Read The railway man : a pow's searing account of war, brutality and forgiveness for Free Online

radio course in 1940 I had already heard Adolf Hitler's voice coming out of my father's radio, an endless rhythmic scream full of strange crescendos. Hitler was not only the most powerful man in Europe, he was also clearly mad. None the less the threat his voice contained seemed as far away as all radio voices.
    I got stuck into the electrical rote-learning that the Post Office Telephones arranged for its staff. We had to memorize complicated circuits and patterns of valves. A typical exam question might be 'Reproduce the Circuit for the No. 2A Switchboard', which was a bit of a labyrinth. The radios of the late Thirties were large heavy pieces of equipment, not quite as massive and unwieldy as Mr Weatherburn's home-made wireless, but solid and imposing for all that; and I began to learn how they worked and how they should be maintained. We also learned about telephones, morse signalling and telegraphy. I was moving on, but I can*t have been content.
    My mentor in the Post Office, Bobby Kinghom, was a friend of the kind that a lonely young man makes in his first job: older, wise to the routines of the office, giving off the air of a vigorous, if slightly mysterious, life outside it. I knew he was interested in religion, and once I lent him my father's copy of Hilaire Belloc's The Path to Rome^ one of those accounts of conversion that English Catholics delight in. Kinghom never returned it, to my father's considerable anger. But my colleague had, as it turned out, taken a very different path to Belloc's.
    My only vivid religious memory from my childhood is of being a choirboy in the Episcopal Church at the age of eleven or twelve. I remember the music and the division of the choir into cantoris and decani, and that I was assigned to the cantoris. What happened, therefore, came as much as a surprise to me as it did to my parents, who had grown used, if not exactly reconciled to my relentless exploration of Britain for unusual machines.
    On summer evenings you could see a great variety of trains at a station in the west of Edinburgh called Dairy Road. It had an island platform in the middle of tracks that ran past it from east to west, and off beyond the tracks were engine sheds and repair works. Sometimes you would see outside its longest shed a string of pre-First-War engines, stubby six-wheeled locomotives of the defunct Caledonian Railway nose to tail with their high steam domes and thin quaint chimneys.
    One Sunday, I stood on the island in the warm dusk, surrounded by empty tracks stretching off on either side, waiting for a train that might have some exotic engine at the head of it. The old railway systems were dissolving fast now, and anything might be coming through, a strange engine of the former London and North Western Railway, perhaps?
    I was approached by an older man who struck up a conversation about trains and about recent sightings at this very station. He was a gangly clothes-pole of a man, a long coat flapping around his shins. I thought he was simply a fellow obsessive and we talked politely about rare southern birds and dying Highland breeds. He really did seem to know a great deal about locomotives. Then, once he had hooked me, the talk turned to religion, and he was so hypnotically persuasive that the transition didn't seem abrupt. In those days, steam locomotion and the divine were not as far apart in my imagination as they should have been.
    Today, a man accosting a youth at a spot like this would arouse suspicions of only one kind, but this man had no carnal intentions at all. He was simply after my soul. His name was Jack Ewart and he belonged to Charlotte Baptist Chapel, a famous independent evangelical church in Edinburgh. He could talk, he could seduce you with talk of love and compassion and salvation, that subtle mixture of flattery and fear that the apostle of any sect learns to use. I found myself, a lonely and impressionable young man, being drawn into the reassuring and comforting world that