![]() ![]() 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. But they didn't.Today Nan and Linda are dead, and Eric himself died last year. Perhaps if the filmmakers had made a firm decision either way, the movie would have been better. It relies too heavily on music, pseudo-mysterious close-ups, and oblique references to secrets untold. And in its war movie incarnation, the film also falls short, pushing the audience to feel deeply when it doesn't deserve the commitment. Which would be fine, if the movie had actually given her more to do than just appear concerned and ready to come to the rescue of a damaged man. You get the feeling that Kidman being cast as Eric's wife demanded a beefing up of their relationship storyline. And in many ways, as the latter, it's sensitive, empathetic, and moving. But then it quickly becomes apparent that it's also a war movie. It starts as what appears to be a romance, an exploration of the relationship between two equals, one more self-actualized than the other. But this version is pulled in two different directions. ![]() In another time and place, it could have been Oscar bait. THE RAILWAY MAN is a lesser movie than it should be, packaged as it is with gorgeous cinematography, atmospheric music, and a star-studded cast.
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