than the Clerk to the County of Shetland. He lived at Lystina House, considered the best address in the whole of Shetland. My mother was immensely proud to be the niece of the top local government officer in the islands, while my father, and I myself, were rather more impressed by Great Uncle Archie’s stamp collection, which was quite magnificent.

  My curiosity nearly killed me even then. I was taken out with my father by a couple of fishermen in a rowing boat on the Loch of Spiggie, in the south of the island. Insatiably inquisitive, I pulled out the bung in the boat’s hull and held it up. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. I was aware of a spasm of anger and a sudden controlled urgency about the adults’ behaviour. I had done something dangerous. The oarsman pulled for shore, his boat slowly sinking under us.

  * * *

  Shortly after that first visit to the Shetlands in 1924, I was made to attend the Royal High School in Edinburgh. So far as I could make out, the choice of this school was based not on its 800-year history but solely on the convenience of the new electric tram service and its door-to-door linkage of our house with the school.