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December 28, 2013

A POW’s widow recounts the long battle for forgiveness that became The Railway Man.

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Patti Lomax lowers her eyes for a moment and swallows a sob. She is recalling the moment when she and her late husband, Eric, who was tortured by the Japanese as a prisoner of war working on the Burma Railway, visited a cemetery of war graves in Thailand some 50 years later. After suffering the effects of battle stress for decades, Eric Lomax had set out to meet and forgive his torturers. His widow was keenly aware that none of the dead would have that chance.

”I was wondering whether we were being disloyal to all these young people,” she says before her voice cracks. ”And my husband just turned to me and he said: ‘Patti, some time the hating has to stop’.” She composes herself. ”Sorry.”

Eric Lomax’s struggle with hatred is the subject of The Railway Man, which stars Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman and is directed by Australian Jonathan Teplitzky. Lomax died last October, aged 93. His wife was clearly his rock. Facing the press at the San Sebastian Film Festival, she succumbed to just that one tearful moment.

Memories: Patti Lomax visits the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. Photo: Graham Tidy

”She was treated very badly at times emotionally and what have you,” Teplitzky says. ”But she stuck with it, she hung in there, which is one of the things Nicole said. She said: ‘I really want to do this because it speaks so strongly about what it takes to love someone’. And that is what Patti’s like.”

Eric Lomax started his working life as a telegraphist in the Scottish post office. He was a Royal Signals officer when he was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore and put to work in the Thai jungle. Then he was discovered to be part of a group of canny Brits who had built a radio out of scrap. The Japanese officers were convinced that Lomax was the ringleader of an insurrection plot, and they were determined to torture it out of him.

”Torture continued for about a year, on and off. And during the water torture, for instance, Eric’s arms were broken. He had been beaten beforehand and his hip was broken,” says his wife.

Eric Lomax and his tormentor Nagase Takashi during WWII.

She speaks calmly now. This is well-trodden ground. Water-boarding, she says, was worse than anything else.

”When President Bush was talking about water-boarding, my husband wrote an article for the Times describing what it was like. And that’s just as relevant now.”

Part of his journey to recovery involved working with a British charitable institution called Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, where he talked to Iraqi refugees and young soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Veterans receive less help now than ever, she says. ”If they have had a leg blown off, it shows, but if they have seen terrible things that left their minds affected, then they’re left on their own, unless help comes from a charity.”

Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman in The Railway Man.

Lomax had a passion for trains. He spotted Patti Wallace consulting a map on the intercity to Edinburgh and decided she was a kindred spirit. They married in 1983, when he was 62 and she was 45. His previous marriage had foundered under the pressure of his appalling nightmares, mood swings and erratic behaviour. Patti gradually realised this was his personal war legacy and determined to help him through it. Even so, she often felt like leaving too.

”I loved him dearly, but even when you love someone, when they push you and hurt you so much … in a sense that was almost part of it, an inner anger. He didn’t trust anybody, not even me.”

Nevertheless, she was able to persuade him to let her write to a psychiatrist studying former prisoners of war, initiating a long process of recovery. ”I explain it to myself and others as a little bit like an alcoholic having to realise he needs help before he does anything. Eric gradually realised that he was being different and that he would lose me and he cared enough, although he didn’t express it, to try to receive help. In fact, it was probably only in 2011 that I really realised he did feel deeply about me.”

A crunch moment arrived when a fellow former prisoner sent him a newspaper cutting featuring Takashi Nagase, a Japanese wartime soldier who was now campaigning, against considerable opposition at home, for reconciliation and a recognition of guilt.

Nagase was the translator whose voice had taunted Lomax through those long interrogations, even telling him to ”keep his chin up” as he was beaten. Lomax held on to the cutting for two years before going to meet his tormentor in Kanchanaburi, the site of the infamous bridge over the River Kwai.

Patti Lomax believes he went with the intention of killing Nagase. In fact, the two became firm friends. Both lives were scarred. They understood each other. Lomax’s poor health meant they met only a few times, but they would speak by phone and, every Christmas and birthday, Nagase would send a card showing a Japanese train.

The Railway Man, Eric Lomax’s measured, moving autobiography of his ordeal and the fight to transcend it, was published in 1995. It won several prizes and was filmed as a documentary and as a television drama. Cinema, however, proved a tougher proposition. It took the producers 15 years to bring the film to fruition. Originally, they envisaged a $US40 million war epic, which was eventually redrafted as a $US15 million drama focused on the couple’s shared experience of battle stress. The film was still being shot when Lomax died. He was able to visit the set just once, the crew lifting his wheelchair to the top of a steep hill where Firth was being filmed staring across the sea. That, says Teplitzky, was ”a fantastic day”.

Teplitzky was asked to direct this more intimate version of the story just three years ago. He cast Firth, who then suggested Kidman. Patti Lomax says she steered clear of giving advice on how she should be played.

”I knew she had had experiences in her own life, as we all know, protecting a loved husband, so I trusted that she would be able to relate to my experiences. And she is an expert. She is a professional and she has her way of doing things.” Her husband’s illness meant they rarely went to the cinema. He didn’t know who Firth was until he saw him on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, snapped at a film premiere.

”Over those 15 years we lost faith in ourselves quite often,” says scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, who was with the project from the beginning. ”But Eric and Patti never lost faith in us.”

During that time, the team became friends. ”I think it had always been very important for them to share that story,” says Teplitzky. ”When you make that leap to forgiveness, you carry a sort of desire to get other people to see it the same way you do.”

Not that it was easy. ”I felt very angry,” Patti Lomax says. ”I wasn’t as forgiving as Eric. Then I had to give myself a good talking to, because it wasn’t my place not to forgive. If Eric had, I had to. And then, we moved on.”

The Railway Man is screening now.