A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival by Judith Tebbutt Page B
Authors: Judith Tebbutt
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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.
4
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. Theirexample 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
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.
4
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. Theirexample 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
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