A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (5 page)

I wasn’t tired, but to my surprise my captors, one by one, stretched out on the ground and fell asleep – Money wrapping himself in a filthy pink sheet. Their rifles –
AK
47s, old, with frayed straps – stayed at their sides. I wasn’t convinced this was how a seasoned band of kidnappers would go about their business. And yet they seemed to have accomplished something just by getting me onto the muddy banks of the mangrove: some kind of step had been attained, and now they were biding their time, conserving their energies. Clearly they were banking on my making no attempt to escape, and they were right, since quite simply I had nowhere to go.

For a brief period I dozed myself, my head on my knees. When I stirred I saw three men asleep minus the Leader. Then I felt a new desperation, to see that the tide that had brought us to the mangrove had disappeared. Now the view was only of mangrove stumps, roots of trees and wet sand. Any boat that happened to be patrolling the coast would never get near enough to see anything of us.

Money stirred awake in his sheet, like a pupa emerging from a cocoon. Since I was the only one conscious I had dared to remove the hood of the jacket, as my head had begun to throb from the effects of the heat. But now Money leapt up, shouting at me, eyes bulging. He grabbed his rifle and pointed it at my head. There was a derangement about him as he gesticulated
wildly. As I shrank from him I gathered that he meant not to shoot me but for me to replace the hood over my head.

The Navigator was awake too now, and he hastened over to us, but only to take Money’s side.

‘You must keep on,’ he said sternly. ‘No hair showing!’

‘Why?’

‘It is our religion.’

I just hadn’t made the connection, thinking my head cover was only part of their effort to keep me hidden rather than anything to do with piety or modesty. But now, shaken, I understood. Evidently these men were very observant Muslims. I had to wonder, were they ‘radical’ or ‘extreme’ about their faith? How did their beliefs incline them to treat women? The evidence so far was not encouraging. I wondered if it might do me any good to pretend I had some religion of my own. Would they be any more circumspect about shoving a gun in the face of a believer?

Darkness came down. I still hadn’t eaten since I’d been snatched away from Kiwayu. The Navigator brought me some tea, again in the filthy plastic ‘beaker’ but I drank it as I was very thirsty. It was hot and sweet. He lingered, and crouched by me.

‘They need your husband’s mobile telephone number? They have to ring him. They want money – when they get money you go back.’

I was struck by his repetition of ‘they’, this man seeming to want to distinguish himself from his partners in crime.

‘Just take me back now,’ I ventured. ‘Then we can sort out money.’

He shook his head. I wasn’t surprised.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember my husband’s number.’ This was the truth, frustrating as it was to me. At the same time I knew very well that David’s phone was sitting at home in Bishop’s Stortford, unattended, so any effort in this line would be wasted.

‘Tell them to ring Kiwayu Village – speak to the manager, George Moorhead? He will get my husband on the phone, his name is David. Then you can sort this out, he will get you money.’

‘OK, OK, yes,’ the Navigator nodded. He loped off and relayed this to the Leader. But in short order he was back and asking me to try again to recall any family phone numbers. It was hopeless – I simply couldn’t do it without my own phone in front of me. The Navigator gave up, clearly disappointed. I was annoyed that I couldn’t perform this simple task so as to initiate the process that would mean my freedom. But I remained hopeful.

It may take time, but this is resolvable – depending on how much they want. Sixty, seventy thousand pounds, maybe? We can do that, I know it, we’ve got that money.

It was fully dark and the only light was from the moon when Marvin came over and signalled for me to crawl out from under the shrub. Just to stand was a welcome reprieve from the painful crouch I’d been forced to adopt all day. He led me by the hand to the boat. I was very hungry, very apprehensive of what was going to happen now, and yet relieved somehow to be moving. The boat was fastidiously reloaded, canisters and all, in complete silence. These men seemed barely to leave a tread on the ground.

Once we were aboard, though, there was a hitch: the boat wouldn’t budge, and I realised – as they had – that the boat’s propeller blades must have got entangled in mangrove roots. Two
of them struggled to lift the propellers clear of the water, and a third hacked away at the tangle with a machete. It took some time, during which I felt once again that there was something oddly inept about this kidnap. Each time they fired up the engine it only whined in complaint and the boat remained obstinately stuck. I was hoping against hope that someone somewhere could hear this straining din. Finally the engine returned to its peak roar and once more I was ordered to lie down on the mattress, under the same clammy, ill-smelling covers.

Again we sailed all night, and for a time I slept, waking as if to déjà vu, for the boat was edging slowly into the reach of another mangrove swamp. The men executed their appointed roles: the boat was steered in, moored, unloaded. But this time I saw the Leader give some instruction to the Navigator, whereupon he shinned barefoot up a mangrove tree and began to hack down branches with the machete.

I was led, with an unhappy familiarity, to a large shrub,
low-growing
with thick branches. I knew what was coming but I didn’t crawl under until prompted. This shrub, at least, enabled me to lie down under it, and so I got onto my back and rested one leg on a stray branch. From there I watched my captors cover the boat with a thick camouflage of the branches the Navigator had chopped down. Its bright turquoise hull was soon entirely buried under foliage – invisible, for sure, to any plane passing overhead. Inwardly I cursed them for having taken such care. Looking about me, I noticed one or two discarded cigarette packets and stubs (‘Sportsman’ brand), also some empty tins of tuna and water bottles scattered around. I could only deduce that this peculiar hideaway had been used before.

The men settled themselves a little way off from me, on a flat open space up an incline, and there they ‘pitched camp’. They lit a fire, hung their rifles on branches, removed their wet clothes and either laid or hung them out to dry, and changed into clean clothes that they produced from black plastic bags. There was the sense of an organised unit, making ready for at least an overnight stay (though I realised the Fifth Man was nowhere to be seen, the unit seeming to have shrunk to a quartet). I also saw the Leader retrieve a mobile phone from another bag and make a call.

But then all the bivouacking came to a halt as the Leader and the Navigator began – methodically and in unison – to pray. With water from one of the yellow containers (was it consecrated?), they washed their hands and heads and inside their mouths and ears. Then, crouching, they balanced on one foot while scooping handfuls of water to cleanse the other – a gymnastic feat, executed with near synchronicity. I watched in fascination. For all that I knew my predicament, still my mind was taken out of it for the time that I observed this rigorous procedure. It seemed to me now that this was the likely reason why the men had vanished periodically the day before. They must have retired to some appropriate ‘private’ patch of ground where they could pray.

They stood, held out their palms upwards, then crossed their arms over their chests, all the while reciting words I couldn’t make out or understand. Then they knelt, placed their hands on their knees, and prostrated themselves, foreheads and flats of their palms pressed to the ground. This I recognised as the customary Islamic gesture of submission to Allah.

The whole spectacle made me thoughtful. I had always been inclined to respect people’s avowed religious beliefs as an obviously
meaningful part of who they are. I was never persuaded, though, that ‘being religious’ made one a good person: showing respect and deference to a higher power seemed less important to me than showing kindness to one’s fellow man and woman. And these men, I felt, were making a mockery of their faith. Having kidnapped a defenceless woman in order to sell her for money, they were now prostrating themselves before their god. Was it so that they might be forgiven the offence?

Their prayers complete, the men turned back to worldly business. They slung the bright orange tarpaulin from the boat between two trees and secured it, making some shade for themselves. The Leader got busy once again with his phone. They boiled water over the fire and brewed tea, all huddled under the shade of the tarpaulin. Suddenly I saw their mistake and grinned inwardly. After all these pains to conceal the turquoise skiff, if a plane passed overhead nothing could have been more conspicuous to it than that orange tarpaulin. Fresh hope arose in me: as long as they all sat blithely under a covering as bright as a Belisha beacon then somebody might spot us from above.

It was as if my thoughts had been broadcast out of the top of my head. Within moments Money and the Leader stomped from under the tarpaulin and cocked their heads to the skies, as if listening for something. A plane? If so, I couldn’t see it, much less hear it. But in a trice the men had pulled down the tarpaulin, folded it and stashed it. Crestfallen, I clung at least to the notion that it had indeed been a plane they’d heard – a plane looking for me.

The Leader then strode away from the group down a path that led around a corner and disappeared. I watched him all the way until he vanished from view. Where did the path lead? I had to find out. I signalled for the Navigator, told him I needed the
toilet. By now I had devised two sounds to express and distinguish the need: either a hiss or a grunt. I found that by a grunt I was permitted to walk a little further away from them than by a hiss. This time I selected a reasonably private shrub as near to the bend in the path as I could. But I couldn’t see much of where it led. Escape was on my mind, but with it came the fear that if I tried and failed I might put myself in greater jeopardy. My ordeal had lasted two days – another forty-eight hours and it might be all over. When I got the inevitable signal to hurry up and move back nearer the camp I complied.

As the day wore on my captors once again spread themselves out on the ground to sleep, rifles by their sides. A fantasy entered my head in which I ran over, grabbed up one of their weapons without their waking, instantly figured out how to fire it, and strafed the lot of them with bullets – the Leader too, whenever he returned. As I was idling in my mind, knowing I was utterly incapable of any such thing, I began too to think about how much more perilous it might be for me to do this than not to.

The Leader returned after a few hours, toting some plastic carrier bags as though he had been shopping. Marvin came over to me with bottled water, which I drank gratefully, and some biscuits – labelled ‘Encore’, each the size of a pencil eraser, in long cellophane strips. They tasted dry and disgusting.

Come evening the gang boiled water in a metal container and cooked rice. I watched them eat. I remained unfed. One thing I took from all of this activity was that there had to be a village near by: the Leader must have sourced his provisions from somewhere, unless this place was a semi-permanent dumping ground.

Once darkness was complete they dragged the mattress off the boat and deigned to come down from their incline and join me. I came out of the shrub, they threw the mattress to the ground, I lay down and they lay either side of me, wrapping themselves head to toe in sheets that they secured at each end. There was something very unnerving about this procedure, as if they were preparing themselves for their own burials.

They seemed to fall asleep simultaneously and soundly. But for some time my eyes were wide open – I was alert and frightened of who or what might emerge from the bush. I had never before slept out for a night under the stars – unlike David. I shuddered to think that only a few nights ago on the Masai Mara – nights that now seemed terribly far away – the notion of passing a night in the Suguroi Hill Tree House had felt like the riskiest thing imaginable to me.

Still, a voice inside – rational and calculating – told me to keep calm, stay alert, exert whatever self-control I could summon. I would need to draw on inner resources to survive this, for however long it took. I was alone and I was scared, yes, but I had experienced times of loneliness, vulnerability – even peril – before. And then as now, the inner voice had told me:
OK, there’s nobody else here. So you are just going to have to rely on yourself.

There were times in our marriage when David would say – fondly, in jest – ‘I just want to look after you, you’re so tiny …’ It’s true that I’m on the diminutive side, and I never minded my husband pointing it out in affection. But I deeply disliked the idea of anyone else getting the idea that I was frail or delicate or helpless. This was a perception I’d had to struggle against all my life, and so it was doubly important to me that people understood I wasn’t someone to be pushed around. Otherwise I would have been surrendering to the cards that were dealt me at birth.

I was born in December 1954, premature, tiny and underweight. Worse, I was diagnosed with a ‘hole in the heart’ between the right and left ventricles. As such I grew up a sickly child, endlessly susceptible to viruses and minor infections. This might have mattered less if my family had had the means to cosset me, but life was a lot harder for all of us growing up in Ulverston, Cumbria.

I was the fourth of six children and we were raised in a terraced council house in a typical northern street, a close-knit community where the neighbours vied a bit over who had the shiniest front step and happily took in next door’s kids if they came home from school to an empty house. Sometimes that was me and my siblings, simply because our mum and dad had to work all hours. Consequently we had to bring ourselves up to some extent.

My dad Thomas was a big man who did odd jobs of casual manual labour, while my mum Gladys worked as a cleaner. Their
example meant that in our family there could be no passengers, no refugees from the work ethic. Like thousands of other
working-class
families we just got on with it. But, for all that industry, we struggled. At my first school I was one of the kids who needed school milk and free dinners, and I was subjected to a fair bit of verbal bullying for wearing hand-me-downs that usually looked the worse for wear. My mum was well versed in the art of make-do-and-mend, but one day she went to the school to complain to teachers after I was ridiculed especially for wearing an old and threadbare duffel coat of my brother’s.

My attendance record at school was patchy in any case, on account of my poor health and susceptibility to any illness that was going around. I missed so many days that the truancy inspector started turning up at our door. In truth I wanted to be at school very badly, for I was afraid that otherwise I’d start to lag behind the rest of the class. The anxiety knocked my
self-confidence
. For a long time afterwards I carried with me a nagging sense of being ‘not quite up to scratch’. The issue of my health was bad enough to prompt our local doctor to lobby for us to be allotted a larger council property, with electricity and amid a better environment, so that at least we kids weren’t all sleeping in one room. And that move did make a difference.

My siblings and I did have fun times, knocking around like a little tribe, climbing the fence of the local council depot to run up and down the aggregate sand heaps, or traipsing the two or three miles to Canal Foot estuary opposite Morecambe Bay, which we called ‘the beach’, though there was no sand there – a pretty gritty, muddy, smelly place, but great for playing at mudslides.

Generally, though, on these excursions I was the only girl. I hung around with my brothers a lot, but they were obliged to
take me and at times, I’m sure, grew tired of me. As a result I was often on my own, but at such times I’d simply resolve just to find something to do. And for all that this was thrust upon me, I learned not to be afraid of solitude. I found that I really didn’t mind my own company. And this encouraged in me a bit of resourcefulness, the important ability to count on myself.

I loved to climb trees, sit in my perch, listen to the wind and watch the world. My favourite spot was up a copper beech tree in the grounds of the local vicarage. In the first house where I lived, our backyard never got any sun, perpetually gloomy, always hung with a line of washing. But I perfected the skill of shinning up the fifteen-foot stone wall so that I could gaze out over the allotments behind us – at crops of tall sunflowers, people tending vegetable patches, chickens clucking behind chain-link fences. It did my spirits so much good just to climb free of the darkened yard up into the light, where the sun shone and I could observe all these good and useful signs of life – until such time as some neighbour or other would shout at me, ‘Oi, you, get down off that bloody wall!’

The year I turned twelve, in 1966, was memorable to me for quite a few unfortunate reasons. I sat my 11-plus exams, desperate to get to into the local grammar school. But nobody reckoned I would pass, myself included. I failed, and took the depressing news to mean that perhaps I was meant to keep my horizons low in life. That summer before I was due to start at the local secondary modern I learned that I would have to travel to Pendlebury Hospital in Manchester for a coronary angiogram to assess the state of my heart condition. I hoped this would be a mere day trip – the kindly vicar, he of the local vicarage, gave me a
Tiffin chocolate bar for the journey and a get-well card. But instead I was driven the hundred miles to Manchester by my Uncle John, dropped off at reception and left alone on a children’s ward for some weeks, without visitors.

The angiogram itself was a frightening and traumatising experience to me. I was taken into a room of nurses, my wrists and ankles strapped to four corners of a bed, and the catheter was inserted in my groin without local anaesthetic. Thereafter I languished at the hospital until my stitches could be removed, alone, without any communication from my family, until the day Uncle John turned up to take me home. The test results, when they were delivered, made clear that my heart was going to require surgery at some point. But the problem was put aside for the time being, and I certainly couldn’t have faced much more upset at that time.

Secondary school did prove a solace to me in that I made a proper friend there, Janet, who lived on the road below ours and was someone with whom I could walk to school. We liked to go together through the churchyard of St Mary’s and Holy Trinity, whereas lots of other children would sooner take the long way round on dark mornings when the gloom around the graves might have seemed disconcerting. But I found the ambience of this place somehow protective. I was fascinated to read the inscriptions on gravestones and to imagine the lives of people who had died before I was born. Of course there was also a very sharp poignancy in the stones of people – sometimes children, infants – who had died before their time. Conversely, though, it gave me a warm and consoling feeling wherever I saw that a husband and wife had been buried side by side – the sense that they had shared a lifetime together, and it had happened that one had died before the other, but now they were conjoined again.

I didn’t know if Janet shared in all the sorts of feelings that St Mary’s churchyard evoked in me, but for sure both of us would get very cross if we saw anybody playing around the tombstones. The notion of respecting the dead – of never, ever trespassing on a person’s final resting place – occurred to me as a totally natural and instinctive piety.

Things did improve a little for our family in the latter part of the 1960s. My dad found regular work at the local shipyard, my brothers finished school and dutifully went out to work, even I worked Saturdays at Woolworth’s (on the footwear and electrical counters) so I too could contribute to the upkeep. By my teens my health had improved to the extent that I could lead an ordinary life.

And yet as my school years drew to a close I grew more and more preoccupied by the feeling that life could offer more than what everyone around me was so well used to. My parents had had to toil so hard for such small tangible reward. It wasn’t the life I would have wished for them, and emphatically not what I wanted for me or any family of my own I might have. But my prospects all seemed to tend in one dispiriting direction. I was desperate to figure out a way I might still improve myself – some kind of escape from the given.

After finishing school at sixteen I managed to fund myself (by working at a fish-and-chip shop) through a course at Lancaster College of Further Education, and there I picked up a few formal qualifications but, probably more importantly, a bit of precious confidence in my own initiative. But it couldn’t keep me from the seemingly inevitable, and within a year I was working on the assembly line at Ashley’s electrical components factory, dirty and
mundane work relieved only by the fact that I ended up sitting next to my old schoolfriend Janet.

Fate took an ironic turn, though, for it was at Ashley’s that I met Peter, who became my first husband. And by marrying him I became the first person in many generations of my family to leave Ulverston – albeit initially moving no further afield than a little two-up two-down in Barrow-in-Furness. The really radical removal, of course, was eighteen months later – to Zambia. And though I could never have anticipated it, Zambia gave me everything, because there I met David, who turned my life around entirely.

For all that David gave me, there were inevitably things in my life that he couldn’t change or influence or even really help me with – things I had to deal with alone, as we all must – and foremost among these was the concern over my long-term health.

In my early twenties I was told by a doctor that if I didn’t have heart surgery then by my fifties I would be chronically affected – constantly breathless, my mobility impaired. At that point I thought my fifties lay impossibly far away in the future. And for a few more years I put the matter aside, happy to be with David, relatively fit and active. But then I had to have a surgical procedure on my ear, and the hospital tests detected my heart murmur. I was told this would certainly affect my giving birth. So I discussed it with David and resolved to have the necessary surgery. I was booked into a former army hospital, an off-putting place of cramped rooms and long dark corridors, with nothing in the way of communal space. David dropped me off there but his work meant that he couldn’t stay. And so after the nurse settled me in I was on my own again in a small room,
sitting on the bed, intensely conscious of the weight of silence and solitude, very apprehensive over what was going to happen to me.

Probably we all like to think that in growing up we put childish things behind us and become functional adults, fully capable of facing any eventuality life might throw our way. But I believe most of us retain a shadow inside of the children we were; and sometimes in life situations arise that threaten to reduce us once again to the status of the child – unknowing, dependent, helpless. Alone in the hospital room I faced just such a situation.

You’re here now. What do you do? You’ve got to be strong and you’ve got to get through this on your own.

There was no turning back. And I was in the hands of others – I could only wait to be acted upon. But what was in my power was to control my feelings and try to be brave. Life experience had taught me a little resilience, and I intended to use it.