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

all over the south east of Scotland. We had to watch out for things like excessive fuel consumption, breakdowns and accidents. This was my future now: the minute administration of Post Office machinery, counting and accounting in careful detail for the public's means of communication and the people who kept it running.
    The life that awaited me if I had not broken from it can be guessed at in the story of the file on expanding shelter for our vehicles in the Edinburgh area. I wrote minutes, memos, drew up lists of suitable premises. In 1948 I went back briefly to the Post Office after leaving the army, after a war in which millions of people had died cruel and pointless deaths, in which I had been shattered psychically and physically. On my first day back in civilian employment the file on garage accommodation was solemnly handed to me. It had not been opened for almost a decade. Time had stopped in this fusty government oflfice while for me it had accelerated beyond reason.
    Some inkling of dread must have percolated into me back in 1936, because I decided to make another move. I realize now, looking back, that for all my conformity I was looking for something more satisfying, more wholly absorbing than the set lines of my life could offer; in my own way I was very ambitious. I decided to take evening classes in telegraphy and telephony. My father thought that this was most irregular, wanting to switch from the office grades to the technical, from the supervisory to the practical. We were staff, we did not work with our hands. But with that stubbornness which I would later learn much more about, I went ahead.

CHAPTER TWO
    I GREW UP IN a world in which tinkering and inventing and making were honoured pastimes. My father, though he was not a telegraph engineer, liked to experiment with technical equipment. In the early 1920s he and his friends Mr Weatherburn and Mr Patrick were building a wireless, which they kept in Weatherbum's house.
    It sat on a table in a room cluttered with glass valves, flex, pliers, copper wire, soldering irons and screwdrivers. There was a strange burning metallic smell, a smell of glue and oil. I could touch the dark rolls of thick sticky tape, but was warned not to touch the big black dials with their pointers turned to the brass buttons set into the wood panel. Three beautifriUy-milled brass cylinders, detectors for those mysterious waves that I couldn't see as they rolled into the lighted room, were set into the polished mahogany of the box. The front panel was studded with protruding, fragile looking valves, switches and dials, and polished brass terminals. I could see the delicate metal in the bulbs of the valves. The whole apparatus looked at once ridiculous and awesome. It was like an unfinished toy, but also an engineered aesthetic tool, something crafted and heavy. Its front sloped back like the stand used for the big Bible in church.
    My father placed a pair of heavy headphones around my ears, and I heard, through the hiss and buzz of far-off energies, a disembodied human voice. Somewhere a long way away a man was sending his words into space and they were somehow being collected here and narrowed through my ears alone.
    In the worst times, much later, when I thought I was about to die in pain and shock at the hands of men who could not imagine anj^ing of my life, who had no respect for who I was or where I had come from, I might have wished that my father had had a different passion. But after the First War, technology was still powerful and beautiftil without being menacing. Who could have thought that radio telegraphy, a simple channelling of ethereal lines of force, could cause terrible harm? It was a wonderful instrument by which people could speak to each other, and I knew that up on the hill in Edinburgh Castle there was a station of the BBC speaking calmly and authoritatively through educated English voices about the weather, the news and the Empire.
    By the time I started my own