by Eric Lomax
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 footnote, 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 cla
im 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 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.