Free A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival by Judith Tebbutt Page A

sign that we had been there.
    My stomach began to churn: something, clearly, was going to happen but I’d no idea what. The Navigator came up to me.
    ‘We move.’
    ‘Where are we going?’
    He gave no reply other than ‘Come now.’
    My best guess had been that we would get back in the boat, so I was surprised when we began to walk in the opposite directiontowards open grassland. I followed, stumbling and tripping over the uneven ground, the grass coarse against my bare feet. Marvin, again, gave me his sandals. He and the Navigator were laden with bulging black bags, blankets, and provisions.
    As we trudged along I found my mind returning to the long walk David and I had taken for pleasure less than a week earlier, up the Siria escarpment. It was a memory so fresh and fond that I wished I could reach out and touch it, return to it, relive it. Instead I was trekking through darkness to a destination unknown, blindly following the footsteps of hostile and hateful strangers.
    We walked for maybe half an hour until we approached a wooded area where, once again, I was pressed under a shrub. It was a big rambling growth, with a dome like a blackberry shrub, its trunk and thick roots twisted round each other, and the ground underneath was quite soft, so that by carefully positioning myself I could get comfortable. But I was left there, and couldn’t see my captors. I recoiled to see a huge centipede, as thick as my middle finger, crawling down a branch towards me. The Navigator must have heard my gasp of surprise because he pushed through the shrubbery, gently removed the insect onto a stick and whisked it away.
    Eventually I was brought the first food I’d had in two days. I couldn’t tell how they’d prepared it, but it was dollops of rice, steaming hot, in the bottom half of a plastic Castrol GTX container. Marvin showed me a tin of tuna with an enquiring look on his face. When I nodded he dumped the contents out onto the rice and tossed the tin aside, like the rubbish I’d seen earlier.
    I ate tiny bits with my fingers – the rice tasted awful, petroleum-flavoured, inevitably. But I knew that I had to eat, and to try not to be sick. They were eating too, forming rice into ballswith their fingers and pushing these into their mouths. I tried to imitate the style, without success, and they laughed. Then the Navigator, wordlessly, took the machete, hacked a shard of yellow plastic from an oil container and fashioned a kind of spoon for me. It was a prisoner’s meal, for sure, but I took some reassurance in knowing after all that it wasn’t their plan to starve me.
    *
    I slept awhile. When I was shaken awake it was dark, the moon was out and I was beckoned from the shrub by torchlight. Marvin and the Navigator were loaded up once more with bags, and clearly we were on the move again. I was filled with foreboding. Marvin held on to the sleeve of my jacket and guided me through the bush, down a shallow dip, over a grassy plain and up the other side. The stars in the night sky were vividly bright: I could see the hazy glowing arc of the Milky Way, and pick out the seven stars of the Plough. I felt a pang in my heart to think that David, were he with me, could have named all the various constellations. He had learned to navigate by the stars as a Sea Cadet, the same knowledge that got him through his Outward Bound course in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia.
    We walked on through long, dry grass, me struggling in the dark to make out what lay before us beyond the shapes of trees. Marvin was trying to hurry me, tugging me, but I struggled. I was conscious that we were moving down a slope, and then we made a definite turn and came over a headland – all this in utter silence, no one speaking a word.
    Down below us I could see a horseshoe bay and houses, faintly lit, dotted around the shoreline. It was civilisation of a sort, and I wondered whether this was the place they had come to procure their food and water.
    We got onto a