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

Caroline Jordan, a neighbour's child who I helped with maths and Latin. I think her father had me in mind for her, but nothing came of it.
    Instead, I met a young woman in the Chapel, the daughter of two members of its congregation, and we began to see each other in a decorous way. Her mother was a formidable woman, of intransigent virtue, but her daughter and I walked out together, avoiding the temptations of the city of the world. Dances and films and similar occasions of sin were out of the question for us; we visited each other's houses, took long walks in the country and busied ourselves with Chapel affairs.
    I am aware that I missed a lot in my childhood. I did not know things I should have known, my education was curtailed; my emotional education was still very rudimentary before it was almost snuffed out a few years later in a prison yard. I was pitchforked into work straight from school; from work into the army; from the army into hell.
    In a way, though I feel very distant from the young man who was so easily drawn into that sectarian embrace, the moral conviction of being saved, that I really had found God, helped me to survive what came later. I was still very committed and religious when I went to war. A rearrangement of personal authority took place during the three and a half years of our imprisonment. Under those terrible pressures a private might emerge as a leader, and his standing would simply be accepted. I must have seen it in very pure Protestant terms, as though we had somehow returned to the conditions of the Old Testament. I even felt myself gaining some moral authority, growing in a human way despite starvation and misery and dirt. I never felt that I was owed any particular status, but some others acted as though it were there. Some of the traditional leaders, on the other hand, some of the senior ofiRcers, sank without trace. If I can be grateful to the Chapel for anything, it is for helping me build that armour of stubbornness that got me through.
    I was not a politically-minded young man, and I could lose myself in my religious and mechanical enthusiasms. The drastic nature of the world in the late Thirties didn't really sink in until my father confirmed the worst predictions. Out walking on the promenade at Joppa one afternoon in the spring of 1939, he rebuffed my polite enquiry about holiday plans by saying with adult finality that since there was going to be a war, he very much doubted if there would be much scope for holidays that summer.
    Once conscription was introduced later that year, I decided to take, not exactly evasive action, but action to optimize my position. I joined the Supplementary Reserve of the Royal Corps of Signals, which recruited men firom the Post Office Telephones. Until war was declared, my only duties would be attendance at the annual 'camp' of Scottish Command Signals.
    So it was that on 4th May 1939 I became 2338617 Signalman Lomax E.S., based in Edinburgh Castle. Mills Mount barracks was inside the north side of the castle, with a magnificent view for miles across the city and out over the Forth to the hills of Fife. The 'camp' that simimer consisted of me and a young man named Lionel.
    Few people can have had a stranger introduction to the British Army. There was no induction into a depot or drill hall; no weapons training; not even a sergeant-major to humiliate us. I was simply told to sit at a typewriter and to turn out letters; Lionel was shown how to fill up quartermaster's returns. An insurance clerk, he couldn't stop referring to Scottish Command Headquarters as 'Head Ofifice'.
    Gradually, in this unmilitary atmosphere we learned the harder business of the Royal Signals. A corporal called Moore tried to turn us into efficient signallers, making us see how our work was important to the string of coastal defence batteries on the north coast of Scotland and in the Orkneys, where the great naval base of Scapa Flow was located. We learned about the importance of