Some of the prisoners built their own radio which they used to follow the progress of the war. Subsequently he was sent to Burma to work on the railway to Siam (now Thailand). Less than a year later, he was captured by the Japanese after the surrender of Singapore – and for the next three and a half years Nan waited, not knowing if he was alive or dead.Įric, meanwhile, had been force-marched along with other British, Australian, Indian and Malay prisoners to the infamous concentration camp at Changi. In the months before he left, he'd been courting Nan in their native Edinburgh and on the eve of his departure they got engaged. He was there physically, but emotionally he was 100% absent," says Charmaine.Įric was 20 when he joined the Royal Signals Corps and went, in 1941, to south-east Asia. "My dad's feelings were locked inside himself. "He had this armour and you could never get beneath it to find out what was really going on," she says. The truth was that only Eric knew and the only way he could survive was by burying it so deeply inside himself that he couldn't communicate anything. "But no one ever explained what tortured meant." "I was forever being told, 'Your dad was tortured'," she recalls. But while he was the victim of appalling physical torture (in Burma he was waterboarded daily and kept at the point of death for weeks), his family were tortured secondhand, for decades, because of what it did to him and to their relationship.įor Charmaine, growing up, one phrase continually cropped up. That is an extraordinary feat, because the truth is that Charmaine, Linda and Nan were victims of torture just as Eric was. That understanding has meant the end of a long journey to forgive her father. What I saw for the first time was the man Dad should have been, the man he would have been if he hadn't suffered in the terrible way that he did." "Jeremy Irvine is so like my dad it's uncanny. "On screen I got to see him as a young man – as he was before I met him, as he was even before he married my mum," she says. But seeing The Railway Man has prompted her to do so because, watching it, she felt as though the final piece of her lifelong mission to understand her father was being slotted into place. "I could see them thinking, where do you fit into all this?" she says.Ĭharmaine wasn't sure whether she wanted to tell the story of how she fitted in, the story that is missing from the film of her father's life and yet integral to it. So when Charmaine attended the film premiere in London earlier this month, she noticed a few puzzled looks when she told people she was Eric's daughter. Instead, it effectively toggles between the latter-day Lomax as he meets and marries the compassionate Patti (Nicole Kidman, as a former nurse who struggles to understand her tight-lipped new husband’s longtime trauma) and flashes back to a young Lomax’s (Jeremy Irvine) horrific time as a prisoner of war under the young Nagase’s (Tanroh Ishida) iron thumb following the 1942 fall of Singapore.Today Nan and Linda are dead, and Eric himself died last year. The film, as directed by Jonathan Teplitzky from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson, takes anything but a direct approach toward that tense, final showdown between Lomax and Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada). Lomax will eventually cross continents to confront his erstwhile captor and hopefully quell the post-traumatic stress disorder that has plagued the self-dubbed “railway enthusiast” for decades. He learns that Takashi Nagase, the Japanese interpreter at the helm of that cruel, unforgettable punishment, is still alive. An alternately delicate and brutal retelling of the memoir by former World War II British Army officer Eric Lomax, “The Railway Man” is an impressively crafted, skillfully acted, highly absorbing journey into a dark corner of world history.Ĭolin Firth plays Lomax in 1980, more than 35 years after being tortured at a Japanese labor camp in Thailand.
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