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

about climbing aboard the platform of a steam engine, nine or ten feet off the ground, and standing in firont of the wall of instruments, the gleaming levers, throttles and stopcocks that regulated so much power.
    We thought of ourselves as being involved with these smoky vehicles of change, we never saw ourselves as just standing on the ends of platforms crossing numbers off a list. We didn't tolerate firivolity, or drinkers or the unserious. But machines don't make good companions, and it is true that I spent much of my youth alone, cycling between stations on roads that could be grey and wet in autumn and winter, with often only a distant relationship to my fellow enthusiasts. It isn't much wonder that I was so easily recruited into the Chapel - but that was later.
    Meanwhile, attendance at the Royal High School became more and more of a penance. Many of the boys delivered by tram on the 1 St October 1924 continued to be unhappy ten years later. The attitude of many teachers towards pupils was deplorable. They seemed to regard us as something of a nuisance and an interruption to their daily routine; collectively to have been unaware that children and their interests had any connection with the employment of teachers.
    There were exceptions. One devoted history teacher came up with a scheme by which any pupil who discovered a genuine error in any history text would be awarded an extra 1 per cent in the term examination. The enthusiasm with which his pupils combed their texts for mistakes was impressive, though there were rumours that their parents had been drawn into the research. Inevitably, a market economy developed around this precious information. Confident boys placed suspected errors on the market, charging rates that varied with the probability of acceptance. It was good practice for life, of a kind.
    The school's emphasis on classics was less useftil for the world we were about to enter. By the time I was fifteen, my father had to ask the Rector to make special arrangements to allow me to study history and geography instead of Greek. But as the final examinations approached, I knew that my prospects of formal academic success were slim.
    On holiday in the autumn of 1935, my father saw an advertisement for a Civil Service competition for a single appointment as a sorting clerk and telegraphist in the GPO in Edinburgh, and announced that I should apply. Sons in those days did exactly what their fathers told them to do, or at least I did, so at the age of sixteen I sat the examination. I tookfijrst place in the city, to my own astonishment and my family's, and on the morning the brown envelope came my father told me that I could leave school that day.
    I went to the Rector's office and told him that I was going. The Rector, a very elevated person named Dr King Gillies told me in omniscient tones that I was being very foolish, that I could expect only to become a butcher's delivery boy - the ultimate social disgrace. I spoiled his day by showing him the letter firom the Civil Service Commission. And so my formal education ended.
    I still think I would have made a reasonably good butcher's boy.
    Early in January 1936,1 started to study at home for the next grade of the Civil Service. I had a couple of months before I started work. I also began to explore the Lothian Hills and the coast, cycling to small harbours and old docks, to obscure sidings that were said to contain interesting survivors of early locomotive classes. These were rehearsals for later marathon rides around the kingdom on my brief holidays from the Post Office. I thought that I might never have so much completely free time at my disposal again. I was right.
    In the year of the Popular Front in France and of the Spanish Civil War, the year Japan began its assault on China, I was going on even longer excursions. In 1937, on my annual holiday from what was then a not very fulfilling job, I cycled all the way to the English Channel and back - a 1000-mile