A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (16 page)

One evening, a surprise: Kufiya Man came into my room carrying a transistor radio, the most intriguing sight I had seen in a while. He wore a big smile and, encouragingly, seemed to want to engage with me.

‘Ah, radio?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, very good,’ he replied, with a thumbs-up. I had no idea what he was listening to, but that didn’t seem to be the point.

‘BBC very good, yes?’ he said. ‘BBC World Service?’

‘Oh yes, World Service!’ I gave him my broadest smile.

At that he lifted the radio and began to fiddle with the tuning knob. Suddenly an English-speaking voice broke forth, the familiar RP intonation of a nightly BBC newsreader. Kufiya Man handed me the radio with a look of triumph. I was amazed, and feared that I might cry.

‘Not for me, no?’

‘Yeah!’ he said, beaming. Then he sauntered out.

I sat and listened for perhaps half an hour, to
News Hour
and then
World Briefing
, stunned by how the business of the great wide world was suddenly cascading into my narrow confinement. To be able to hear my own language, and news from home, felt like a lifeline, a friend in isolation, clarity and coherence after so much dark and confusion.

Whereupon the Fifth Man stomped into the room, carrying his usual cloud of rancour, and snatched the radio away. He 
barked something at me and walked out with my prize.
It was too good to last
, I thought, deflated.

In a little while Kufiya Man was back, and seemed bewildered to find me empty-handed.

‘Radio?’ he asked.

‘Gone’, I said, shrugging, pointing outside.

His brow furrowed. I got the impression his view was that, as he had joined me together with the radio, no other pirate should then tear that asunder.

He must have gone out and registered a complaint on my behalf, because later that night, as I was preparing to wash at 8.30 p.m., Amina entered, all smiles, and from under her
jilbab
she produced another transistor radio, this one with an earpiece dangling from a socket. Then she hugged me, which I appreciated.

I couldn’t get reception from the radio that night, but I awoke the next day with new hope. I had been managing for so long with so little, pen and book and torch, rudimentary things that were hugely vital to me in structuring and getting through a day. This radio was therefore an incredible luxury.

I tried periodically to pick up a signal; and around 1 p.m., to my delight, the set came to life with the voice of James Coomarasamy and the World Service
News
. Mindful of conserving batteries, I turned it off again when I walked. Later, around 7 p.m. to 7.30 p.m., the signal turned frustratingly inaudible. But I was cheered: my days had acquired a new, essential, unmissable element, one that opened up my world.

That night Amina and the Navigator entered, along with a new face, a young girl in a blue and black
jilbab
, carrying a handbag. Amina had brought me extra batteries for the radio. I explained through the Navigator that it was working fine, but that I was very glad of the spares. I was more intrigued by this
girl. She appeared to be about sixteen years old, with a shy look, her head down, eyes averted but for occasional quick furtive glances. I said to the Navigator, ‘Who is this?’

‘Ah, this Amina’s daughter.’

I said to Amina, ‘Your daughter is lovely.’

Amina smiled and said something to the Navigator, pointed to her daughter then to me, then gestured with her hand, the thumb and pinkie finger extended, turning in the air like an aeroplane swooping about. The Navigator guffawed.

‘What did she say?’

‘She say when you leave here, you take her daughter with you. For your son.’

What a thought that was. Still, liking Amina as I did, I wanted to be sure I responded with care. ‘Oh no, my son is twenty-five years old.’

‘No care! No problem!’

The next day I saw Amina again in the compound and when she saw me she again made that gesture in the air with her hand, grinning. I supposed it was going to be a running gag.

In the early hours of the morning I felt the ground shake. I awoke in darkness to harsh vibration, discordant noise. My bed was being kicked, very purposely so as to wake me. As I stirred I was dazzled by the harsh glare of torchlight in my eyes, and for a moment I could see nothing else in front of me.

Then I found some focus and realised the Navigator was standing there. He didn’t say a word, but held out a black
binliner
, and pointed sharply at my things around the room, then prodded a finger down into the depths of the binbag.

‘You want me to put my things in there?’

He nodded. ‘We go,’ he said.

‘Where are we going?’

To that, no answer. And so anxiety came spiralling down on me again. I got out from under the mosquito net and began to fill the bag with the sum of my worldly goods – my book and pen, my radio, my torch, a little bottle of shampoo. When no one was watching, impulsively, I plucked off the six pegs that were holding my curtains together: it just seemed to me that they could prove a handy addition to my cache. Then I was told to sit, and they took down the mosquito net, folded up the
blue-and
-yellow mattress, gathered up my water receptacles. In the dark I could barely make out the figures flitting around me: the effect was phantasmagorical. But Vain Man was directing operations, ensuring everything was stripped down and carted. Silence prevailed. No one spoke. The pirates’ feet seemed to be soundless on the floor. Actions were seamlessly orchestrated, one man’s job to pick up and bear off this, another that.

Then I was led out into the compound. As usual most of the pirates were asleep, either undercover or outside in the compound, their sheets wound up and around their heads, like shrouds. The door in the metal gate was opened, I stepped out and there the Fat Controller’s four-wheel-drive awaited me, its door open. I was bundled inside, clutching my black bag. Pirates got in the back beside me, with their guns.

The car rolled away, headlights off, moving slowly through the village. Through the glass I saw a restaurant, a hairdresser’s, a donkey tied up, houses with four-wheel-drive cars parked up outside. All was quiet, dark, deserted. After a little while I noticed piles of stones along the sides of the track, seeming to lead out of the village. We were headed that way, but not at speed. Once we were past the dwellings the car lights went on. But soon we
entered another settled cluster of houses. We hadn’t gone so very far, and seemed to be nearing our destination. I knew now I was going to be confined to new quarters. I’d got accustomed to the compound, got settled there. This new disruption was frightening to me.

It was an eerie feeling, knowing oneself to be transported somewhere ‘in secret’, and a kind of mental torture, too, because I could feel the natural, surging instinct to scream out, ‘Help me!’, to anyone who might listen and come to my aid. Or else to try to bolt from the moving car – something, anything, that could alert some other sensible person to my plight.

But I didn’t dare do any such thing. I had contemplated escape once, right at the start, in the mangrove swamp, but not since. It had been hopeless then and it had been hopeless ever since. My prison wasn’t just whatever hole of a room I was confined to. It was this whole village, and its surrounding area. My prison, indeed, was all of Somalia. And from that there could be no escape.

The car pulled up before a narrow gate of blue corrugated iron with a tiny shiny padlock, in a frame of flimsy wood set amid a perimeter fence of misshapen branches and shrubbery secured by wire. The pirates got out first, and Hungry Man led the way, scratching around in the pocket of his shorts as if for keys. He pulled out a bunch and tried the gate with each of them, without success. I watched this folly glumly from the car’s back seat. I checked my watch. We’d left the ‘Big House’ at 2 a.m. Now it was 2.20 a.m.

At last the gate was levered open, I was taken from the car and we trooped into the compound. They used the light shed by their phone screens to show me the way, across a small yard towards a poky dwelling with a corrugated-iron door. Fearful already of what I was going to find there, I asked for the toilet. One pirate pointed, swung the weak light around in another direction, towards another door. I fiddled in the dark with a bolt, flung it open – found another hole in the ground, with a tree seemingly growing up through it. Conditions here, I could tell, were much cruder and more rudimentary than the place we had left.

When I crept back out from the toilet Vain Man ushered me into a dark, dirty, chilly room. In it was nothing but a table at the end and a bed base of wooden slats on a frame, standing unsteadily on an uneven concrete floor. The roof was tin, the walls appeared to be pale clay with occasional knobbly protrusions. There was one shuttered window, about twelve inches square. I felt desolation creep over me.

A quartet of pirates came in and set about desultory efforts to ‘make up the room’. The Navigator carried in the mattress and threw it onto the bed base. I put sheets on the bed as they tacked up the mosquito net. My bucket and bowl and container were brought in, plus a chair that had been carted across from my previous room too. But there could be no masking the squalid, ramshackle appearance of this place.

‘Why have I been moved here?’ I asked the Navigator.

He shrugged. ‘I not know. I just told we must move.’

The thought of being stuck here for the foreseeable future was so dismal that I had to try to shut down my emotions, assert the logical side:
OK, so the first task is to make it through to morning. In the light of day you can assess the situation anew. You’ll walk, you’ll get into your routine – you’ll manage.

Two more mattresses were dragged into the room and I realised I was to have company for the evening: the Navigator, the Fifth Man and Bambi threw themselves down. The door was pulled shut, enclosing us in airless darkness: I had a horrible feeling we would be in unpleasantly close quarters here. Of course in a room scarcely fit for human habitation we also had company of the six-and eight-legged variety. In bed I pulled the sheet up to my chin as always, but it wasn’t long before I felt the repulsive sensation of creatures scuttling across my face and neck.

Surveying the room in the light of dawn was a stern test of my spirits, from the moment I opened my eyes to see a gauzy mesh of grey cobwebs on the ceiling above me. The walls, I now made out clearly, were fashioned from dried wattle and daub that had been plastered onto the branches of trees, some of which protruded through this render.

After the first shock to my system of the kidnap from Kiwayu I had tried to practise resilience: I knew I had reserves to draw on, and I was sustained too by a particular hope – in retrospect, a nearly naive optimism. But then had come a second shock, the dreadful news of David’s death, which had thrown a shadow over me and shattered my dearest hopes. None the less I still had my resilience, my faith in our son, and my dream of getting home to him. However I felt in my bones that this move was yet another shock: one that made the thought of getting through the days all the more daunting.

I would have to hold onto my structure: my walking and exercise, my set times of eating and sleeping. The floor was nine paces long, and my challenge hadn’t changed: to walk that floor a dozen times daily until I fell into bed from weariness. I had to keep telling myself, ‘You’ll be leaving soon. It’s just a matter of time.’ But looking around this bleak place it was a lot harder to believe that. If I was to be here now, did the Negotiator know? Could I expect to see him, to have calls with Ollie, to be informed of what, if anything, was going on over my release? Everything I had understood to this point had been thrown into disarray.

I needed to impose myself on my surroundings somehow. Looking around the muddy walls, in particular at the spurs of hard tree bark that poked through sporadically, I decided to put these to good use, as ad hoc clothes hooks. I hung up the
binliner
that contained my carefully washed and preserved red-
and-black
dress, and as I commenced my walking I nodded to it with each passing circuit.
That’s your going-away outfit. At least keep that clean.

I got some sense of the pirates’ new modus operandi when Vain Man and an elderly man arrived at the compound by car,
bringing food and water for the pirates and for me, along with plastic bags of
khat
, which were doled out near-religiously.

When I looked out to the yard I realised that the only other permanent structure in this compound bar my room and the toilet was a small, round house, its roof thatched in the African style, to the left of the gate. That house looked to be so cramped – indeed the whole place appeared so jerry-built – that I wasn’t surprised I’d been required to share my room with pirates overnight.

I tried to engage the pirates in a few other small tasks that I hoped would make the room more bearable. I asked for Marvin’s help to move the green-and-gold-topped plastic table, and a filthy rug that sat underneath it, the shifting of which disturbed a veritable colony of cockroaches. In the yard Hungry Man was being his usual fastidious self, busying himself with a broom, and I asked him if he would help me clean out the room. He loaned me the broom and I swept, and then he brought in a large bucket of water, which he splashed around the floor with a scoop. This meagre effort at houseproudness was a little ‘connection’ of sorts, and the outcome was a clean floor.

Later that morning Vain Man came and took my door off its hinges, propping it against the outer wall while Hungry Man fetched a green curtain and nailed it up over the doorway, leaving a two-foot gap at the bottom for fresh air – which also gave me sight of the gate and the African House. Realising this, the pirates reconsidered. Vain Man decided to drop the curtain right to the floor. I had to have fresh air, and I decided to put my case to Hungry Man rather than Vain Man: smiling, I gestured as to clutch my throat and made a ghastly choking noise. He took my point, and refixed the curtain one more time to leave six inches at the bottom. My small victory, though, proved short-lived:
come the afternoon torrential rain came, lashing at the curtain, and the pirates hastily reinstated the door, pulling the curtain over the top so it wasn’t exposed. And so gloom resettled itself on my dingy and cheerless habitat.

There was a second delivery of food and water late afternoon, and around five o’clock my evening portion of rice was brought. I saved it for after my walk, and ate by torchlight, since there was no other source of light come the evening. However, one of the guards came in and made me move to the furthest corner of the room, in case someone outside might notice the light through the window.

I counted seven pirates in the compound. There was no sentry at my door. Most of the time they all seemed to be in the round house. Two of them had been assigned the big tripod-mounted machine-guns, and they were stationed with these weapons trained on the gate. The other pirates toted their standard-issue
AK
47s. Those who weren’t part of the detail for sleeping in my room had a particular ritual come the evening: they dragged an old car bumper from the side of the yard to a position in front of my door, and propped it up with sticks, then threw their mattresses down and their coats against it so they had a crude kind of backrest.

Around 8.30 p.m. I insisted on my usual washing time and would close the door, with the words, ‘Washing now.’ But as soon as I was done the pirates crept in and got onto their mattresses. Their presence was hugely annoying, as they fiddled continually with their phones into the small hours. Sleep was next to impossible given the lights of the glowing screens and insistent tapping. They were wired on
khat
, of course, and they knew they could get through a shift and then sleep the rest of the day. But I didn’t 
have that recourse. I was desperately afraid of turning nocturnal in my habits. That way led to unreality, and I needed to be as sharp and alert as possible.

The move had shaken and dispirited me, and I couldn’t hide that from myself. I was edgy, no longer knowing what to expect. Hour by hour the awfulness of the place seemed to exact a price on my morale and my psyche.

My room was hot and dark and felt to me like the lair or domain of whole clusters of beetles, ants, arachnids and even amphibious life. Continual noises and small rustlings made me start and think, ‘What could that be …?’ I found a frog in the corner of the room one afternoon, and brushed him out. But when I began to see insects emerging through the walls I recoiled and wondered if I could believe my eyes. These invaders were large, bright-red caterpillars, their bristling movements so disconcerting that I could hardly bear to look at them.

The floor of the toilet heaved with insect life, and I couldn’t set my foot down anywhere without a crunch. Big ants, an inch long, roamed over my feet and up my legs as I squatted. In the dark I couldn’t be sure what I might touch wherever I put my hands. The branch growing up inside the toilet was especially crawling with life. Unfortunately I found I needed to hold this branch for support in getting to my feet, and whenever I did so I got a handful of squirming arthropods for my trouble.

The corrugated-iron roof exaggerated the heat of the day. In the mornings the pirates tended to open my door in and pull the curtain out over the doorway, so at least I got the benefit of some breeze. They constructed a shaded area for themselves out of branches with matting draped over them, but more often they 
seemed to lurk in the African House, and so I found myself strangely isolated. In the Big House (as I now thought of it) the covered walkway outside the rooms meant that one always had a sense of life outside, pirates talking and laughing. But in this Horrible House (which seemed the most fitting appellation), I had to lie down on the floor and look under the curtain for the smallest sign of life or activity.

One day, as I sat in the room sensing that nothing was happening outside, I wondered what the pirates might do if I flicked the curtain over the door, to give myself a little more air but also something more to look at beyond the enclosure of four walls, and the cockroaches crawling over the bed. Somehow they must have had a preternatural sense of my initiative for no sooner had I dared to do this than they came running out of the African House and shouted angrily at me. I retreated to the corner of the room, lay down on a mattress and protested weakly in Somali, ‘
Kulul
[hot].’ But they threw the curtain down and closed the door on me. I had to believe the punishment was temporary, that they understood I would be in danger of asphyxiation unless the door was opened soon.

I had to keep my head together, my mind occupied. I took to virtual driving, beginning by picturing myself clambering into our car on the drive in Bishop’s Stortford. I could feel and smell the leather seats, the steering wheel in my hand, the power in the vehicle as I turned the ignition, indicated, reversed up the slight incline and out, and then drove off down our street. Long drives seemed to make sense to me. I routinely headed for Cumbria, towards the
M
11, then
A
14,
M
6,
A
509 – until I imagined myself approaching the Cumbrian fells.

As a hostage my world had shrunk: I had adapted to a cramped, confined space, with great discomfort. To a degree I
was amazed that I could ‘manage’, ‘cope’. But I worried, too, that I would get accustomed to it, accept it – because to do that would be to say goodbye to my self-worth. I had in any case been robbed of my outward dignity and reduced to some desperate measures. Lying on a filthy floor shared with cockroaches in order to peek out under a curtain was a debasing activity, but I did it, and decided it was not so bad, in return for at least seeing what was outside – even just my captors praying on their mats. In myself, though, I thought:
Thank goodness David is not having to witness this level of deprivation I’m being subjected to.

In this Horrible House I soon got used to waking up in the morning and discovering different, if familiar, faces in my room and in the yard outside. Clearly the pirates were rotating my guard, and I supposed they were hardly more comfortable with this squalid setting than I was. Certainly their moods seemed not a great deal more elevated than mine, exemplified in my mind by the miserable face of Limping Man. One day he appeared so disconsolate that I thought to engage with him just by reference to what was emblazoned across the front of his vest. ‘Celtic very good team,’ I offered. But he just blanked me, scowling. I ought to have remembered that he was one of the pirates on whom efforts at friendliness felt especially wasted. Another of these was a pirate who made a point every evening of stealing my plastic chair from the room so that he could perch himself on it for the duration of the night watch. He was too belligerent a character for me to argue with; and he was called ‘Chair Man’ in my mind henceforward.

The Fifth Man was one of the contingent routinely required to sleep overnight in my room: a close proximity that I supposed 
he resented, since he seemed to have such a problem with me generally. He was perpetually threatening, and he made me uncomfortable. Yet, for this very reason – also, perhaps, for a challenge – he was a character I felt drawn to work on, to try to improve our relations. I had an inkling that he was intelligent, and knew a little English too. I had encountered many more ‘difficult’ individuals during my working life, and I had always been able to find some way to connect to them.