The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness (27 page)

This man was called Nagase Takashi, and he lived in the city of Kurashiki. He wrote to Babb, saying that he could not help him with the information he required, but that he thought the man in question had died soon after the war.

Babb suggested that some of the information I was seeking might be in the Public Record Office in Kew, where records of some of the war crimes trials were now held. In the spring of 1985,1 found myself sitting at a quiet table reading fading copies of old documents in File W0235/822, the official record of the trial of those held responsible for the deaths of Captain Hawley and Lieutenant Armitage and for the ill-treatment of my colleagues and me.

It was an extraordinary afternoon. I forgot my surroundings, and entered a kind of trance as I read, visualizing the scene in Kanburi almost as a spectator. There was the guardroom, the Korean and Japanese guards, the wooden table, the drainage ditches, the areas of raw earth, the dust and heat and in the distance the hazy mountains which were a barrier between us and the friendly west; the row of British army officers, beginning to suffer terribly from several hours of exposure to the heat, from the brilliance of the sun and from thirst, still standing to attention with great difficulty, and then from the dark the rabble emerging to beat the men.

I came to myself after several hours of reading and rereading the evidence, including some of the documents I had typed myself, feeling completely exhausted. Perhaps the most remarkable element in this experience was the curious sensation that I was reading something in which I was not personally involved. I was seeking these exact truths on behalf of some person I barely knew.

Babb moved from Oxford to Cambridge late in 1985, and I went to visit him. He was very old and ill, but clear-minded and articulate. I was not surprised to discover that he was, like so many of us, ambivalent about that part of his past. He had destroyed his POW notes and papers in the 1960s, and later regretted doing it; he tried to reconstruct them from copies in the Imperial War Museum. His faith had thinned after the war; he had exchanged religion for the certainties of mathematics, and taught the subject for years, returning to his role as padre only once, on a visit with ex-POWs to modem Thailand.

He gave me some information about his correspondent Nagase Takashi, who claimed to have become active in charitable causes near Kanburi in the post-war years, and who had just built a Buddhist temple close to the railway there. I read about his activities with cold scepticism and found the very thought of him distasteftil. I could not believe in the idea of Japanese repentance. He had organized a meeting of'reconciliation' at the River Kwae Bridge, that too-famous structure which has given so many people such a false picture of POW life through the David Lean film (who ever saw such well-fed POWs?). I had not seen a Japanese since 1945 and had no wish ever to meet one again. His reconciliation assembly sounded to me like a fraudulent publicity stunt.

Padre Babb died in 1987. I might have taken up direct correspondence with his repentant Japanese ex-soldier, but it would have been easier to cut off my arm.

It was becoming more and more difficult for the person I loved most to bear with me. The ex-prisoner, even after several decades of 'forgetting', can puzzle and frighten others. It is impossible for others to help you come to terms with the past, if for you the past is a pile of wounded memories and angry humiliations, and the ftiture is just a nursery of revenge. At times my good qualities, which I am self-aware enough to know that I have, could almost be crowded out by sudden triggerings of frightened anger. A confrontational edge to a voice could bring all my shutters down. All of this made it difficult to imagine a way of healing my wounds.

Patti had to suffer the sudden icy rages, the withdrawals of affection and contact, of a man who could not stand being teased even lovingly. My hurt response was never deliberate; it was a way of disappearing into myself, of adopting the impassive hurt features of the victim; I shut down as a way of protecting myself. Patti was bewildered by it. I recall not speaking to her once for almost a week because of some imagined insensitivity. Another time, I woke from an afternoon nap after some wonderful days in which we had been getting on so well, and possessed by the spirit of loving fun I crept downstairs naked, intending to surprise my wife as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. When I appeared like a ghost at the door behind her she turned and, matching my high spirits, threw a wet dish-cloth at me to cover my indecent condition. That harmless gesture pitched me into a frightened remoteness, ruining a delightful piece of hilarious intimacy.

Everything in my world was still printed in black and white. I had become so used to burying the truth, the real pain, that I preferred to hope it would go away: as I thought my torture had, as I fooled myself Outram Road could be made to do. My unreasonable docility was allied to immense stubbornness.

Patti suspected that I had been seriously damaged by my wartime experiences, and that they were at the bottom of our difficulties, and decided that something had to be done about it; neither of us could bear the thought of our relationship breaking down.

I had no idea where to turn. The thought of consulting a psychiatrist or psychotherapist had never entered my head. The ordinary former Far East POW has probably never talked to anyone about the details of his experiences, except perhaps to other ex-POWs. A few have succeeded in writing memoirs, but they are very few. Not talking becomes a fixed habit, a way of shielding ourselves from those years, and this is doubly true for the victim of torture, who most certainly does not talk. I can write this now, but I have come a long way since the moment I first determined to confront my memories.

We found ourselves pursuing parallel lines of enquiry. Patti read an article about the long-term health of former POWs from the Far East by Dr Peter Watson, a Senior Medical Officer of the Department of Health. He had studied a thousand of us, and listed the medical problems that we faced, and reported that over half those he investigated had obvious psychological problems.

She wrote to Dr Watson, and soon I was on my way to the RAF Hospital at Ely, in Cambridgeshire, for a tropical disease investigation, with a special request for psychiatric evaluation. I was going to have to talk at length about Siam and Malaya, more than I had ever done at one time to anyone. I knew that for the treatment, whatever it was, to have any effect, I would have to talk, but I could not bring myself to do it. I solved the problem by writing the story of my misadventures in the form of a Memorandum, which ran to over fifty typewritten pages. I presented this to an astonished Squadron-Leader Bloor, the consultant psychiatrist at Ely. I could not possibly have told him any of it by word of mouth, but the Memorandum gave us a basis for discussion. For the first time in my life, I felt that a barrier was being pushed aside.

After four days in Ely I returned home. In the meantime Dr Bloor called to confirm that Patti had on her hands a straightforward case of psychic damage arising from wartime trauma, a kind of prolonged battle-stress. He may have had a more clinical name for my state of mind, but it did not matter; simply to have the problem identified and named was in itself a step forward.

Meanwhile, I had read an article about the launching of a new organization. It was called the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and had set up shop in a disused hospital in London. I knew nothing about it, but wrote to its director, Mrs Helen Bamber, and early in August 1987 I was invited to visit them. Helen Bamber received me personally. I can still see myself sitting at the end of her desk with my back to the wall, haltingly describing why I had come in precise sentences that hinted at things I could not say. I still thought that what I was telling her was unique to me, and perhaps I felt a little ashamed of my difficulties; but when she told me that everything I had told her was so familiar to her, from countless victims of torture from many different countries, the most intense feeling of relief flooded through me.

She was utterly unhurried, and this is what impressed me more than anything. She seemed to have infinite time, endless patience and sympathy; but above all she gave me time. It was astonishing simply to know that the pressure of everyday life would not drown out what I had to say. I remembered the half-hour medical examination in 1945, when I was still raw and sore, and there was no interest or time. Half a century later I was still livid with suppressed anxiety and now at last here was someone with the time. Not only that, there was the easing of mind that came with knowing I was not uniquely crippled or mad.

That meeting was like walking through a door into an unexplored world, a world of caring and special understanding.

Helen Bamber is a remarkable woman. A small person, whose stillness and calm presence belie an extraordinary energy for her seventy years, she has spent most of her life working with the victims of cruelty. The Medical Foundation of which she is a founder is probably the only organization in the world whose staff and consultants are expert in the problems of the tortured. Helen entered Bergen-Belsen with the Allies at the age of nineteen in 1945, and stayed for two and a half years. It is an illusion to think that the inmates of the Nazi camps were 'liberated' and went home; most of them had nowhere to go, and it was people like Helen who looked after their tuberculosis, their memories of cannibalism, murder, and the grotesque selection procedures that sent some to work and some to the gas chamber. She learned as a girl in Belsen the importance of allowing people to tell what had been done to them; the power of listening to their testimony and of giving people the recognition that their experience deserves.

For many years Helen worked with Amnesty International, and the demand for special services for victims of torture eventually became so pressing that she set up her new organization. We've learned so little in my lifetime that torture is now a global epidemic: Helen's small group has seen 8000 cases in its ten years of work.

Our first meeting was an exploratory one, but after an attempt to interest my local health service in taking me on - when I was told by a young psychiatrist that ancient history did not fall within her brief-I received an invitation from Helen Bamber to become the first ex-serviceman from the Second World War to be accepted as a patient of the Foundation. This changed my life, at nearly seventy years of age.

I was amazed again and again that everyone in the Foundation from the Director to the newest and youngest member of staff cared enough to observe and to listen, and to listen again. I could hardly believe that I was beginning to talk.

Throughout 1988 and 1989 Patti and I attended this extraordinary place every four weeks, making a round trip of 600 miles on each occasion. The doctor assigned to me, Stuart Turner, was a man of infinite tact, and he persuaded me in his 'guided conversations' to reveal more and more, gradually bringing to the surface every fragment of my experiences from early 1942 onwards. He seemed to have wide and painful knowledge of the world's tortures and of their effects on victims. I had never before met a doctor who was so perceptive and so willing and so quick to understand.

I was aware of myself for the first time as a person for whom the idea of torture might hold some answers - why I was such a strange combination of stubbornness, passivity and silent hostility; why I was unable to express open anger, and why I found authority so difficult; and why I was sometimes unable even to feel.

Stuart once told me that I was the only patient he had ever met whose face was so inscrutable that he could not tell what I was thinking. I had never heard my mask-like expression described so objectively; it must have slipped on whenever I wanted to hide from his questions for a moment.

While I was learning how to face the past and beginning for the first time in my life to understand what sort of person I had become during the war, I had not forgotten my personal quest for the full truth of what happened in 1943, and yet in the course of these two years, my search changed its character only very slowly. The need to identify the Japanese responsible for these particular cruelties was reasonable enough, but the idea of revenge was still very much alive in me.

One of the men I had found in my belated search for information was Jim Bradley, who had lived in the bed next to mine at Changi in 1944. He published an account of his experiences as a member of the Wilkinson escape party in 1943 and his subsequent mistreatment, and after reading a review of his book I foimd a copy in which I read a warm tribute to *the late Eric Lomax'. It was a pleasure to write and surprise Jim with my insistence on living. We met and renewed our friendship. In October 1989 I went to stay overnight with him and his wife lindy at their home in Midhurst, a village in Sussex on the edge of the South Downs. We had a pleasant evening, talking about the old days, and over breakfast the following morning Lindy gave me a photocopy of an article from xhc Japan Times of 15th August 1989. This is an English-language paper published in Tokyo and not a publication I was ever likely to buy. Lindy had been sent it by a member of the War Graves Commission in Japan, who knew of her extensive collection of cuttings about the war in the Far East, and she thought that this article might be of interest to me because it mentioned Kanchanaburi.

The article was about Mr Nagase Takashi, the interpreter who had helped the Allied armies find their dead along the railway after the war, and Padre Babb's eager correspondent. As I read it.

I experienced a strange, icy joy of the weirdest kind. A photograph accompanied the piece. It was of a shght elderly man, dressed in a dark collarless shirt and leaning back in a chair against a wall full of books, his arms spread out to the side making him look resigned and vulnerable. Behind his right shoulder was a large photograph of the River Kwae Bridge with its distinctive spans in the shape of minor arcs. The face was unsmiling, thin and familiar with pain, the face of an ailing seventy-one-year-old man; but the text with its short paragraphs and neutral prose revealed a younger face behind it.