![]() While they were there, a second child arrived, a boy who lived for four hours. Then Eric, who now worked for the Colonial Office, was posted to west Africa to help build a 600-mile railway across what is now Ghana. So they papered over what was a dark, fathomless chasm in their marriage and pretended all was well. Nan never did ask again: Charmaine thinks she was too afraid. "He said he didn't want to talk about it and that she should never ask him again." "My mum told me that on their first night together she rubbed cream into the sores on Dad's back and asked him what had happened," says Charmaine. Three weeks later, Eric and Nan were married. An army doctor checked his vital signs and told him to get on with his life. Today, every professional he'd have encountered once he was home would have urged him not to rush into anything after his experience in captivity. "Dad had nowhere to stay, so he moved in with my mum and her parents," says Charmaine. They might have waited to get married but while Eric was a prisoner of war, his mother died. When she woke up, she felt certain that he would come home. ![]() One night in 1945, Nan, a devout Christian, had a dream in which she saw Eric emerging from a bright light. Incredibly, he survived until the end of the war. ![]() But in August 1943 they were caught 10 men were arrested, severely beaten (two died) and moved to a special prison for prolonged torture – Eric was one of them. 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. Today Nan and Linda are dead, and Eric himself died last year.
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