The pride, pain of Railway Man’s Canadian wife Patti Lomax
Movie shows how British Second World War PoW forgave his Japanese torturer
Patti Lomax met her husband on a train. It was 1980 and she was visiting Britain from Canada. Eric, then 62, and she struck up a conversation about the book she was immersed in, a guide to England’s railways.
“That was the beginning of it all,” recalls Patti. “We met for lunch in Edinburgh a few weeks later.”
At the time, both were married to other people, but neither happily, and their bond grew stronger. They married in 1983.”
Eric, who died in 2012, is the author of The Railway Man, the story of the atrocities he suffered as a prisoner of war in Thailand, working on the socalled “Death Railway” during the Second World War.
More than 60,000 Allied troops captured by the Japanese were set to work on the train track. Conditions were horrendous, with searing heat and unbearable humidity. Dysentery and cholera were rife. Prisoners were often brutally beaten, and 12,399 died.
Eric was liberated from Changi, the notorious labour camp in Singapore in 1945.
Scarred by war, Eric soon drove away his own wife and two children. It would be several decades before he summoned the courage to confront one of the men who had tortured him.
Now his harrowing tale has been made into a film. Eric is played by Colin Firth and Jeremy Irvine, who portrays him in his younger days as a Royal Signals officer. Patti is played by Nicole Kidman. Eric died before the film was completed, and so Patti, 76, 20 years younger than Eric, tells his story.
They were on their honeymoon when she realized Eric suffered
The nightmares were terrible. He had flashbacks, long silences if I happened to say something that triggered a memory.
PATTI LOMAX
WIDOW OF POW ERIC LOMAX
from post traumatic stress disorder ( PTSD). She awoke to find him thrashing and screaming in pain. “The nightmares were terrible,” she says. “He had flashbacks, long silences if I happened to say something that triggered a memory.”
Routine tasks such as going to the bank reminded him of being in an interrogation room. He would walk out of a restaurant if diners there were Japanese.
“He couldn’t talk to me and it took a long time to finally get him to realize, and myself to realize, that he needed help.”
So began two years of counselling, and, little by little, Patti — who accompanied Eric — began to learn the horrors of what he had been through.
Eric was 22 when he was captured. He toiled for 20 hours a day in 38 C heat, malnourished and diseased. In 1943, his captors discovered Eric had built a radio so he and his comrades could monitor the war.
As punishment, he and six others were forced to stand in the heat for days. At night, they were stomped on and beaten unconscious with pickaxe handles.
The face of one captor lodged in Eric’s mind, Takashi Nagase. Years later, he received a letter from a friend. It contained a clipping from a Japanese newspaper, a review of Nagase’s autobiography.
“It described Eric’s tortures and an experience that the author had that made him feel he had been forgiven for his sins,” says Patti.
“I was incandescent. It is very unusual for me to be angry but to think this awful man had felt this while Eric was suffering … So, with Eric’s permission wrote Mr. Nagase a letter.”
To her surprise, Nagase replied. “I had asked him how he could possibly think he was forgiven, ” Patti explains.
“His letter back was very apologetic, touching really. We learnt that in atonement for the atrocities he had committed he had done a tremendous amount of charity work.
“We corresponded for many months before Eric felt ready to write back — and another two years before Eric wanted to meet him.”
Patti accompanied Eric to Thailand in 1993. The meeting with Nagase took place near the bridge over the River Kwai.
“I am very sorry for what I have done,” Nagase said. “You must have suffered very much.” “Thank you,” Eric replied.
Eric forgave Nagase who died in 2011. Eric’s autobiography was published in 1995. The final words in the book are those he told Patti when they were standing in a war cemetery among the graves of Allied prisoners of war.
“Sometimes, he said, the hating has to stop,” says Patti. “And that sums up the man.”