A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (8 page)

My breakfast had been an austere dish but I soon saw that my captors would be on better rations. Through the door I noticed a woman enter the compound – tall, statuesque, beautiful, in
jilbab
and
khimar
,
de rigueur.
She brought food up to and under the breezeblock wall, flasks of tea, stainless-steel dishes with lids on, plates piled with unleavened breads. Three of the guards took charge of removing the lids from steaming hot food, and began to eat. Two of these men had been sleeping directly outside my door – one a heavy-set, heavily bearded man with bloodshot eyes who ate with particular gusto; another a rather loud, vain, self-admiring fellow with very white teeth and a goatee. The third, chunky and bearded, wore a Bedouin-style
kufiya
draped over his head. They seemed to form some sort of senior Triumvirate: Hungry Man, Vain Man, Kufiya Man.

I got the feeling that some of them knew each other from before, were friendly with each other, at ease. Certainly this Triumvirate and the Leader had a clannish look to them.

Gradually other guards, aware that the first meal of the day was served, joined the Triumvirate and scooped food from the steel dishes with their hands. They ate messily – but if I didn’t think much of their table manners, I certainly envied their menu.

That night, after dark, I was visited by a delegation of sorts. It was led by Fat Man and his Sidekick from the car that had
brought me here. The Leader and Vain Man were present but the principal figure in the party was a new face to me: a small, trim man, smartly dressed and neat in appearance, his goatee carefully tended, a whiff of cologne about him.

At his back some of the compound guards were trying to push their way into the room too. The men always took their shoes off on entering the room, as if it were a mosque. This was meaningful.

Then Fat Man thrust out a pudgy arm in the way of a barrier and glared at them, whereupon they got into a kind of line. I had thought of Fat Man as nothing more than a driver: now I realised he exercised some sort of control over the compound guards. He adopted a stance, leaning against the wall and looking over his right shoulder at me. He had a slight squint in his left eye, and big protruding teeth, his head somehow disproportionate to his girth, which was concealed by a big tent-shaped shirt.

The real authority, though, seemed to issue from the new man, who gestured and muttered something, whereupon two plastic picnic chairs, one green, one blue, were carried into the narrow room (albeit with some difficulty), followed by a table that bore the same yellow-blue Arabic motif as the cover on my ceiling. It was a very narrow space, so in order to carry in the plastic picnic chairs they had to open both doors to make leeway.

The new man beckoned me to sit facing him at the table, and then dropped a packet of white napkins and a toothbrush and toothpaste onto the table top. I accepted these provisions with a nod, instantly looking forward to brushing my teeth. The man, meanwhile, produced an exercise book and opened it.

‘Do you know where you are?’ he said, in clear English.

‘Africa, somewhere. I was in Kenya …’

‘Now you are in Somalia. West Africa.’

This detail confused me. ‘Somalia’s
East
Africa, isn’t it?’

‘East, West, pah …’ He gestured as if to say it was neither here or there. ‘Do you know who these men are behind me?’

‘Well, no, of course I don’t.’

‘They are Somali pirates.’ He seemed to study my face for a reaction. ‘You are very lucky. Somali pirates, they don’t kill people, don’t torture people. They just want money. That’s why they took you. When they get money you will go home.’

I nodded my understanding, silently glad of this clear stress on my remaining unharmed. The man took out a pen from his shirt pocket.

‘Now, we need information from you. To contact your family, to get money.’

‘Well, I can tell you, you won’t get any money from my family, they haven’t got money to give. But you can contact my husband, David.’

‘What is his mobile phone number?’

‘I’ve said this before – I can’t remember his number. But it’s pointless anyway, my husband hasn’t got his phone with him. If you phone Kiwayu Safari Village you can speak to him. The only phone he’s got is my phone. And no, I don’t remember that number either.’

The man looked irritated. ‘Why have you not got your phone?’

I felt an annoyance of my own. This fellow didn’t seem quite as smart as his manner endeavoured to project. ‘Because I was dragged out of my bed and onto a boat in the middle of the night by men with rifles. So I didn’t have time to pick up my phone.’

He shook his head and sighed. ‘OK. That is our problem.’

‘Yeah, it
is
your problem.’

‘How many people in your family?’

‘There’s my husband, and we have a son.’

‘What is your son’s phone number?’

Again I was blank. ‘I – I’m really sorry, I can’t remember that either.’

Scorn reappeared on the man’s face. ‘You can’t remember your husband’s number, your son’s …?’ He tossed his pen at me in seeming disgust. ‘You can’t love your husband, or your son, if you can’t even –’

I didn’t let him finish, because outright fury had boiled up in me. ‘Don’t you tell me I don’t love my husband. I’ve been with him thirty-three years – I love him. And I love my son. Loving someone has nothing to do with remembering a phone number.’

Livid, I snatched up the pen, minded to throw it back in his face. But I caught myself.
Be calm, be in control, keep above it all.
Slowly, then, I pushed the pen across the table to him. I could tell the other men in the room had been struck by my raised voice: they shuffled somewhat, exchanged glances, looking in particular to the Leader. But this man had really incensed me. I glared at him, unabashed.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I have to contact
someone
– speak to them to tell them you are here, and will be here until money is paid. So I need to ask you questions.’

I nodded. In my own way I was as keen as him to move this process forward – the swifter the better. He asked me to confirm my name, how many brothers and sisters I had. I told him.

‘And your parents, are they alive?’

‘My mother’s alive, but she is ninety years old. And I don’t want you contacting her, because that will give her a heart attack. Understand? You can’t do that. It’s my husband who you need to contact.’

‘Your husband’s work, what does he do?’

I took a moment’s thought before answering – worried that to tell them David was the ‘Finance Director’ of a respected publisher might pump up their estimation of what price to put on my head. Whatever I said needed to have the effect of deflating expectations.

‘He helps to make books. Books, that you read?’ I added since the man seemed first to frown.

‘How big is your house?’ he asked.

‘We have what’s called a semi-detached house? Which is like only half of a house?’

‘How many cars do you have?’

‘One car.’

‘Just one. And just one child …’ He shook his head. ‘That’s bad, that’s very bad …’

Again his attitude stuck in my craw. ‘What do you mean, “very bad”? I don’t know what you think is normal, but some women can only have one child, and I am one of those women. And I’m really grateful. I was very lucky to have my boy.’

‘Yeah, well, at least you had a boy, that was lucky, yes.’

I had begun to feel exasperated – stuck in this jerry-built holding cell somewhere in Somalia, while this self-important man shared his backward moral view of the world with me.

‘How old your boy?’

‘He’s twenty-five.’

‘He has a job?’

‘Is that relevant? No, he hasn’t got a job,’ I lied.

‘What about you? You work?’

Again I balked slightly, not wanting to paint them a rosy picture of a well-heeled three-salary household. Still, I did intend to let him know who I was.

‘I work in a hospital.’

‘Hospital?’

‘Yes, a psychiatric hospital. I work with women who are very unwell.’

He grimaced. ‘Women who have, uh … sick heeds?’

‘Heads.’ I shrugged and nodded. He seemed at first to recoil from this detail. He turned and muttered something to the others, which earned me another grim stare from Fat Man. But then, nonplussed, he wrote the detail down carefully in his book beneath all the other information. And with that, he seemed to be done.

‘OK, you should get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow we do a video, then negotiation start. I help them get money for you.’

‘Is that what you do? You’re the negotiator?’

‘That’s right. Negotiator. I’m not a pirate. Tomorrow I come and we video you.’

‘Where will you send that video?’

He sighed. I got the impression he didn’t care for my asking questions. ‘We send it so your family can see it.’

‘Well, like I’ve said, don’t send it to my mother. And there’s something else you need to know. It’s my mother’s birthday in two weeks’ time. We have a big celebration, all my family get together? I have to be there. I have to be out of here in two weeks’ time.’

I was serious and I wanted him to know as much. Did he care? I doubted it. He rose from the chair and walked out. The others trooped off after him.

Alone, I assessed the situation: some kind of a video message sent back to the UK would be progress, I supposed. David would see it, and if ‘negotiation start’ then there would be clarity at last. I couldn’t guess how long it would take, but the process would be apparent to all. I assumed David would stay in Africa for as long as it took to secure my freedom, and that Ollie would want to come out to join him.

I undressed, got into bed, tucked the mosquito net all around, and reflected on the evening’s exchanges.

Perhaps I had been a bit over-combative with this
Negotiator
, given how important he was obviously going to be to my getting free. But then he didn’t seem the easiest fellow to rub along with.

Evidently he had found the idea of women with ‘sick heeds’ to be strange and unsettling, if not outright distasteful. Did he think that Somalis were somehow immune to mental health problems? Or could there be a sort of taboo here that prevented such illnesses from being recognised and properly treated? I knew well enough that even in Britain a sort of stigma still attaches to anyone who is classified ‘sick in the head’, that they can be dismissed – ‘half a person’ at best – to be feared and ostracised because they simply aren’t comprehensible to the rest of us. And from the little I had gleaned of the status of females in Somali society, I had the feeling that any woman suffering from mental health problems here might not receive a massive amount of compassion or understanding.

At any rate, the Negotiator hadn’t thought much of what I did for a living – plainly he was more interested in impressing his own importance on me, the fact that he was no mere ‘pirate’. I didn’t much care. I knew that my job had armed me with a quite particular set of transferable skills. For a start I had learned how to ‘read’ people’s personality traits from their smallest behaviours, to observe them when they didn’t know they were being observed. I could usually tell when I was being lied to (or being told what the person imagined I wanted to hear). I had developed quite deep reserves of patience, and a pretty good facility for building rapport with people who might look ‘difficult’ or intimidating to the rest of us.

Above all, my training in social work had prepared for me for situations that were awkward, uncomfortable, scary, even
downright
dangerous. I knew how to handle people from whom others might recoil. And if nothing in my past could have prepared me fully for this current predicament … still, it crossed my mind that certain aspects of my professional training could be a kind of salvation to me now.

Like a lot of people I found the path to my vocation in life by a bit of serendipity. In 1989 David and I were living in Andover, Hampshire. Ollie was three years old, settled in at nursery, and I was looking for a way to make myself feel useful again. I began to volunteer locally at Enham Alamein, a well-known residential centre for people with physical disabilities, founded originally as a place of rehabilitation for badly wounded servicemen. In December 1992 our little family upped sticks to Bishop’s Stortford, but there I kept up my volunteering, helping out at a local multipurpose day centre for people with learning difficulties as well as physical impairments. I picked up a range of handy skills, from Makaton to driving a big tail-lift bus. I also encountered people who were struggling with a variety of difficult clinical conditions. For three years I worked with a man who had Asperger’s syndrome. He could become aggressive quickly, but I seemed to be able to defuse his tempers just by being patient with him, talking him back round.

One night I mentioned to David that I had begun to feel just about as competent as a professional social worker, that I could probably do the job. His response, quite seriously, was: ‘Why don’t you?’ My instinctive reply was to bring up all the possible obstacles to such a plan, not least among them the time that I’d have to spend getting qualified. ‘None of that matters,’ he said. ‘You should do it. Go for it.’ So I did. And David’s support for me remained every bit as staunch as his initial and crucial encouragement.

I got my diploma in social work and chose to specialise in Mental Health. I had the benefit of a really excellent mentor or
‘practice teacher’: a smart, tough woman who had seen a lot of demanding patients and situations, and who impressed on me the importance of treating the people I would deal with as individuals, always respectfully, and without passing judgement on them, since they simply couldn’t be held to the same account as those of us who aren’t afflicted by these desperate conditions. I was to accept them for who they were, and to remember that we are all, to some degree, the products of our upbringing and environment.

My mentor had on several occasions been attacked by patients, and I came to view physical threat as something one would be lucky to avoid in a career of this kind. I had training in specific techniques for ‘de-escalating’ situations of potential violence, and I soon learned how to anticipate trouble. More than once, visiting someone in his or her own home, I found my intuition telling me, ‘I need to get out of here …’ However, to do the job you have to be prepared to confront and manage people who are disturbed and in distress. Lashing out, verbally or physically, might be the only thing they know how to do when they are confined to a hospital, frightened, confused, desperate to be free. The easiest option for an institution in such cases would be to have three big male orderlies fall on top of the patient and restrain him or her. But nothing is ever truly solved or made better that way. One has to try to build communication and trust – however long that takes, and however much one’s nerves are strained in the process.

In my first social work job – with an Assertive Outreach Team for people in the community needing focused support – I met Jason, a nineteen-year-old with a serious anti-social personality
disorder. He was from a comfortable middle-class home but had always been ‘a handful’ for his parents, who could never control his tempers and came to realise they were dealing with something far worse than mere ‘naughtiness’. Jason was capable of startling violence at home. He made his parents’ life hell, and at their imploring I found him a place to live, in a flat within a managed group home. He was a complex young man, but I had a reasonable rapport with him. He was someone for whom you had to get the medication exactly right, in which case he was certainly manageable.

But late one afternoon I got a call from Maggie, the group home manager: Jason was causing a disturbance, playing music loud. Could I please come and help? I wasn’t in a position to refuse, so I got a message to David that I would be home late that night.

On arrival I went with Maggie to Jason’s flat and immediately it was clear to me that he was unmanageable, and hadn’t taken his medication. He then admitted as much. Any one of a number of things might have upset him in the first place, but I knew we had to get him to a hospital doctor, and that it was my job, using the rapport he and I had established, to make him see both that I was concerned for him and that going to hospital was in his best interest. ‘I can see something’s bothering you, Jason,’ I told him. ‘This is not the “you” that I know. Maybe we should go get you checked out, get yourself back on track …? What do you think?’

At first he seemed to comply. Knowing him to be fussy about his appearance, I was encouraging him to get his overnight bag packed with all his sundry toiletries and hair gels. At which point he pulled a knife on me.

I felt a cold flush go through me, but at the same time I heard an inner directive:
Keep calm. Think.

‘Come on, Jason. This is not you. Let’s talk …’

Maggie’s reaction, though, was to inch towards the door, offering to go and make all three of us ‘a nice cup of tea’. I felt this was a cop-out and I was angry with her, but I couldn’t let that show in my voice as I continued to try to talk Jason round. Sure enough, Maggie exited, leaving me in the small flat with Jason and the knife. I knew that screaming and shouting were no good. Nothing could be gained by hysterics. But there was no room for error either. I had to be ‘in the moment’ and try a lot of calm, careful persuasion.

‘I know you’re angry, Jason, but we have to talk. You’re eloquent, you can tell me how you’re feeling. You don’t need a knife. You don’t want to use it. Why not put it down …?’

He took to pacing up and down the room, muttering to himself, still resolutely clutching the blade. As I sat there I kept on urging him that he was a good guy, that he had other options, things to look forward to – for instance, the possibility of moving to another flat that he liked better, an option that could very well be jeopardised if he were to stab me.

Two agonising hours ticked by before Jason abruptly walked past me towards his kitchen and, in doing so, set the knife down on the side of my chair. I took it and darted to the door where I found Maggie waiting for me, and told her pretty sharply to get on the telephone. In orderly fashion I helped Jason collect his things and got him into an ambulance and away. Afterwards, I was a wreck. I got home to David at 10.30 p.m., and he had a glass of wine waiting for me. ‘You want to talk about it …?’ he asked calmly. He was brilliant – just as on the many other occasions when my working days, if not always blighted by the threat of violence, none the less quite often called for tense and exhausting levels of concentration.

I was ready for a new challenge when in 2004 I went to work at the women’s ward of Kneesworth House Hospital in Bassingbourn: something of a place of last resort for women with difficult conditions who couldn’t be supported elsewhere.
Kneesworth
was a medium-secure unit and the twenty-two women there had all been ‘through the system’, usually culminating in court appearances and rulings that their problems would be best addressed by care, treatment and secure rehabilitation.

The women I worked with were profoundly unwell. Some of the most challenging cases, inevitably, were women with
schizophrenia
. There will probably always be a proportion of the public that views people with schizophrenia as dangerously unhinged potential murderers, which is simply not the case. Danger to the public must always be weighed up with great care, but thousands of people can live with the condition in the community, so long as they are managed well. At Kneesworth we helped to get women back into their communities and to disburden them of the long-term stigma of being outcasts from society. But, of course, the consideration of whether these patients can make such a return safely depends on a number of factors.

Anna was a patient who, some years previously, had made a violent assault on a family member. I worked with her very tentatively, meeting her on a daily basis. For a year she kept her distance from me. Then I was advised by a nurse that Anna was suffering from a fixed delusion that I had somehow wronged her, and she might pose a physical threat to me. Anna eventually told me as much: ‘Don’t think I don’t know about you. I’ll take your eyes out.’ And so I had to be on guard around her. The system was that whenever I went ‘on ward’ I rang ahead, and would be
escorted to the nurse’s office. One day I called and found the line engaged and decided, fatefully, to risk it.

I let myself onto the ward with keys, came through, rang the doorbell. The nurses in the office saw me and waved. I waved back. Then Anna appeared from around a corner, shot me a look, and I knew I was in trouble. She disappeared from sight and while I was hastily looking for routes of escape Anna strode up and set upon me with scissors, stabbing at my head. She got in two or three connecting blows before I was able to grab her, shout at her, ‘Anna, no! You don’t want to do this.’ Then the nursing staff appeared and fell on her, hauling her away to a secure room. All the other patients flocked to my side. ‘I’m fine,’ I assured them, as blood trickled down my head. Then I was taken to hospital.

David got a phone call at work from one of my colleagues: ‘Now, it’s nothing to worry about, but Judith’s been attacked with a pair of scissors.’ He made it to the hospital in double-quick time and was as brilliant as ever. But this was a different order of scare than we’d had before, and I was just as worried as he was.

My manager urged me to accept some trauma-counselling sessions, because I needed to get over the incident and get back to work. I was prepared to shrug it off, to work with Anna again. But after the attack on me Anna had to have one-on-one protection from the other patients, and eventually she was returned to the high-security facility from whence she had come.

Hearing this tale, some might shake their heads and consider it a sorry and hopeless case. But the real sadness is that only two months before she attacked me Anna had made a remarkable bit of progress.

Anna did not know that I had made contact with the family member she’d attacked, who still bore the scars yet harboured no
ill will towards Anna. Anna, in turn, had expressed remorse to one of our nurses for what she had done, with terrible violence but in a moment of utter blinding paranoia. I treated it as a responsibility and a privilege whenever I met with the families of patients, and I had come to realise that I was quite often the first person a family had ever spoken to about their loved one’s illness.

On the basis of these encouraging signs we were able to take Anna out of Kneesworth one day for a family visit. I found the experience heartbreaking. It gave you a glimpse of who this woman could have been, were it not for her awful illness. Some amends, at least, were made by that visit: it was a good day’s work. But the minute Anna climbed back into our van – which represented hospital to her, confinement, two entire decades of her life – the veil descended, and she was lost to us again.

I believed in what could be achieved at Kneesworth and felt we worked hard to provide a worthwhile service. Our successes were relatively modest. We knew that not everyone was going to ‘get better’ but that some people could still make extraordinary improvements, even when they had been removed from society for so long. The difference could be as small as a patient who always sat in a corner and never looked at you one morning raising her eyes and saying, ‘Hello.’ Such processes can take months, years even, and they can represent giant steps for the individual out of a world of silence and confusion, fear and distrust; steps in a journey back to human society.

At our hospital we were just a small part of such journeys but it was our duty to do our work properly and professionally, to give the patients hope that they could get better. Because there
is nothing as bad in life as to have no hope, to believe you have been defeated, and to give in to that. I wasn’t prepared to countenance that fate for the women I worked with at Kneesworth. And now that I found myself in confinement, four thousand miles away under a hostile sky, I would not accept it for myself.