Kidnap victim writes of ordeal,
Former hostage offers moving account of her abduction and husband’s death
As anyone unlucky enough to ever need such help will soon learn, hostage negotiators choose their words very carefully. In what is the ultimate game of bluff and double bluff, any phone conversation is usually carefully scripted: neither friendly nor aggressive when talking to the kidnappers, and careful “news management” if speaking directly to the hostage, who usually clings to every word.
Spare a thought, then, for 25-year-old Ollie Tebbutt, who in negotiating the freedom of his mother Judith after her kidnapping by Somali pirates, had to break the news that her husband David was dead.
When a gang abducted the couple from their lodge house at a Kenyan beach resort, she neither heard nor saw the gunshot that killed him, and thereafter her captors maintained the pretence that he was still alive.
It was left to Ollie to inform her, two weeks into her ordeal, why it was he, and not her husband, who was negotiating the ransom to get her back.
In A Long Walk Home, Tebbutt’s account of her ordeal, we learn that Ollie was being advised by professional hostage negotiators. Even they, one suspects, must have struggled with how to help him phrase the following exchange: “Mum, there’s something I have to tell you.” Ollie says: “Dad didn’t survive his injuries.”
As the “clock stops” in his mother’s heart, he counsels her: “We’ve just got to remember all the good times we had with him.” For once, the armed men guarding Tebbutt look ashamed, and when she jabs her finger at them one by one, accusing them of being murderers, they gradually slink from the room.
Many long-term hostages consider suicide at some point, and it is perhaps remarkable that Tebbutt did not attempt it, having been handed what many might see as a perfectly reasonable excuse. One reason was that she did not want to deprive her son of his only surviving parent.
But as this book reveals, the woman who emerged waif-like from captivity six months later, was better equipped for such ordeals than she looked.
In her career as a social worker in psychiatric units, during which she was once attacked by a patient with a pair of scissors, she spent plenty of time retrieving souls lost in darkness.
Hence, when her own was being dragged the same way, she drew on the principles she applied in working with her patients.
That Tebbutt has been able to put this book together is testimony to her ability to take her own advice. Written with help from a ghostwriter at Faber and Faber, the publisher where David Tebbutt worked as the finance director, it is a detailed, touching account, revealing not just how she coped, but also her tenderness for her husband, whose meticulous holiday planning habits were a standing joke in the Tebbutt household.
His parting words to Ollie before going to Kenya were: “If anything should happen, our will is in the safe.”
A sense of foreboding stalks the couple from the outset of their holiday, when they arrive at the beach resort to find it eerily empty and themselves the only guests at dinner. The botched abduction then takes place the very first night, the gang spiriting Tebbutt by boat north to Somalia, under a moon that casts “a ribbon of silver across the sea’s surface — an image of romance, turned here into horror.”
Vivid accounts then follow of life in captivity in a succession of compounds and insect-ridden houses. Just as I did when I was kidnapped by Skullface and The Old Bastard while reporting for the Daily Telegraph in Somalia in 2008, she nicknames her captors according to their appearance and habits — Vain Man, Hungry Man, Scary Man, Chainsmoker and so on.
And she, too, finds comfort in listening to the BBC World Service, and some cheer is brought by the news that a raid by U.S. special forces in Somalia has rescued two kidnapped aid workers and killed their captors.
Her own kidnappers, fearing the same fate, move her from relatively comfortable quarters into the “Horrible House,” a baking hot room seething with cockroaches and caterpillars. Throughout her ordeal, she keeps both body and mind together by walking circuits of the rooms in which she is held — hence the book’s title.
Freed in March 2012 — reportedly for a ransom of $1,302,179 Cdn — she tries to move on from David almost as soon as she touches back down in Britain. While being debriefed at a country mansion provided by the Foreign Office, she stares out over the oak trees one morning, vowing to herself that “my life begins again from here.”
However, while her story may be inspirational, its ending is far from happy. David’s murder, she says, is not something she will “get over.”
Told in simple, first-person prose, the book touches only briefly on the wider picture of why Somalia became a pirate haven in the first place, concentrating rightly on Tebbutt’s raw personal experience instead.
It is perhaps a shame we do not hear more about the clearly remarkable role of her son Ollie but, as she points out, professional negotiators, like the highstakes poker players they are, never reveal their secrets.
She does, however, pay touching tribute to her son, saying that she overcame her instinctive reluctance to write the book in the hope that it might one day be read by any children he might have.
She wants them to learn first what a fine grandfather they would have had, and secondly “what a mentally strong and resolute man is their father.”
If future Tebbutts ever do read grandmother’s memoirs, they will think she was made of pretty strong stuff, too.