A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (14 page)

One evening another delegation trooped into my room, but without ceremony or threat: it was just the Navigator, Hungry Man, Smiley Boy, and a few other pirates, including one I’d dubbed Bambi (young, doe-eyed, almost pretty in a fragile way) and a diminutive fellow whose nickname in English the Navigator had identified for me as Mouse (‘What you call tiny creature, four legs, long tail …?’) One of the men now muttered something to the Navigator, who turned to me.

‘My friends want to know about your son.’

‘What do they want to know about my son for?’

‘They say, does he like … football?’ And he mimed a sort of net-bursting kick.

Ollie had never been especially keen on the game, but since that was what got them enthused I decided to tell a few white lies.

‘Oh yes, yes, he loves football. He
plays
football.’

Faces lit up around the room. Here was a genuine interest and excitement. Smiles and cheery digs in the ribs abounded.

‘What team he like?’ the Navigator continued.

One day I’d noticed a pirate wearing an Arsenal shirt. It was the obvious choice. ‘Oh … Arsenal?’

‘Arsenal! Arsenal!’ They were utterly sold. ‘What other sports he like?’

I told them, truthfully now, that Ollie loved to swim and to take long bike rides, fifty or sixty kilometres at a time. But I wasn’t certain they grasped the concept of the bicycle.

‘He no have car?’

‘No, he gets about on his bike. Or by bus?’

This seemed only to perplex the gang further.

‘How many
years
he?’

‘How old is he? He’s twenty-five. So he’s older than some of you.’

When I then had to explain that he wasn’t yet married with children, this deepened the frowns and internal discussions.

‘Why you have only one child?’

It was the Negotiator’s gripe, back to haunt me again. Girding up my patience I told them, ‘When I had my son I was very ill. Could not have another child – too risky? But God was very good to give me a boy …’

This entirely calculated remark got them nodding vigorously once more. Altogether it was a version, albeit warped, of a ‘normal’, ‘friendly’ exchange over the health of one’s family; also another little trip for me down a cultural divide. Of course they asked me nothing about myself, and, had I a daughter, I knew they wouldn’t have taken the slightest interest.

When they had gone, I found myself resenting the intrusion a little. Why had I talked? These men weren’t entitled to know a single thing about Ollie. Nor could they even begin to appreciate the sort of person he was. On that level, I was glad I had lied to them. But I found, too, that I could forgive myself for what I’d said truthfully – because for me, as for any proud parent, there was a strong and simple pleasure in speaking of a beloved son, who had brought such joy and wonder to David and myself from the moment that he came along and changed our lives.

One important detail I gave the pirates was absolutely true: I was indeed very ill after giving birth to Ollie. My pregnancy was relatively uncomplicated, but I was monitored closely throughout on account of the medical history of my weak heart. Once my contractions quickened and David took me into hospital, my heart was under considerable strain, and what followed was twenty-two hours in labour. Finally the consultant came in, examined my readings, and declared that I had to have an emergency Caesarean section. The baby was wanting to be born, but I just didn’t have the strength to push. Within two minutes I was whisked out of the room – David would tell me later that he had wondered if he would see me again. He was by no means sure I would pull through, and no one explained to him precisely what was happening.

From that point I remember little or nothing, but Ollie was born at 8.14 a.m. on 23 July 1986. As David told it, he was left pacing, anxiously, not allowed to see me, until the nurse came out and put Ollie, swaddled and crying, into his arms with the words, ‘This is your son.’ David found himself thinking:
Please, Jude, pull through, I can’t do this alone.
And he shed some tears of his own.

I woke up the next day at 1 p.m. There was a crib in the corner of my hospital room. ‘That’s your son,’ a nurse told me. ‘Would you like to hold him?’ Sadly I fell asleep again before I could manage even that simple feat: I was just too worn out. And I didn’t see David until the evening.

Within days, still confined to hospital, I knew something was wrong. My stomach was sore, too tender to touch, and hot when
I dared to touch it. Ollie was proving a little fractious, not feeding, and I was fractious in turn. I had an infection. I needed a blood transfusion, and injections to break a blood clot inside the Caesarean scar that was turning septic. Ollie and I were in hospital together for two weeks in all before we were allowed home.

My post-natal experience was relatively good, but it was a more difficult time for David: he had been very shaken by our traumatic time in hospital, and it took him a while to adjust. Ollie, though, was a lovely baby. He didn’t sleep as well as we might have hoped (the familiar parents’ lament), but he was no trouble – happy, cheeky, engaging. As he grew he showed a keen curiosity, a natural inquisitiveness, even when very small. As soon as he began to talk, everything was ‘why?’ – putting David and me on the spot.

We were living in Chute Forest in rural Wiltshire, four miles from the nearest village, and David, very busy with his work, went off in the car every morning. So I spent a lot of time with Ollie in a somewhat secluded existence, the only mum with a small child in the vicinity. One thing we had taken from the standard advice about childrearing was that, when children are small, ‘you get out what you put in’. So I made sure we had adventures. I had a little backpack and would take Ollie out yomping for the day in nature. I’d show him trees and flowers, touch his hand to bark and leaves and petals, explaining what these things were, encouraging sensory experience. At home I got him to help me turn the pages of books as we read, and I put his baby-seat up on the kitchen worktop when I was cooking or baking, so I could let him in on what I was doing, give him pieces of peel to hold. Years later I began to think he might choose a career as a chef: he loved to cook, and creatively at that, as did David. It was one of the striking similarities between them.

When Ollie reached school-leaving age his creative abilities were borne out by his gaining a place at a leading London art college, which thrilled David especially, as this was something he would have loved to have done himself. In due course we went along proudly to Ollie’s graduation, where I whooped and whistled when his name was read out. We were both of us so happy that he had found a means to do something he enjoyed doing and that fulfilled his talent. He was living the life we had hoped for him. Now I could only imagine that on the night he got the phone call bearing the terrible news from Kiwayu he must have felt himself catapulted into an utterly different world.

At first I had the natural concern: how on earth was Ollie going to cope with the awful responsibility that had been thrust on him, and without David, the backbone of our family? But gradually I realised that he would have people around him for support – he had his girlfriend Saz and her family, his uncle Paul and aunt Maxine were kind and caring, my sister Carol would be there for him. Above all I knew Ollie to have a quiet strength of character that would enable him to handle this ordeal, to remain calm, not get hysterical. In fact I was pleased, relieved, that he was in charge. I had heard it in his voice on the phone – that control and assurance. So I had every confidence in his abilities.
He’s David’s son – he’ll do it.

On a Tuesday, 1 November, I was favoured by another visit from the Negotiator. He told me he had spoken again to Ollie, that Ollie was ‘still getting money together’. And yet he seemed confident.

‘Don’t worry, your family are helping your son,’ he told me.

I just knew this couldn’t be the case.
Who is helping him? Where’s he getting advice from?
I thought it best, though, to make it clear I had total faith in Ollie.

‘I’m not worried. My son
will
get you the money.’

The Negotiator did not intend to dally but as usual I wanted to make the most of the conversation.

‘I’m curious – I’d like to know more how piracy works in Somalia. How do these people become pirates in the first place?’

I had a theory of my own, namely that there couldn’t be a great deal else to do for money in Somalia. As we’d travelled through the countryside, I’d seen no industry – this was a deprived country. The Negotiator didn’t seem to want the conversation, though. He waved a hand. ‘Just speak to any man here, they will tell you.’

‘How can they? They don’t speak English. Your English is very good …’

The flattery didn’t work. ‘Some other time …’ he muttered, and left.

The Navigator – so adamant that he himself was no pirate but, rather, an unwilling conscript – nonetheless turned out to be keen to relate to me the latest news bulletins from the front line of Somali piracy. He came to see me one evening with a conspiratorial finger pressed to his lips, and spoke in hushed tones.

‘There is American hostage taken tonight.’

‘Oh no!’

He nodded keenly. ‘Big Man take American woman, hold her in house. He will ask
millions
of dollars for her.’

‘So, the Big Man has some other place where he can hold hostages?’

‘Yes. Not this village. Different village.’

I had a notion. ‘Why don’t you tell Big Man, he could save some money, and bring the American woman here instead?’

A friend for me,
I thought.
Misery loves company – we could get through this together. Who knows? It could be one of those lifelong friendships, Americans can be so affable that way …

‘No, no, no …’ The Navigator broke my reverie, waving his hands, making clear that even if my proposal were serious he would not be relaying it to the Big Man. But then, perhaps wary of having disappointed me, he began to tell of several other Westerners being held in pirate bolt-holes across Somalia – as if to assure me I was not so alone, the Big Man’s operation being only one of many.

‘There are two men from Italy, they aid workers? They hostage, yes. And two women from Spain – young women. And a woman from France, old, she taken.’

‘An old woman?’

‘Yes, very old, and she is sick, she …’

He gestured with both hands as if he were pushing himself about on wheels.

‘Do you mean she’s in a wheelchair?’

‘Yeah, she very sick. But they take her. Very bad. They take her away on boat, put her on donkey, donkey in forest.’ He sounded aggrieved on this woman’s behalf; and things did sound dismal for her.

‘Is she being held near here, this woman? Are any other hostages near by?

He shrugged, shook his head. ‘No. I don’t know.’

I wondered about his interest in sharing information with me covertly. Was he trying to remind me of his oft-stated view that he and I were ‘on the same side’? The little I gleaned of pirate operations was from him, and he had to expect I would remember our exchanges once I was freed. A grim, fleeting thought crossed my mind: maybe he tells me this because he thinks I’ll never get out of here: ‘dead women tell no tales’.

I kept up my efforts to rub along with the pirates via the dictionary. The Triumvirate was a special focus in that respect. They were, so to speak, the sharpest knives in the drawer: they must have had some education, for at one time or another I heard each of them say something in English. Vain Man was an awkward character, but the other two I could work on.

Some pirates, I noticed – Hungry Man and Kufiya Man in particular – would vanish for days at a time and then return. I asked the Navigator about this and he said, ‘They go to see their families.’ That had the ring of truth: the pirates were on their phones a lot, and you could tell when they were speaking to their families by the change in their manners. At such times Hungry Man would kiss the screen of his phone, a vaguely touching sight.

From the dictionary I dug out the words for ‘family’, ‘children’, ‘home’, and attempted to ask them about these furloughs. Kufiya Man nodded, ‘Yes, yes, I go home.’ Hungry Man confirmed the same, just as content as he was in going through numbers and days of the week with me, translating back and forth.

The stiltedness of communications was entirely understandable, of course. And yet sometimes it did occur to me that the members of the Triumvirate knew a little more than they let on. One day I asked the Navigator if the local
muezzin
used a
microphone
to amplify his loud summons to prayer. He frowned, seeming not to understand ‘microphone’. I tried Kufiya Man on the same question. ‘Yes, or else he wouldn’t be heard,’ he shot back. This struck me as a rather more sophisticated English construction than ‘I go home.’

On another of his evening visits to my room the Navigator took out his phone and showed me a picture on the screen.

‘Do you recognise this?’

The photo was taken in daytime, from out at sea, looking from a distance at a shoreline of sand and thatched beach huts. I started in sudden recognition. It was Kiwayu.

‘This is where you took me?’

He nodded.

‘Did you take this photo? From the boat?’

That one – as was his way – he did not deign to answer.

‘How long were you in the boat before you took me? Had you been waiting all day?’

‘We had to wait until midnight …’

He looked less happy now. As before, I got the impression he wanted to please me by divulging scraps of information, but if I pursued them then he instantly regretted his candour. But my need to know was great. If he was not ‘one of them’, surely it cost him nothing to disclose all he knew?

‘Did the pirates know that David and I would be the only people staying at Kiwayu that night?’

He nodded. ‘They knew. There was another man. He still in Kenya, stuck there, they leave him. Very bad.’

‘So there were six of you, in all? Six men involved? But one got left behind?’

He nodded again.

‘The weird thing is, there was just one couple staying there the night before us. So they were the only two there that night too.’

He looked rueful. ‘That is a stroke of bad luck,’ he said. Again, this seemed to me quite a phrase to use, from a man who liked to profess that his grasp of English was poor.

The slow but useful progress I made with the Navigator was offset by the brute fact that there remained others among the pirates I simply couldn’t deal with, and who unsettled and intimidated me, seemingly with intent – chief among these Mouse and, especially, Scary Man.

One evening as I stepped warily across the compound with my torch en route to the toilet I saw in the puddle of light a huge black beetle making slow progress of its own across the sand, working its way around rocks and stones. As a child Ollie had been keen on insects and read up on them in encyclopaedias. By taking a parental interest I was consequently able to identify all varieties of beetles, stags and scarabs and so forth. This was a goliath beetle, quite unmistakable with its big pincer claws and domed black-and-white-striped head. I followed it with the torchlight, fascinated. The pirates watched, bemused. Vain Man had his usual look of disdain. Hungry Man giggled.

Scary Man, however, got to his feet, marched past me and stood on the beetle – with a sickening crunch – then stared at me with his customary hostility. I wanted to shout at him for the
sheer pointless callousness of it. Instead I shone the torch right in his face and then stomped off. But I could have cried, it was so mean and unnecessary – not to say redolent of my situation. The beetle’s crushed carcass remained there for days, on view whenever I walked by.

One afternoon the Navigator entered, bringing with him a pirate whose face I didn’t recognise at first.

He smiled. ‘Do you remember “Man Number Five”?’

‘No …’ I said hesitantly.

Then this man stepped into the light, and a horrible feeling crept over me. It was indeed the long-absent ‘Fifth Man’ from my abduction. This was the first time I’d seen him since the nightmare of that midnight hour. His presence was unsettling, he was so gaunt and hollow-cheeked and unsmiling, with glaring, bulging eyes. I associated him with violence, with my being dragged out of bed, struck on the back with a rifle butt. I summoned my nerve, held out my hand to him as if we might shake. But he ignored the gesture, and leaned back against the edge of my picnic table, aloof.

In the days that followed he was even less affable. He came into the room not merely to stare in the manner of the others, but as if to unsettle me and put me on edge. If I was eating he would watch me, jab a finger at the food, then his own mouth, as if he wanted me to feel he might steal my poor rations. As I walked around, he would plant himself in my path. (I stepped around him.) At other times he would unshoulder his rifle and point it at me, drawing a bead on my progress as I walked.

One sweltering afternoon – of sauna heat, as I sweated and felt debilitated and drained – Kufiya Man came in, unpegged the
curtains and opened the window, letting in flares of light like a halogen lamp. As I walked I felt the cooling breeze, a blessed relief. It lasted five minutes, until the Fifth Man stomped in, shouted at me as if I had done this on my own initiative, and shut me back into darkness again. Kufiya Man wandered back in a little later, and I gestured with a thumbs-down. He shrugged, but looked as if he didn’t feel like reversing the decision.

Although I was not being harmed, there was a lot of bluff discourtesy directed my way, and precious little personal consideration of any sort. In the absence of kindness, then, I looked for ways to be kind to myself.

My feet were increasingly blistered from my walks. When the blisters then burst, I knew I needed warm water to wash them properly, so they might heal. Given the usual responses to my exceptional requests I needed a ruse. And I thought of the thermos of hot water that used to be delivered to me daily for my tea. That afternoon I raised this with the Navigator.

‘You know, I think I’d like to start drinking tea again. Could I maybe have some this evening …?’

The Navigator seemed to think this was a splendid idea. Smiley Boy duly came in before 6 p.m., beaming, with packet of tea and a flask that he set on my table. ‘Tea!’ he chirruped. A little later Amina entered with the Navigator and set down a shiny new-looking tea-strainer.

‘This is for you!’

‘Ah!
Mahadsanid!
’

Alone again, I exulted in my cleverness. When wash-time came round I knew I had first to make a token gesture towards the tea: so I spooned up some loose leaves, wetted them with a
dash of water, then flung them out into my toilet bucket. Then I poured the rest of the precious hot water into my green bowl and lowered my feet into it – the closest thing to ‘pampering’ I’d known for months, and desperately needed. I gloried in the sensation, felt my feet begin slowly to relax. Once they were thoroughly soaked I massaged them, avoiding the blistered areas, feeling some pain, none the less, but some crucial relief most of all.

Ruses were a lifeline to me whenever I could devise them: they helped me improve my circumstances, however slightly, and made me feel I had my wits about me still.

Writing in my book was what I considered to be my private evening pastime. But the pirates routinely came in and checked what I had been scribbling, sometimes twice a day, sometimes weekly. What they were looking for, I couldn’t imagine. But while they flicked through the front and back of the book, and saw all my fastidious A–Z lists, they never bothered to check the middle pages. Realising this, I got the idea of keeping a diary of daily happenings that began in the middle of the book and proceeded outwards. It would be secret for as long as the pirates didn’t bother to look in front of their noses. And they didn’t.

Writing was, of course, entirely dependent on adequate
torchlight
. And the first time I noticed the beam waning was a very angst-inducing moment for me. I asked for replacement batteries, and was intensely relieved when they came. An instinct, though, told me not to discard my ‘duds’ but to keep them handy. Since it was usually different pirates who fetched things for me, I picked a moment a few days later to replace the duds in the torch, summon a pirate and complain that the torch was
dead. Again he brought me new batteries. But I stashed these, put my perfectly serviceable ones back, and contented myself knowing that I had ‘spares’.

The idea that the pirates were protecting me from something beyond the compound walls dawned on me gradually. It wasn’t, of course, a concern for my actual well-being so much as their need to protect their valuable asset. There were times when my request for the toilet was refused on the grounds that there was a plane passing overhead. I couldn’t hear anything, and I could hardly believe I could be spotted from the air. However, they took this very seriously.

The Navigator had told me of ‘other pirates’ who might be minded to snatch me, but that I was safe inside the compound. I was reminded of this when he came to me and said in his familiar hushed tones, ‘If anyone try take photo of you, you tell me, straight away. You come get me. Or it will be very bad for you. Very bad.’

I was spooked. ‘Why?’

He wouldn’t explain further, yet he was adamant. Thinking it over, I decided that if one of the pirates illicitly snapped a proof of my presence here then they could, if they were wily enough, claim to the British Consulate that they had taken me, and so open up a different channel of negotiation. Fat Man and his gang had already invested much time and money and effort in my capture and upkeep. I could see they would be nervous of some other party scooping me up and making off with the proceeds.