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Eric became distant and he struggled with meeting the demands of daily life, including paying the bills. An emotional chasm had developed in his marriage. The family returned from Africa in 1955, and Eric went on to work as a lecturer at Strathclyde University. was born in Takoradi, but the baby only survived for four hours. His first wife Nan and their daughter Linda went with him. 'He said he didn't want to talk about it and that she should never ask him again.' According to Charmaine (pictured), she never did.Įric went to work for the Colonial Office and he was posted to West Africa to help construct a 600-mile railway traversing what is today Ghana.

'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,' recalls Eric's daughter Charmaine.

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Charmaine (inset at the 2013 movie premiere), her sister, and mother were left out of the film. The real Eric Lomax with his daughter Charmaine in the late 1960s. Upon his return, he ended up staying with his fiancée Nan and her parents, a living situation that likely hastened their impending nuptials. In researching The Railway Man true story, we learned that not only did Eric Lomax have to deal with his physical and emotional scars from the war, he also had to face the reality that while he was a prisoner of war, his mother had died and his father had remarried, leaving Eric without a place to call home. What did Eric do when he came home from the war? Eric and Patti were 'both living rootless and not altogether happy lives.' Patti had three sons of her own, Graeme, Nicholas and Mark, and she also had a daughter. She had grown up in England where she became a nurse, but she moved to Canada after marrying her first husband who was part of the Canadian air force. In his book, Eric states that Patti, portrayed by Nicole Kidman in the movie, had been in a marriage that was as reduced as his own. Dad had made life very tough for her: Mum deserved better.' -The Guardian 'It was hard,' says daughter Charmaine, 'but we wanted to concentrate on our mum. Soon after, Eric officially ended his marriage with Nan and married Patti in 1983. A fondness for one another developed and in 1982, Patti left Canada for the United Kingdom, her place of birth. While riding on a train to Glasgow in 1980, the real Eric Lomax met the then 43-year-old Canadian nurse Patricia 'Patti' Wallace, who was seventeen years his junior and back in Britain visiting her mother, sister and some close friends. In his 1995 book, Eric refers to Nan merely as 'S.' He left her in 1981. (born June 18, 1948, died at birth), and Charmaine Carole Lomax (born June 17, 1957). After the war, they were together for 37 years and shared three children: Linda May Lomax (born December 14, 1946, died December 13, 1993), Eric Lomax Jr. Following his capture by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Nan waited for three-and-a-half years not knowing whether he was alive or dead. Eric and Nan got engaged the night before he left. He had been courting her in their native Edinburgh prior to leaving for the war in 1941.

Completely absent from The Railway Man movie are Eric Lomax's first wife Agnes ('Nan'), whom he married on November 20, 1945, just three weeks after he was liberated.

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