singapore hotel: Ghosts laid to rest

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An only child, Lomax joined the postal service in 1935. After a period as a postal clerk, he attended ”evening classes in telegraphy and telephony”. He joined the army’s Royal Signals Corps, received further training and, by March 1941, he was sailing from the Firth of Clyde for service overseas, a second lieutenant.

Throughout his school days and working career, Lomax’s passion was railways. He travelled long distances, often by bicycle, to inspect railway engines, lines and yards.

His style of storytelling reminded me of Albert Facey’s A Fortunate Life – simple and straightforward. There were occasional, brief references to the trauma to come. ”I was pitchforked into work straight from school: from work into the army, from the army into hell.” He is aware of his stubbornness, ”which I would later learn much more about”.

He visits Capetown, his unit sees a good deal of India, then it is on to Singapore and Malaya, where he is in camp, one of 30 signalmen ”headphones to hand, ready to receive or transmit”, when the Japanese invade.

Initially, Lomax is relatively comfortable as a prisoner of war. With technical and administrative training in the British Army and his knowledge of railways, the Japanese use him in their maintenance workshops. At his first posting, ”we were working for Japanese railway fitters, turners and welders, most of them humane men interested in getting a job done, and their workshops were not cruelly managed”. The next camp, Kanburi, further up the Burma Railway line, was ”uncomfortable and oppressive”, but ”… the Japanese in charge were engineers rather than professional Imperial Army soldiers”. However, Lomax does see the columns of ”neglected” and ”bedraggled” troops passing the Kanburi workshop on their way ”up the line”.

A group, including Lomax, constructs a radio to listen to BBC news broadcasts. The radio is discovered by Japanese guards and Lomax is one of five subjected to beatings. Lomax had drawn a map of the area and, when this map is discovered, the Japanese believe he has contact with local inhabitants outside the camp. He suffers further torture. Throughout the ordeal, Lomax is continually confronted by the face of the Japanese interpreter-interrogator and most of his resentment is directed towards this soldier.

Lomax is moved to Outram Road jail in Singapore. The conditions were such that its inmates all strove to be transferred to Changi. The way to do this was to become too weak to survive the regime and require the Changi sick bay. Lomax achieves this and survives the war.

But Lomax’s torment does not end when the war ends. He relates how an elderly memsahib is of the opinion that ”as we had been prisoners of war during most of the fighting … we would be eager to ‘do our bit’ now”. Back in Scotland, his mother has died and his father has married a woman Lomax does not like. He cannot go home.

The first quarter of The Railway Man is about Lomax’s life before the war. The next two quarters covers his life during the war. All are good reading, but it is the final quarter of the book that was, for me, something new in narratives of war experiences. Lomax has a successful working life, a failed marriage, then marries again and, in retirement, begins to ask questions about his suffering during the war. He makes contact with members of his old unit and through them is made aware of a Japanese ex-soldier who is seeking to ”make up for the Japanese army’s treatment of prisoners of war”, specifically on the Burma Railway.

Lomax identifies this man as his interrogator: a face that has haunted him for 50 years.

”Moving” is a word I use sparingly when describing something I have read, but I use it unhesitatingly for the final quarter of The Railway Man.

■ The Railway Man is republished by Vintage.