Surviving captivity

John Mccarthy was 29, and on his first foreign assignment, when he was kidnapped by Islamic Jihad terrorists in Beirut. They kept him captive for five years, chained up in a series of cells. He’d never been particularly religious, but after a period in solitary confinement, he was driven to distraction by the sound of people being tortured, and one day he just dropped to his knees and prayed. “The next minute I was utterly euphoric,” he told Laura Pullman in The Sunday Times. “The horrible neon light had turned a soft blue and I thought, ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’” There were other consolations too – including humour. Once, he and fellow hostage Brian Keenan (who is still a close friend) were transferred to a freezing room with a particularly terrifying kidnapper. “We started imitating the guards, doing really cod Arabic accents. We were lying on a freezing floor, roaring with laughter. We realised if there’s still joy in this absolute hellhole, then of course we’ve got to hold on.” There was very little that was funny about his experience, though, and for a long time he kept it from his daughter, now 12. But one day, she came back from primary school and said, “Daddy, if you don’t let me do that, I’m going to put you back in prison.” So Mccarthy gently explained what had happened to him – how men with machine guns had stopped his car and one of them had hauled him out by the collar. He worried that she might cry. Instead she asked: “If you’d been wearing a T-shirt, do you think he’d have grabbed you by the ear?”