The Railway Man Read online

  Within a few weeks I had joined what was then a fundamentalist Christian sect. I had done exactly as my father told me to do. I had left school, joined the Post Office and been a good son. Now I was doing something for myself.

  I met Bobby Kinghorn at the Chapel. This was his secret life. We were in a kind of cult, it seems to me now, a sect that resembled the Plymouth Brethren or the ‘Wee Frees’, the rigid schismatics of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church. It was a powerful magnet for a young man looking for a centre to his life. Looking back, I can recall little except an extraordinary arrogance – the members of the Chapel were better than everybody else, they were saved, they were exempt from normal rules and they were certainly above compassion. I didn’t know it, but I was now living in a matchbox with people who thought they could rule the world. This was, after all, a church with but one chapel which financed its own missionaries to Africa and Asia.

  The Chapel was famous for the extremity and ferocity of its preaching. The minister, J. Sidlow Baxter, who was a real fire and brimstone orator, reminds me of those tent gospellers who now make fortunes on television channels in the USA. An accountant before he found the Lord, he relished the tabulation of human weakness. He would rant, cajole, pray, threaten and demand; his sermons were the high point of our services, which were otherwise pretty routine affairs with announcements, readings and hymns.

  What held me there was a kind of sociability I had not been used to, and a genuine, if transitory, conviction of their rightness. I was utterly fascinated by the sonorous mysticism of the Book of Revelation, as I was by the driving certainty of the narrative in the Book of Genesis. I went to Chapel several times a week: to two Sunday services, and once or twice during the week. There were also sedate social occasions, teas and fundraising efforts. And of course like any sect it had ‘policies’ about things you could do and a great many more about things you could not, like going to the cinema, to dances, pubs or watching the new medium of television. They would have banned the radio too, but it was too well-established by now and they all listened to it anyway.

  The older members were immensely bitter and obsessed with status. If newcomers or visitors occupied a pew which an older member felt that he or she had a claim to, the interlopers were the object of furious resentment. These were petty divisions, petty angers, small minds. But for all that they made me feel welcome. Ewart, my proselytizer, was still my closest contact in the group. I discovered that he made a speciality of recruiting young men and that he was genuinely interested in trains: a fairly unique form of evangelism.

  The Chapel, however, inevitably cut into my profane pleasures, my expeditions around the country and my collection of industrial information. And my membership further strained my relations with my parents, who were desperately upset and worried about it. It was as though my intensity of commitment to almost anything I did was bound to alienate those who loved me.

  All this time I was living at home, expected to be in at certain times and to behave properly; this was a disciplined Scottish family. My parents had never liked me swinging off on my bicycle, my disappearances in search of railway engines, my quiet intensity. My bonds with them were thinning by 1939; we could never talk easily, and the distance between us now grew. I felt boxed in at home, and resented my father’s timetables the more I boxed myself into the tiny world of the Chapel.

  Apart from Chapel, I had little social life. I had no girlfriends; there were very few women of any age in the Post Office, for girls went into nursing or catering, and in the Civil Service as soon as a woman married she had to give up her job. There had been a girl called Caroline Jordan, a neighbour’s child who I helped with maths and Latin. I think her father had me in mind for her, but nothing came of it.

  Instead, I met a young woman in the Chapel, the daughter of two members of its congregation, and we began to see each other in a decorous way. Her mother was a formidable woman, of intransigent virtue, but her daughter and I walked out together, avoiding the temptations of the city of the world. Dances and films and similar occasions of sin were out of the question for us; we visited each other’s houses, took long walks in the country and busied ourselves with Chapel affairs.

  I am aware that I missed a lot in my childhood. I did not know things I should have known, my education was curtailed; my emotional education was still very rudimentary before it was almost snuffed out a few years later in a prison yard. I was pitchforked into work straight from school; from work into the army; from the army into hell.

  In a way, though I feel very distant from the young man who was so easily drawn into that sectarian embrace, the moral conviction of being saved, that I really had found God, helped me to survive what came later. I was still very committed and religious when I went to war. A rearrangement of personal authority took place during the three and a half years of our imprisonment. Under those terrible pressures a private might emerge as a leader, and his standing would simply be accepted. I must have seen it in very pure Protestant terms, as though we had somehow returned to the conditions of the Old Testament. I even felt myself gaining some moral authority, growing in a human way despite starvation and misery and dirt. I never felt that I was owed any particular status, but some others acted as though it were there. Some of the traditional leaders, on the other hand, some of the senior officers, sank without trace. If I can be grateful to the Chapel for anything, it is for helping me build that armour of stubbornness that got me through.

  * * *

  I was not a politically-minded young man, and I could lose myself in my religious and mechanical enthusiasms. The drastic nature of the world in the late Thirties didn’t really sink in until my father confirmed the worst predictions. Out walking on the promenade at Joppa one afternoon in the spring of 1939, he rebuffed my polite enquiry about holiday plans by saying with adult finality that since there was going to be a war, he very much doubted if there would be much scope for holidays that summer.

  Once conscription was introduced later that year, I decided to take, not exactly evasive action, but action to optimize my position. I joined the Supplementary Reserve of the Royal Corps of Signals, which recruited men from the Post Office Telephones. Until war was declared, my only duties would be attendance at the annual ‘camp’ of Scottish Command Signals.

  So it was that on 4th May 1939 I became 2338617 Signalman Lomax E.S., based in Edinburgh Castle. Mills Mount barracks was inside the north side of the castle, with a magnificent view for miles across the city and out over the Forth to the hills of Fife. The ‘camp’ that summer consisted of me and a young man named Lionel.

  Few people can have had a stranger introduction to the British Army. There was no induction into a depot or drill hall; no weapons training; not even a sergeant-major to humiliate us. I was simply told to sit at a typewriter and to turn out letters; Lionel was shown how to fill up quartermaster’s returns. An insurance clerk, he couldn’t stop referring to Scottish Command Headquarters as ‘Head Office’.

  Gradually, in this unmilitary atmosphere we learned the harder business of the Royal Signals. A corporal called Moore tried to turn us into efficient signallers, making us see how our work was important to the string of coastal defence batteries on the north coast of Scotland and in the Orkneys, where the great naval base of Scapa Flow was located. We learned about the importance of precise information so that the guns in their remote emplacements out on the cliffs wouldn’t fire blind, and to understand the importance of accurate communication between the different parts of an army. Later I would wish that some of our teachers had learnt their own lesson a little better, but for now war was still only a word.

  After this genial brush with the army, I spent the rest of the lovely summer of 1939 perfecting my scheme for improving and expanding the garaging arrangements for the Telephones vehicles in the city, swimming, hunting classic engines and going to Chapel.

  On 24th August 1939 I received my mobilization papers, went to work as usual and closed my file on Garage
Requirements. After saying goodbye I took the No. 23 tram up Hanover Street and the Mound and walked up the Lawnmarket to the Castle. Lomax had gone to war.

  * * *

  Mills Mount was now a crowded and hectic base. Royal Signals reservists from all over the country were turning up, short of beds and equipment, and I found myself sending out more mobilization orders to other reservists. I was issued with full battledress, all rough cloth and webbing – except for the trousers. There was a shortage of trousers. The guard commander, like most of his kind in Scottish regiments, couldn’t share our joy at walking around centaur-like in civilian pants.

  I was sent down to the Assembly Rooms in George Street in Edinburgh to take charge of the confused lines of would-be signalmen of all ages and classes who were trying to enlist. Some had been sent by the BBC, the Post Office, the private electronics companies; they were to be the technical elite of the army. I was struck by how effective a single man in uniform, confident of his authority, could be in maintaining order over several hundred men unsure of their position.

  Each night I would go back up the Mound, and walk inside the old black walls of the castle which dominated the city like a crouching beast, as it does to this day. It is difficult to imagine it now as anything other than a tourist attraction. Times change, and so do buildings. Changing people is harder, or so I have found.

  In the barracks we had radios on all the time, as you would expect. At 11.00 am on 3rd September, we heard Arthur Neville Chamberlain say in his exquisite reedy voice that we were now at war with Germany.

  Fifteen minutes later, the air raid sirens sounded throughout Edinburgh. From Mills Mount I could look down into the main streets of the city. On Princes Street, the trams came to a standstill; every motor vehicle stopped where it was. Passengers walked with a swift nervous urgency, making for the air raid shelters in Princes Street Gardens, through which the main railway line was sunk. It was empty and silent now. Within minutes the streets were deserted except for the immobilized vehicles, some with their doors open, stretching away down Princes Street. A hand had swept over the city, stopping its heart: the war came in this silence.

  Nothing happened; there was no raid. I had tangled up the straps of my gas-mask, and had to be rescued by a company sergeant-major called Dennis Bloodworth, who really was as strong as he sounded. We went back to preparing ourselves for real battles.

  Equipment now began to arrive in earnest. We already had a ‘Wireless Set No. 3’, a big and seemingly powerful thing, with controls on the vertical front; it was made of stamped grey steel with none of the ornamentation of domestic sets. This was a machine for keeping open a channel of communication between Edinburgh and London, in the event of telephone lines being broken, and it did not hide its function of grabbing electromagnetic waves as brutally as it could. Everything about it spoke of war and emergency. It was noisy to operate, it gave out heat, and I had to sleep next to it before I wangled a bed in the barrack block at the West End of the Castle. It was an austere place but at least I could sleep. I was learning that you have to survive not only in the face of the enemy, but also within your own army.

  With this in mind I applied for a commission, and appeared before an interview board in the building owned by the Scotsman newspaper on the North Bridge. Washed and polished and eager to please, I was told by the major who interviewed me that the average expectation of life of a second-lieutenant on active service in the Great War had been two weeks. I said I wished to persist.

  * * *

  While I was waiting for my application to be processed, I volunteered to go to the Orkney Islands, where the battleship Royal Oak had just been sunk, in its base at Scapa Flow, with almost a thousand casualties. This was the first real shock of the war, and might have taught us more about the vulnerability of gigantic gun-platforms. People could hardly accept that it was enemy action that had sunk such a dreadnought; it must be sabotage, or some fault of our own. But of course it was a German submarine. In any case, our signals work clearly needed improvement.

  We sailed from Scrabster Harbour, near Thurso on the north coast of Scotland. After the worst sea journey I could remember, a day of icy wind and pitching seas on a fifty-year-old steamer that lacked any suitable covering for the North Sea in late autumn, we arrived – Sergeant Ferguson and his squad of twenty, including me – in Stromness. We settled in and helped to control the local signals traffic, by radio, telephone and telegraph. We were part of the North Signal Section, one of His Majesty’s more remote garrisons.

  I liked it on the cold, bleak island, working methodically every day in a requisitioned hotel. What I thought of as my developing gift for survival and adroit moves in large organizations made me the entrepreneur of the group. I did a deal with one of the cooks in the hotel by which she provided fried egg rolls and tea and I sold them to the men in the middle of the morning. I was much in demand.

  On an island, you noticed people’s isolation more. When I distributed the mail for our little squad, I saw that some of the men could never conceal their distress when letters failed to arrive. And a couple of them looked almost terrified if mail did come for them.

  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 The 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 Marne 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 useful, 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.