The Railway Man

I went to see a movie called The Railway Man yesterday. It is the story of Eric Lomax, a former PoW who confronts his Japanese torturer. The film starts with an encounter on a train in 1980.

One of the first jobs I ever had was a summer holiday spent in Barclays Bank in Caerphilly checking the takings from Carrefour, one of the first hyper markets in the UK. It was probably around 1980.

I remember one of the women who worked there saying that her father had been a Japanese prisoner in World War II, and would still sometimes wake up screaming and try to climb out of the bedroom window. Just like scenes in the film that I may otherwise have found far fetched.