The Railway Man: A POW's Searing Account of War, Brutality and Forgiveness

CHAPTER TEN

THE RANDOM HAZARDS of captivity gave way to the orderly regime of the army. I was once more a serving officer, and I was being sent home. I had not seen my family for over four years; I had been around the world and had witnessed things that had not been dreamed of for centuries in the world I had left behind. My ‘unpleasanmess’, as I often called it, for we survivors almost competed with each other in laconic understatement, seemed to have ended with the surrender of Japan. I was more worried about my physical injuries: my arms, my exhaustion, the skin diseases which I could not eradicate; I still had ringworm when I left Changi. I didn’t understand yet that there are experiences you can’t walk away from, and that there is no statute of limitations on the effects of torture.

The rush of reorganization, the excitement of departure and the concentration on gathering the evidence for the high command of what had been done to us held other thoughts at bay. The past two years had seen so many fresh invasions of fear and anxiety that it was difficult for the mind to dwell on particular episodes, and although I had had enough angry hours to think about Kanburi, the discovery and betrayal and the

Kempeitai interrogations, I was now almost too busy to remember. Instead there were the latest and the last of the wartime partings from friends I had come to admire. Jim Bradley, who was in the next bed to mine in HB2, was still very ill and was sent to a hospital ship; Macalister rejoined the Australian Air Force; Fred Smith and the others were sent to different parts of the jigsaw-puzzle army around Changi. After we were broken up, many of us never saw each other again.

My 5th Field Regiment, which had been left in the lurch at Kuantan in 1941, was by then in Formosa, but we were expected to be attached to some body of men and to make ourselves useful, so I was sent to help take charge of the Indian troops, of whom there were thousands in the city, leaderless and disorganized. Colonel Parker, with whom I had grazed potato leaves, was now my commanding officer. We organized some big parades, checking names and identities of men who had been used as labourers and survived, remnants of the once-proud Imperial Indian Army. Some of the assembled men had joined the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, and could have taken part in the abortive invasion of India in early 1944; these men were denounced by their comrades who had stayed loyal to their original commitment. The IN A men were arrested and passed from our hands.

One day I was simply told to get down to the docks with about fifty men and to take them to Calcutta. I said goodbye to Malaya, as abruptly as that. We sailed on a converted liner called the Devonshire and reached India in less than a week.

In Calcutta I was sent to a place called Belvedere, a magnificent residence used by the Viceroy of India when he stayed in Calcutta, which had been turned into a reception centre for returning POWs. It resembled an enormous Italianate English country house, the sweeping staircases and colonnades of the fagade rearing massively in the heat of Bengal. The loggias and caryatids of this massive palace were now shrouded in purplish camouflage. The ballroom with its acres of springy wooden flooring had been divided into offices for a paymaster and the Red Cross, a canteen, a bar and a post office. It had splendid rooms, full of heavy English chairs with thick legs, long polished tables and sideboards laden with blue china. The windows were enormous, letting in the afternoon light of an Indian autumn on to young men unable to believe their luck.

It was run by ‘lady volunteers’, brisk self-confident women used to servants and to getting their own way but on the whole wonderfully kind to us. Most of them, at least. One afternoon a woman joined me and another officer who had been on the railway as we drank tea on the veranda, looking out over the green, watered grass and the rose bushes and still marvelling at our recovery and the sheer pleasure of amenities that made this place a paradise to us. She was a vigorous breezy memsahib, and thought it right to speak her mind, as she would no doubt have described it. She was sure, she said, that as we had been prisoners-of-war during most of the fighting she expected that we would be eager ‘to do our bit’ now. There wasn’t a trace of irony in her voice. In it you could sense her picture of the camps in Siam and Malaya as places full of bored, underemployed and shameftil men. We held the sides of our chairs tightly and said nothing. At the time I thought that this was one insensitive civilian, but I soon discovered that you have to have seen things with your own eyes before you believe them with any intimacy, and that there are some things which many people do not want to know.

After a few days of rest I began to feel weak, fainting and generally exhausted. The sudden requirement to do nothing was more than my system could bear. A doctor put me to bed for three days in a military hospital and I slept for fourteen hours a day.

After my brief convalescence I was sent on to Mhow, in central India, where the kit I had left in 1941 had been kept in a store manned by Italian prisoners-of-war. From there I sent my mother a birthday telegram. The prospect of seeing my family again was becoming real, the remoteness of their faces diminishing, but it was still hard to see across the gulf that the war and Outram Road had put between us. I looked forward to my parents’ house in Edinburgh as one does to a bracing plunge into a clean, cold pool; it represented normality and the pleasure of an unexciting kindness.

I felt other anticipations too. In Mhow I had a gold wedding ring made for my fiancée. I assumed that she would still be there, and that time would have stood still for her while so much had happened to me. I had no idea how much the world had changed, or how much I had changed – and how little some people had moved from the ruts they had made for themselves before the war.

From Mhow there was a train to Deolali, and a delay while I and other stray officers were allocated to a ship returning to England. We were sent down to Bombay and found ourselves on the Johan van Oldenbamevelt, a requisitioned Dutch ship heading for Southampton.

On board I was approached by some former POWs from Siam who had officers in charge of them who had not themselves been POWs. They were being allocated ordinary ship’s duties by regimental officers who had no conception of what these men had been through. My robust lady volunteer back in Calcutta had co-thinkers in the army, it seemed. The ex-prisoners felt that they had done as much forced labour in the previous three years as they wanted to do for a while: they wished these officers in hell. These were broken-down men, ill and in need of rest and great care. I went to the ship’s adjutant and argued that they should be treated as passengers, not as working soldiers. He agreed, but carelessly and offhandedly, an ominous sign of the complete ignorance that was being drawn over our experiences like a veil.

Apart from this the voyage was eventless. I read day after day. We reached Southampton on 31st October 1945. The band had played ‘There’ll Always Be An England’ when we arrived at Singapore in 1941, but our landfall was quiet and subdued, in the chill grey weather of the English coast at the approach of winter. Some mail came on board and my name was called. I was handed a letter from my father telling me that my mother had died three and a half years before, about a month after the fall of Singapore. She was sixty-four years old. She had died thinking that I was dead, because I had been reported missing. And my father also told me he had married again.

I knew the woman he had married. She had been an old family friend for years; or rather, a friend of his. I had never liked her much; she had always seemed an insincere and acquisitive person. All the calmly-constructed images of home which I had been nurturing on the voyage back simply vanished. I was so shocked that I could not tell grief and anger apart, sorrow for my mother almost eclipsed by my response to what seemed like a betrayal by my father. It was a quick and brutal indication that I was not returning to anything I would find familiar. I felt exhausted again, physically and emotionally, remembering her seeing me off in that darkened street in Scarborough; remembering all the times I had thought of her, and her already dead. There were things I could probably have told her that proved hard to share with others.

I spent ten hours on the train the next day too numb to plan much. When I got to Edinburgh there was no-one to meet me, and this may have decided my course of action. I did not go home. I couldn’t bring myself to turn up as a stranger to find my mother’s place taken, and be dependent on that woman and my father, so at the station I took one of the cars driven by women volunteers to my fiancée’s family and went down the next day to my father’s house in Joppa, my base secure.

My reserve must have been palpable. Over my natural formality was now laid the instinctive caution and blankness of the prisoner used to hiding his feelings. I hardly knew it then, but I had begun the process of shutting down my emotions, pulling back into cold anger at the first sign of confirontation rather than expressing myself. My father and his new wife -1 could hardly bring myself to think of her as my ‘stepmother’ – were welcoming, but I was not. They wanted me and my fiancée to come with them on a holiday to the Lake District, but I evaded the invitation.

I don’t mean to be unkind to my father. He was in his sixties then, and retired from the Post Office, and he told me later that his friend had saved his life by marrying him, that he was going downhill fast after my mother died so suddenly. I couldn’t grudge him that, but I could not reconcile myself to what he had done, thinking that the second Mrs Lomax cannot have been indifferent to his good pension and comfortable house when she took him on. Within two days I was in a world that seemed cynical and petty compared to the companionship and the seriousness that comes from facing death which I had found in the camps and Outram Road.

Three weeks later S. and I were married. We were as innocent of each other as could be, and I was led into it by my own docility, her eagerness and a romantic idea of her that I had sustained through thick and thin. I was in love, yes, but with what? I was taking a leap in the dark every bit as risky as that jump on the stairs at Outram Road Gaol. I had been six years in another life – in another world, for all she knew – while she had gone on in the quiet certainties of a strictly religious provincial family. Edinburgh had suffered the usual privations of wartime Britain – rationing, blackout, the evacuation of children-but it was not as damaged as parts of London or some of the Midlands towns had been by German air raids, and I could hardly believe that it had been in the war at all.

She was the nearest safe haven I could find from my father’s betrayal and the pain that I could not get rid of or understand. I was already living in a world of my own; the privacy of the torture victim is more impregnable than any island fortress. I could not have begun to understand that in 1945, for I did not have the words to describe what I was going through.

Nor did anyone I knew; and certainly not the army. The entire extent of my attention from the British Army after the war consisted of a brief medical examination at an army centre in Edinburgh in November 1945.1 could walk across the room, was warm to the touch and had no incurable diseases, so they turned me loose. Get on with your life, the doctor seemed to say, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. The wounds were not on the surface, nor detectable by stethoscope. My rush to marriage was a symptom of their presence.

The prison camp had become a familiar world to me. I had hardened myself to survive in it, and now I was separated from it, burdened with experiences that I could not describe, cursed with the gifts of deviousness, prevarication and impassivity that had been so essential during my captivity, and expected to resume a normal life.

One of the principal difficulties of the ex-prisoner-of-war is finding the strength to resist the force of circumstance, to say ‘no’ to unwanted suggestions and commands. I think that I had particular difficulty finding the will to dig in my heels, though I also had deep reserves of stubborn energy. But being swept along by events, especially in those first months of freedom, demanded less of my depleted powers. And combined with this negative force was the positive desire to settle, to find an emotional sanctuary as caring as Changi had been of my other injuries in 1944.

Prisoners-of-war don’t find it easy to settle. Today, fifty years after the end of the war, I know a man of about my age, who was also a prisoner in the Far East, and who leaves his house each morning and goes walking, walking, walking until it is dark. He cannot sit and relax. He has become a well-known figure in the town where he lives. For years he controlled this agitation with drink, which kept him close to the pub and a kind of peace, but his alcoholism began to destroy him and he sobered up. Work was always difficult for him, but it too provided a kind of anchor. Now that the alcoholic foundation has been taken away and he has retired, he drifts like a boat, always moving on his own secret current. It’s as though the restlessness which he has been suppressing all his life since his return from the Far East now has nothing to keep it in check, and it has taken him over.

My experiences had put a huge distance between me and my previous life, yet I behaved – was expected to behave – as though I were the same person. In the legal and civil senses I suppose I was, but that was about all. Here was Eric Lomax playing the part of the newly-wed, pretending he was what he had been in 1941, before he left for the East, when his innocence and much of his emotional life had not been ripped out of him. That young man’s life had been mapped out by his obsession with trains and other relics of the industrial age, which were more alluring to him than the history recorded by conventional scholars. The cry of a locomotive had been like an invitation to get away from himself, but the obligation undertaken by that now vanished young man held me in its honourable grip. I had grown up appallingly in the years I had been away. I was much harder, less able to enjoy other people’s pleasures easily and certainly less able to sympathize with their smaller misfortunes. Yet I stepped back confusedly into the tide and it carried me away, as it did so many other young men in that winter of 1945.

We were married in the Chapel, of course, and I was as passive about being drawn back into it as I was about everything else. J. Sidlow Baxter was still in command, still denouncing sin and evil with his evangelical bookkeeper’s fervour, and he was glad to enter me again on the credit side of his flock. The wedding ring I had commissioned in India turned out to be too small for my bride’s finger.

We were happy, at first, as excited as any young lovers can be, but we did not know each other well enough to have signed away our lives together. She was pretty, articulate and gifted with a fine singing voice, but her culture was limited by the nature of her upbringing. Her only world had been that of the Chapel and her parents’ friends. She had stood still in the quiet, determined way that people who are sure of themselves, and who have never been exposed to influences from outside their circle, can sometimes do for their entire lives.

It cannot have been easy for her; she really had no idea of what she was taking on. One of the first things she found herself doing was rubbing special cream into my infected skin. Ringworm and eczema were among my contributions to the honeymoon. I can see how hard it was, despite our later estrangement. I was broken down; her own romantic ideas were rubbed up against the reality of this nervous, pale and debilitated young man. She was as much a victim of the war as me.

One of the first unbridgeable distances between us was created simply by our inability to talk. I have spent most of my life unable to talk about my experiences in South-East Asia, but I am pretty sure that in those early years of intimacy with my wife I wanted to try to tell her, to explain to her what it had been like. It was hard for her to be interested. I was expected to behave as though my formative years had not happened. My fumbling attempts to begin a description of the effects of what my comrades and I had experienced in Kanburi, or to talk about the Japanese who had done these things to us, were brushed aside. She naturally felt that she had had a hard time of it too: for civilians there had been the difficulty of getting eggs, the air raid warnings, the waiting in lines. She simply did not know, and I am sure that tens of thousands of returning soldiers walked bewildered into the same incomprehension. It was as though we were now speaking a different language to our own people. The hurt I felt silenced me as effectively as a gag. It was hard to talk, but my wife made it easy not to.

The nightmares began soon after my return. They were usually about Outram Road. I would be left in a cell on my own, with no food or water, starving and suffocating and crying out for release, and in the dream’s compression of time months would pass while I was ignored, and I knew I was never going to be released. Or I would be doing something perfectly innocent and would suddenly find myself back in Outram Road, the victim of some arbitrary justice, this time with no prospect of ever getting out again because there was no reason for me to be there. At other times I would fall endlessly and painfully down the iron staircase covered in disgusting sores. They were all the same dream.

In the cold light of day my anger was more often turned to the Japanese who had beaten, interrogated or tortured me. I wanted to do violence to them, thinking quite specifically of how I would like to revenge myself on the goon squad from Kanburi and the hateful little interrogator from the Kempeitai with his dreadful English pronunciation, his mechanical questions and his way of being in the room yet seeming to be detached from it. I wished to drown him, cage him and beat him, to see how he liked it. I still thought of his voice, his slurred elocution: ‘Lomax, you will be killed shortly’; ‘Lomax, you will tell us’; you remember phrases from encounters that have hurt you, and my meetings with him were cast in a harsh light.

The Kanburi Radio Affair was already a footnote to the history of the war. Lance Thew had been awarded the British Empire Medal and the rest of us – living and dead – were ‘mentioned in despatches’. Then one morning I read a small paragraph in the Daily Telegraph stating that Captain Komai Mitsuo and Sergeant-Major Iijima Nobuo had been hanged the day before at Changi Gaol for their part in the murder of two British POWs, Lieutenant Armitage and Captain Hawley. Other people had suffered more than we had – the horrors of the European camps and the scale of the massacre of the Jews were beginning to sink into the minds of an unbelieving population – but that did not entirely explain the relegation of our experience to the bottom of the page. The British public was not very interested in the Far Eastern war crimes trials, in general, and official policy was to downplay them for the sake of reconstructing Japan as an ally of the West. The Kanburi trial was a very minor tribunal.

But it was not minor and not a foomote, of course, to anyone concerned with the crimes which it judged. I knew that my statements had helped to hang these men, and I felt a cold twinge of satisfaction. The trial seemed infinitely fairer than any judgment they had ever made on us. I regretted that there were not more of them going to the gallows; I felt that thousands of them were guilty. There was unfinished business between me and the Japanese people as a whole, and a few of them in particular. The administrators of Outram Road and the men who coldly worked so many to death on the railway were more guilty than the drunken sergeants who beat us at Kanburi. But most war crimes trials were about cases of actual murder, so I felt satisfied, as far as this one went. Hawley and Armitage were revenged. I was not sure that I had been.

No trace of my interrogator or his brutal superior the Kempei NCO, who had irritated me so personally, was ever reported. I had never even made a statement about them, though I remembered them more than the killers of Hawley and Armitage who to me were simply a faceless bunch of club-swinging thugs; I remembered the faces of the Kempei men almost every day.

The army was my other safe haven. I signed on for another two years after my return, deferring my life for a while; I was not in a good state to make important decisions. So I applied for and got the post of Signals Officer at the Edinburgh University Senior Training Corps, which would allow me to live at home and continue working in as peaceful a military environment as possible. I spent the next two and a half years teaching undergraduate officer cadets how to operate radio and line communications.

This organization for turning students into officers was an important and active part of the University – Britain still maintained powerful armed forces, the Cold War was beginning and storm clouds were already gathering over Malaya again, as the communist insurgency gathered strength. Most training corps had a full-time army commander as well as a few warrant officers, but I was one of the few signals staff officers in any university. After volunteering for so many things that had caused me so much grief, I felt I deserved this less arduous posting.

It was a genuine respite for me. I lectured the cadets about radio telegraphy, and took them away into the Highlands to teach them how to turn theory into practice when hills intervened between receiver and transmitter, and how to communicate in fog and rainstorms. I put them through it, organizing programmes that gave everybody a chance to discover the joys of cable-laying, switchboard work and despatch-riding. Most of the work revolved around radios now, much more sophisticated versions of the sets with which I had started the war. I could barely recognize them at first, and had to teach myself how to use them from the manuals. No more Line Assisted Wireless for me; and I hoped that these boys would never find themselves stuck in a place like Kuantan as blind and deaf as we had been. Occasionally I took them for a fortnight to Catterick, the Royal Signals headquarters camp, to show them some real army life.

Not being able to share memories was, as I’ve said, a common affliction among those who returned from the war and I could not talk about what had happened to me with a soul. The single and partial exception was anyone who had been through similar experiences; but in the crush of everyday life there were few encounters with ex-POWs. I became close to one former POW, however, and we could talk to each other, guardedly and euphemistically. I saw in him some of the same traits that I had developed, his capacity for enthusiasm and joy replaced by surface coldness and docility. When I applied for an appointment in the Colonial Administrative Service, he did too. I felt he was drifting, as I was in a different way, and I had become briefly part of the tide that was pulling him along. He was following me passively instead of determining his own fate.

I wanted to enter the Colonial Service because I needed to move, and because it offered variety and excitement, and an expansive alternative to the stultifying routines of office life, which I now dreaded. The Service needed people who were self-reliant, who were good administrators and were willing to learn about different things, and of course it would allow me to see more of the world. I had not lost my desire to escape confinement.

As if to remind me of what life could have been like, I had as a formality to rejoin the Post Office Telephones in 1948. This was the job which had been kept for me since I left it in 1939, and I had to turn up to claim it so that I could be transferred away from it. Such are the ways of bureaucracies. I was there for all of a fortnight; and the first thing that was handed to me was that file, full of my notes and memos on garage accommodation. When the deluge recedes, the most banal things are found drying out in the light.

This brief return to my old life also produced a stain on my character which has not been removed to this day. When I was demobilized I took leave, quite properly, and calculated that I would have to report to the Post Office on a certain day. Their calculations, however, alleged that I was a day late at the end of this ‘post-demob’ leave. Formally, I stood accused of being absent without leave. Nearly forty years later I asked for a record of my service, and my transgression is still shown on the civil service records: length of service: twenty years; AWOL: one day.

The Civil Service works with deliberate speed and before they would send me overseas I had to spend a year or so in more homely duties. I became an officer of the Department of Agriculture, and attempted to become an expert on diseases of the potato. My only previous experience of the vegetable had been at Outram Road, when Colonel Parker and I became unwilling gardeners for the Japanese. I could confirm now that the green leaves containing solanine are indeed poisonous. I read up on potato ailments, and drafted memo after memo about menaces to the crop. One of my main concerns was to arrange trials of new brands of potatoes to ensure their suitability for making chips. Every new variety of spud had to be registered and assessed. Fish-and-chip shops were where many British people ate their main meal, so the quality of the fried chip was of some concern to the government. One shop in Edinburgh co-operated nobly with us and very august people from the Department would solemnly sit around a table and taste chips made with different potatoes.

Eventually the Colonial Office in London accepted me as an assistant secretary, and told me that I would be assigned to the Gold Coast, the British territory in West Africa now called Ghana. I knew that I was joining the administration of an Empire which was more or less gracefully dissolving itself, in one of the world’s more remarkable processes of decolonization. Our task in the Gold Coast was to hang on as long as we could, partly to keep the radical nationalist Kwame Nkrumah out of power as a matter of policy, and to put certain developments in place and prepare the way for an efficient and orderly handover of power to the Africans.

Meanwhile, it had begun to dawn on me that my marriage had been a mistake, for both parties. After our first daughter was born in December 1946, my wife’s own mother did not see us or the child for about six years; there was an absolute break. Her family cultivated feuds; she had relatives in the Scottish borders, for example, and few of them would communicate with her. She would often say that people in her family would never let a I slight die a natural death. I think this side of her character may have been developed in the Chapel, and it was certainly not discouraged.

The pettiness of the occasions for these vendettas was staggering. Certain of her relatives would not speak to her, because when we sent out the traditional little boxes of wedding cake to our friends and relatives at the end of 1945, they went out in two or three batches, and this meant that some people got theirs before others. And the ones who were in the second and third deliveries were infuriated because it implied that the recipients of the first wave of little sugary wedges were considered more important than them. These were people who were not even aware of their own entrapment.

This intolerance over things so surpassingly trivial was very hard for me to take. I had felt less morbid vindictiveness towards the Japanese guards in Changi than these seemingly normal Scottish middle-class people were displaying to their own blood relatives. Marriage can be like incarceration without a key, as I was beginning to find out.

Of course it takes more than one person to create what Milton called ‘disconsolate household captivity’, and my withdrawals into cold and blank anger in the face of hostility, pulling my shell around me and locking it tight, cannot have made things easier. Confrontation threatened my whole being, triggering flashes of memory that I could not articulate to anyone, and most tragically of all, not even to my wife.

The feeling of claustrophobia was worsened by the Chapel, where fierce feuds, outbreaks of ostentatious remoteness and snorting resentment would break out over the seating priorities. One woman who had been going to Chapel for thirty years complained loudly one day when my wife and I inadvertently sat in what she regarded as her personal pew. I could not help noticing that most of the veterans had done very little in the war; their complaints about how awful firewatching duties had been did not, under the circumstances, engage my full sympathy. I became impatient at their ignorance and their sheer hypocrisy. They would never dream of going anywhere or learning anything new. One couple kept such a tight rein on their unfortunate daughters that these grown-up women had no opportunity to meet young men, and you could see them ageing into enforced loneliness.

The Gold Coast, when I was sent there in December 1949, was in part an escape from an increasingly unhappy existence. It laid the groundwork for my later drift away from that world. Chapel and all. The death of my father soon after I started work in Africa cut other ties with the pre-war past; his second wife went on living in the house overlooking the Firth, and I never went back there.

The month of my arrival with my wife and young child was the beginning of the most dramatic phase of the independence movement in the Gold Coast. Nkrumah had just launched his ‘Positive Action’ campaign for immediate self-government; the country was convulsed by mass rallies, riots and demonstrations. Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, the governor, declared a state of emergency in January and arrested Nkrumah in an attempt to break the headlong rush to independence. He spent the next fourteen months in gaol. But the leaders favoured by the British failed to win the hearts of the population, and eventually Nkrumah was released, hailed as the undisputed leader of his people and became our partner in the countdown to the withdrawal of our power.

I was assigned to the Department of Rural Development. We had two main tasks: to initiate the Volta River Project, and the construction of Tema Harbour. The first was a plan to build a huge dam across the Volta, the 1000-mile-long river that runs from Upper Volta, as it was then called (it is now the state of Burkina Faso), to the coast east of Accra, in the process creating the largest man-made lake in Africa and the ability to generate tremendous quantities of hydro-electric power. The electricity would help develop the country and specifically its aluminium industry; there are vast amounts of bauxite in West Africa, and a lot of electric power is used in the refining process. It was a truly gargantuan project. I prepared the first contoured map showing the reach of the water that would flood out when the dam was built, joining up dozens of 1-inch survey maps until they covered the floor of a good-sized room. Many of my colleagues refused to believe the implications of what we were doing, and I saw a look of almost terror on their faces when they saw the size of my map and the predicted spread of the water.

The Tema Harbour Project was intimately linked to the dam, and to the ambitious plans for an aluminium industry. Outside the capital Accra there was an ideal spot for a major port, and we proposed to build one from scratch. I remember how a consultant engineer put a wooden peg in the sand on the beach and announced that this was where the western breakwater of the harbour would start.

I was now part of the industrial revolution that had fascinated me for so long, and was playing a small role in the great post-war wave of industrialization. The work was satisfying, even if it now seems touched with the delusion of the time that chemicals and metals could solve almost any problem. Installing heavy industries in what we now call Third World countries proved more complicated than anyone first thought, and the problems of post-independence Africa still more difficult. But the work was well planned and well organized, and these were pleasures in themselves. I was co-ordinating aspects of the plan for the colonial administration and I met US consultants with experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other large projects, which reawakened my old passion for reading about the great railway engineers and bridge builders.

One element of the great scheme was, inevitably, the building of new rail lines. The most ambitious of these was the proposal to build a railway from Kumasi, the inland capital of the old Ashanti kingdom, all the way north to Ouagadougou in French-governed Upper Volta. This would have been a bold chapter in the story of the railway age – 600 miles of track connecting the arid savannah and semi-desert of the upper reaches of the Volta with the tropical regions of the coast, but it never left the engineers’ drawing-boards. Rivalry between French and British aims in Africa and sheer pressure on resources killed the project. But there were other new railways, a branch line out of Accra to Tema Harbour, and another to link Accra and Takoradi, respectively the capital and the chief port on the western side of the country. The freight was still construction traffic on these roads; sturdy, small engines hauled wood and rocks for embankments and breakwaters; they had none of the romance of my childhood icons, but they were steam engines for all that.

I loved seeing this little railway take shape under my partial direction, and by the time I left the country some of these lines were in operation – modest 3′6″ gauge tracks, only a little broader than the metre-gauge tracks that I had grown so familiar with in Malaya and Siam, with many of the same kinds of engines running on them, for the same Crown Agents bought them for the Gold Coast and our possessions and dependencies in South East Asia.

I wrote to the general managers of 3′6″ gauge railways all over the world begging them, if they had any surplus engines, to sell to us because we were terribly short of them. One of the great networks built to this gauge was the Japanese system, but I could not bring myself to write to its management. I had had no contact since the war with any Japanese. I couldn’t pretend that I was in a normal trading or business relationship with Japan.

Meanwhile, my wife and I suffered the loss of our son Eric, who died a day after he was born in Takoradi. It was terrible for her, and it led to a deepening of our unspoken estrangement.

I stayed in my post for six years. For the last year I was on the west side of the Gold Coast as Assistant Government Agent in Sekondi, acting more like a traditional, old-fashioned district commissioner. I had my own district, the most important in the whole country at the time because it contained Takoradi, the principal deep sea port. I was a little governor; I was magistrate, deputy coroner, chairman of the board of visitors of the gaol (which looked exactly like a small version of Outram Road) but for all that I did not have the vice-regal powers of an old DC, who ruled his district with absolute power. I was one of the last of the British colonial officers, and we knew we were on the way out. Decolonization was an agreed strategy, so I simply improvised my various roles as best I could. As magistrate I had to assume that everyone’s evidence was unreliable, from both claimants and defendants, and sort things out on the basis of common sense. In child custody cases, for instance, I would let the children decide who they wanted to be with.

Kwame Nkrumah was the man of the hour, at that time the most celebrated nationalist in Africa apart from Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. We had accepted his accession to power as inevitable, his popularity in the country invincible. I met him when he came to Sekondi. My superior, who was responsible for the whole of the western side of the country gave a dinner for him, and I was invited. I found him amiable and articulate, but out of his depth; I felt he had no training for the immense responsibilities he was about to take on, like many demagogic MPs in Britain and elsewhere. On another occasion he expressed a desire to go swimming, so I lent him my trunks. This is perhaps the closest I have come to the seat of power!

We came home, finally, in 1955, with work on the harbour and the dam well under way, the grant of Ghanaian independence only two years off. I took early retirement -1 was thirty-six years old – and cast around for something else to do. Since this is not an account of my career, I will record briefly that I went on a personnel management course in Glasgow for a year, my interest in what these days would be called ‘human resources’ aroused by my experience of marshalling men and materials in West Africa, and then worked for the Scottish Gas Board, with their industrial relations branch. I became interested in the teaching of better industrial relations, and at the end of the Sixties I became an academic, lecturing at the University of Strathclyde and all over the country on personnel management.

I had to behave all the time as if the past had not occurred. I did not think that I was any different from anyone else, despite my terrible nightmares, which I refused to acknowledge as a problem. I wanted to believe that it had all been buried, yet Outram Road kept coming back, night after night. Silence, disease, hunger, fear, above all the intensity of the uncertainty and fear. It was almost always that terrifying scenario of being inside the gaol again after the war, and since there was no reason for my imprisonment, this time there could be no reason for getting out. My wife did her best to reassure me, but the distance between us was hard to bridge. I would cry out at night, wake up sweating as though I had run up a hill with a heavy load and shake with relief when I found myself in the damp heat of Sekondi or the cold Edinburgh night.

Curiously I recognized the symptoms in others, especially in one man in the Gold Coast who had been in Germany as a POW, and was now nervous, defensive, in bad health. But nobody ever spoke about it and I never brought it up. The only way in which ‘my war’ came up would be around the subject of the Japanese, when I could and would say that I hated them with absolute totality.

It isn’t easy to describe the more subtle ways in which Kanburi and its aftermath lived on inside me. I found it difficult to tolerate grey areas in my life, to accept ambiguity or uncertainty of any kind, and I could not easily forgive the mistakes of others, what is euphemistically called not suffering fools gladly. Trifles bothered me, or perhaps it is truer to say I could not be bothered with them, and I would find ways of procrastinating over the small irritations with which life bombards us. For example, while my professional work was extremely organized and I brought real energy and dedication to it -1 could organize my thoughts and speak without notes with military precision – I found bills, circulars and, especially, demands for personal information more or less unbearable. They were contingencies, distractions, irruptions of uncertainty into a life that craved regularity. It was better to concentrate on one thing at a time. I would often ignore bills with mistakes, unable to face the confrontations and idiotic bureaucratic obstruction I knew I would have to go through to sort them out.

I was often inward-looking, a victim of a strange passivity that made me absorb experiences like blotting-paper but which made it difficult for me to give^ it made me appear slow, yet I was anything but lazy. I felt sometimes like a guest in my own house. When confrontation came, I would resist with immense stubborn energy, revenging myself on the Kempeitai and the guards in every encounter. Although I could not have admitted it, I was still fighting the war in all those years of peace.

I began to worry, a little later, that the sins my captors had sown in me were being harvested in my family in more ways than one. Among Far Eastern ex-prisoners-of-war there is a rumbling of belief that our children are damaged, in some way genetically harmed. It seems to us, when we get together now as older men, that we have bequeathed some strange problems to our children. It is interesting that some American scientists suggest that the notorious ‘middle passage’ of the slave trade may have caused intolerable genetic stresses which damaged the immediate descendants of slaves. I don’t know whether it is good science, but we murmur these things among ourselves, caught between rumour and doubt. Who knows, too, what effects our suppressed feelings may have had on the psychic development of our children?

My elder daughter Linda fell ill, struck by a brain haemorrhage at the age of twelve; to begin with a doctor thought that it was simply a fainting fit, but she did not recover consciousness. She lost the power of her right arm and hand; mercifully, she was left-handed. She had been a promising pianist, with real talent at the age of ten; and now she would never do anything two-handed again in her life.

Linda then had a whole sequence of attacks, nearly dying on several occasions, and she had to live the rest of her life aware of these little bombs always threatening to go off in her head. She achieved her aim of working in a big insurance company, investigating suspicious claims and worked diligently on these cases. Her good humour, so terribly shadowed, could make her friends forget her condition; but she could not escape her congenital weakness. She died at the age of forty-six.

My second daughter was born in 1957. She enjoyed a normal and healthy childhood and became a successful nurse and midwife.

My frequent absences on the lecture circuit were a contributory factor, no doubt, to the breakdown of my marriage, but they were also a symptom of its failure. I wanted to get away. In 1970 I moved out for six months, later drifting back, but it was never the same again. In 1981 I left for good.