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

round-trip down the west coast, and back up the east coast via Newcastle and Berwick. I did it completely alone. I was barely aware of what was happening thousands of miles away in Asia. I had no politics; I was an only child.
    It is strange, looking back now, to think of those boys at school to whom I was never really close. Men born ten years after me could speculate idly about their schoolmates, but that option was closed to me by events in China and Central Europe while I was growing up. I know exactly what happened to each of my contemporaries. Of the twenty-five of us in our final year at school, only four survived the war. But there is no justice in statistics, and by some arbitrary chance not one of the twenty-two young men in my officer class at Catterick was killed.
    You had to start at the bottom in the Post Office, just as my father had done nearly forty years before. I became a sorter of mail, and after a week's training I was put on the lowest rung of the Civil Service ladder, from which I was destined to become successively Senior Sorter, Postmaster and so on.
     
    A worker called Bobby Kinghom, who I would later meet under very different circumstances, took me in hand and showed me how to survive without working too hard, and I put his good advice to use on the main shift ft-om 7.30 in the morning until 3.30 in the afternoon, six days a week.
    I had to open parcels from overseas so that customs could inspect them, then laboriously tie them up again. They also assigned me to the football pools section, where a dozen sorters filtered millions of coupons being sent out to the punters who were hoping to get rich from their predictions of the scores of the coming Saturday's soccer matches. All this waste paper, victim of the laws of probability, would have to be sorted, bundled and bagged for movement to Waverley Station, where it would be loaded on to trains heading out to towns in the borders and further south.
    I was now drawing a big circle around Edinburgh of places to which return journeys could be made by bicycle on early summer evenings, and I'd escape to some point on it every afternoon. So many miles, so many lonely sightings of worked metal and quiet satisfaction at another unusual entry into my orderly classification of the world. Ordnance Survey maps helped you to identify half-forgotten branch lines, perhaps some colliery where there might be a couple of engines whose identity and even whose existence would be unknown to anyone outside the colliery itself; but some of the sidings were so obscure that they did not appear on maps, and there was no alternative but to search them out.
    I learned in the Post Office that obsession can take many forms. One much older man became something of a special friend. He had been unemployed for most of the previous five years and had become a communist. He became obsessed with our ignorance of the names of places to which the pools envelopes were being sent. His need for order and his conscientious devotion to the job drove him to make, in his own time, over a period of weeks, a card-index of every British place-name he could find, as an aid to sorting the pools mail. Anything less hke the behaviour of a communist militant is difiQcult to imagine; but perhaps this innocent card-index man would have found a different outlet for his obsession if the circumstances had been different.
    Some flavour of the austerity and discretion of the workplace in the 1930s remains with me in the memory of a colleague called Wendy, from whom I took over duties in the motor transport section after I passed the clerical officer's examination in late 1936. One lunchtime she failed to return to the office. Such was our respect for punctuality that I began to imagine that she had had an accident, or been kidnapped. In a manner of speaking she had suffered both fates: she had used her lunch hour to get married.
    My job was now to maintain the records for the Post Office Telephones' vehicles