In the cold light of day my anger was more often turned to the Japanese who had beaten, interrogated or tortured me. I wanted to do violence to them, thinking quite specifically of how I would like to revenge myself on the goon squad from Kanburi and the hateful little interrogator from the Kempeitai with his dreadful English pronunciation, his mechanical questions and his way of being in the room yet seeming to be detached from it. I wished to drown him, cage him and beat him, to see how he liked it. I still thought of his voice, his slurred elocution: ‘Lomax, you will be killed shortly’; ‘Lomax, you will tell us’; you remember phrases from encounters that have hurt you, and my meetings with him were cast in a harsh light.
The Kanburi Radio Affair was already a footnote to the history of the war. Lance Thew had been awarded the British Empire Medal and the rest of us – living and dead – were ‘mentioned in despatches’. Then one morning I read a small paragraph in the Daily Telegraph stating that Captain Komai Mitsuo and Sergeant-Major Iijima Nobuo had been hanged the day before at Changi Gaol for their part in the murder of two British POWs, Lieutenant Armitage and Captain Hawley. Other people had suffered more than we had – the horrors of the European camps and the scale of the massacre of the Jews were beginning to sink into the minds of an unbelieving population – but that did not entirely explain the relegation of our experience to the bottom of the page. The British public was not very interested in the Far Eastern war crimes trials, in general, and official policy was to downplay them for the sake of reconstructing Japan as an ally of the West. The Kanburi trial was a very minor tribunal.
But it was not minor and not a foomote, of course, to anyone concerned with the crimes which it judged. I knew that my statements had helped to hang these men, and I felt a cold twinge of satisfaction. The trial seemed infinitely fairer than any judgment they had ever made on us. I regretted that there were not more of them going to the gallows; I felt that thousands of them were guilty. There was unfinished business between me and the Japanese people as a whole, and a few of them in particular. The administrators of Outram Road and the men who coldly worked so many to death on the railway were more guilty than the drunken sergeants who beat us at Kanburi. But most war crimes trials were about cases of actual murder, so I felt satisfied, as far as this one went. Hawley and Armitage were revenged. I was not sure that I had been.
No trace of my interrogator or his brutal superior the Kempei NCO, who had irritated me so personally, was ever reported. I had never even made a statement about them, though I remembered them more than the killers of Hawley and Armitage who to me were simply a faceless bunch of club-swinging thugs; I remembered the faces of the Kempei men almost every day.
The army was my other safe haven. I signed on for another two years after my return, deferring my life for a while; I was not in a good state to make important decisions. So I applied for and got the post of Signals Officer at the Edinburgh University Senior Training Corps, which would allow me to live at home and continue working in as peaceful a military environment as possible. I spent the next two and a half years teaching undergraduate officer cadets how to operate radio and line communications.
This organization for turning students into officers was an important and active part of the University – Britain still maintained powerful armed forces, the Cold War was beginning and storm clouds were already gathering over Malaya again, as the communist insurgency gathered strength. Most training corps had a full-time army commander as well as a few warrant officers, but I was one of the few signals staff officers in any university. After volunteering for so many things that had caused me so much grief, I felt I deserved this less arduous posting.
It was a genuine respite for me. I lectured the cadets about radio telegraphy, and took them away into the Highlands to teach them how to turn theory into practice when hills intervened between receiver and transmitter, and how to communicate in fog and rainstorms. I put them through it, organizing programmes that gave everybody a chance to discover the joys of cable-laying, switchboard work and despatch-riding. Most of the work revolved around radios now, much more sophisticated versions of the sets with which I had started the war. I could barely recognize them at first, and had to teach myself how to use them from the manuals. No more Line Assisted Wireless for me; and I hoped that these boys would never find themselves stuck in a place like Kuantan as blind and deaf as we had been. Occasionally I took them for a fortnight to Catterick, the Royal Signals headquarters camp, to show them some real army life.
Not being able to share memories was, as I’ve said, a common affliction among those who returned from the war and I could not talk about what had happened to me with a soul. The single and partial exception was anyone who had been through similar experiences; but in the crush of everyday life there were few encounters with ex-POWs. I became close to one former POW, however, and we could talk to each other, guardedly and euphemistically. I saw in him some of the same traits that I had developed, his capacity for enthusiasm and joy replaced by surface coldness and docility. When I applied for an appointment in the Colonial Administrative Service, he did too. I felt he was drifting, as I was in a different way, and I had become briefly part of the tide that was pulling him along. He was following me passively instead of determining his own fate.
I wanted to enter the Colonial Service because I needed to move, and because it offered variety and excitement, and an expansive alternative to the stultifying routines of office life, which I now dreaded. The Service needed people who were self-reliant, who were good administrators and were willing to learn about different things, and of course it would allow me to see more of the world. I had not lost my desire to escape confinement.
As if to remind me of what life could have been like, I had as a formality to rejoin the Post Office Telephones in 1948. This was the job which had been kept for me since I left it in 1939, and I had to turn up to claim it so that I could be transferred away from it. Such are the ways of bureaucracies. I was there for all of a fortnight; and the first thing that was handed to me was that file, full of my notes and memos on garage accommodation. When the deluge recedes, the most banal things are found drying out in the light.
This brief return to my old life also produced a stain on my character which has not been removed to this day. When I was demobilized I took leave, quite properly, and calculated that I would have to report to the Post Office on a certain day. Their calculations, however, alleged that I was a day late at the end of this ‘post-demob’ leave. Formally, I stood accused of being absent without leave. Nearly forty years later I asked for a record of my service, and my transgression is still shown on the civil service records: length of service: twenty years; AWOL: one day.
The Civil Service works with deliberate speed and before they would send me overseas I had to spend a year or so in more homely duties. I became an officer of the Department of Agriculture, and attempted to become an expert on diseases of the potato. My only previous experience of the vegetable had been at Outram Road, when Colonel Parker and I became unwilling gardeners for the Japanese. I could confirm now that the green leaves containing solanine are indeed poisonous. I read up on potato ailments, and drafted memo after memo about menaces to the crop. One of my main concerns was to arrange trials of new brands of potatoes to ensure their suitability for making chips. Every new variety of spud had to be registered and assessed. Fish-and-chip shops were where many British people ate their main meal, so the quality of the fried chip was of some concern to the government. One shop in Edinburgh co-operated nobly with us and very august people from the Department would solemnly sit around a table and taste chips made with different potatoes.