A Long Walk Home: One Woman's Story of Kidnap, Hostage, Loss - and Survival (2 page)

Though as a native of Cumbria I’ve always rated the Lake District unmatchable in the global league table of physical beauty, I had to admit that the Masai Mara was stunning – with its mountains and rivers, rolling plains dotted with herds of giraffe, elephants making their ponderous way, their young ones in tow. But the chief lure for the sightseer at this time of year was to witness the seasonal migration across the Mara of great herds of wildebeest in search of fresh grazing pasture. David had always wanted to see this spectacle, and if early September wasn’t optimum time we kept our hopes up none the less.

One morning Steve got word through the guides’ relay system that a pair of rhinos had been sighted, and John drove us to the
spot at speed. Of course the same word had reached camps all over the reserve, and we arrived to find six or seven trucks surrounding a copse wherein the rhinos, quite understandably, had turned shy and effectively invisible. David and I looked at one another and knew that neither of us felt good about joining this particular circus: it wasn’t what we’d come for. So we went quickly on our way, which turned out to be another ‘right decision’.

Soon we were parked up close to a neglected section of the river that Steve knew to be popular for smaller herds of wildebeest seeking a crossing. He had an instinct we should sit tight, and we did, for two and a half hours. For a long time we were watching a sedentary herd of a few hundred zebra from a distance. Then two or three zebra detached themselves and scrambled down a hillside to the riverbed, seemingly curious. One zebra very cautiously started to cross the rock-strewn river – and David and I gulped to see crocodiles, curious themselves, moving smoothly downstream, coolly predatory. But the plucky zebra made it over and up the bank to near our truck, then let out a braying sound that alerted its grazing fellows back over on the other side. ‘It’s happening,’ whispered Steve.

Slowly, the zebras got to their feet and made themselves into a winding line, a procession that threaded down to the riverbank and picked its way across. Herds of wildebeest, which had been only dark dots in the distance, got the idea and followed suit. And in short order hundreds of animals were splashing across the Mara, and David and I sat rapt, feeling privileged to witness it from yards away. The din made by the horned wildebeest was phenomenal: restive and snorting, they banged their hoofs on the dirt, then tumbled down the embankment, clattered over rocks and threshed through the water. We were silent, transfixed,
not moving a muscle before this extraordinary display of unstoppable nature. And as far as we could see, the basking crocodiles had no success in trying to spoil it.

Another of our treasurable moments came as a result of David’s hawk-eye vision. We were out in the truck en route to investigate a sighting of a cheetah and her cub on a hillside. And we were travelling at speed, the clear plastic windows of our soft-top truck rolled down against the rain, when I heard David suddenly say to our driver, ‘John, can you stop and back up a bit?’ John obliged and David pointed something out to our guide.

‘Steve. Over there. Is that a serval …?’

And it was. This incredibly rare, tawny, black-spotted wild cat, hardly bigger than a domestic feline, was nestled flat down in the long grass. Unaccustomed to exposure, it peered up at us in great surprise. David gently raised his camera and squeezed off a few shots. Even Steve had never seen a live serval before, yet David had made the spot. He was thrilled, and I was thrilled for him.

The cheetah we then found was hardly less of a treat. In horizontal pouring rain at 7 a.m., flaps down on the truck, feeling alone in the world, we watched as she came out of the undergrowth, creeping low on the ground, then sat up, proud and erect, surveying all around her, establishing that all was completely safe. Then she turned her head, issued a squeak – and we heard an answering squeak, and from the undergrowth came a tiny spiky-haired cheetah cub that ran to sit by its mum. We observed them in complete silence for an hour. David was captivated. For a while I just watched him, the grin on his face, how fully ‘in the moment’ he was.

Back in our room that night David was a contented man. As he rested on the bed I started to write out a postcard to Ollie,
listing all the animals we had encountered over the week. ‘What else did we see?’ I asked David when I got stuck. He filled in things I’d forgotten, but clearly the card would have to be a
work-in
-progress. I tucked it away, to be completed and mailed later.

On our last day in the Masai Mara we decided to embark on what was billed as a ‘moderately taxing’ full-day walking safari up the Siria escarpment to Suguroi Hill Tree House, passing through herds of giraffe and elephants and coming precariously close to lion and water buffalo. For starters, though, we had to get to the other side of the fast-flowing river, which meant crossing a rope bridge suspended above the ravine. But David had always suffered from vertigo, so badly that he could hardly stand on a chair. I could see that, for once, he was nervous, so I volunteered to go first, terrified myself but not wanting to show it, hoping to make it look easy. ‘Don’t look down!’ I called out as cheerily as I could. Slowly but surely David made it over. I couldn’t have been more proud of him.

Across the river lay another of the Serian encampments, and we were met and escorted to its reception area – a big and sumptuous living room with heavy wooden furnishings. The concrete floor was being keenly polished by a young employee who skated over the surface with cloths tied around his feet, and David intro duced himself to the ‘skate’. This sight – and the aroma of polish – made for a powerfully fond aide-memoire. David looked to me, I to him, and we smiled and hugged. Neither of us could have missed the reminder of the curious time we’d once spent, both apart and together, in Chililabombwe, Zambia.

It was a strange post-colonial world he and I had stepped into back in 1976. Previously all I knew of Africa was what I had
glimpsed, aged eleven, in the pages of an encyclopaedia donated to my family by our local vicar (who took a commendable interest in the struggling families of his parish). But both David (a qualified accountant) and my then-husband Peter (a trained electrician) had been hired by Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, a newly nationalised enterprise which was nonetheless bringing in overseas specialists to ease the transition to state owner ship. In this environment the only native Zambians you interacted with were those who were employed around your house and garden: in other words, a typical expatriate community, with its bowls club, polo club, squash, tennis and rugby clubs. As a bachelor David had no qualms about having his domestic work done for him. Moreover at work he demonstrated his competence so effectively that he was promoted from accountancy duties to a position as administrator of
Chililabombwe
Hospital: a line of work in which he had no experience. But he set about it with his customary vigour.

My domestic situation and status in Zambia were rather more complicated than David’s. Peter and I had met and married young, ‘the done thing’, each knowing little of who the other really was. Too late we found out we really had nothing in common and no means of making the other happy. And nothing could change that, not even our radical relocation from grey and rain-misty Ulverston to the heat and colour and aroma of Africa. Though I had approached the move with much trepidation, I was quickly fascinated by this exotic place of hibiscus and frangipani, where turquoise-headed lizards darted down from the trees in your garden, and tall women in vividly coloured robes and elaborately tied headscarves swayed elegantly down the road, often bearing babies on their backs. But while the experience of being under a bigger sky certainly broadened my perception of
the world, it did nothing to improve the hamstrung state of my and Peter’s marriage.

While I rattled around in a four-bedroomed house with a big garden, Peter worked long shifts, and we tended to socialise separately. We were effectively living apart under the same roof, and the notion that I was going to spend the rest of my life with him seemed to me an utterly forlorn and threadbare one. But then in my vulnerable position, five thousand miles from home, I really couldn’t say what the future would hold – until I met David.

It was at a squash club one day in Chililabombwe, as I was waiting around courtside to support the home team, when I saw a man striding toward me – handsome, fit and tanned. He asked me if I could help him find his opponent, who, I happened to know, was already on court warming up. As this man walked away he looked back at me and we smiled at one another. In my head I heard a voice. ‘He’s the one …’ And I didn’t know him from Adam.

No sooner had I met David than he kept cropping up in company. It quickly got to the stage I was looking for him, hoping to see him. We were always in a group situation, to my chagrin, but for me he exuded a stunning magnetism. I had strong feelings for him of a kind I hadn’t recognised before, and I didn’t know what to do with them. It came as a great surprise. ‘Why do I feel sick every time I see him? Why am I hoping to bump into him when I go to the postbox?’ But then, never having been in love before, I couldn’t say what I had lacked. If he came and sat next to me I would feel terrific excitement – but, more than that, the most remarkable feeling of completeness, as if for him and me to be sitting side by side in life was exactly what fate had intended. I knew it was wrong – I was still married. I didn’t
know anything about him. And we had exchanged nothing but chit-chat.

One night we ran into one another at the local arts theatre: we sat together for the show, then he walked me home. I was wearing some unsuitably high-heeled shoes that had been sent to me from England, and at one point I tripped up, but David took my arm and so saved me from falling off the pavement into a storm drain. Inwardly I was thrilled by the touch of his hand on my arm: there was a strength there, and also what I believed to be a caring. I felt something open inside me – the unhappiness of my marriage couldn’t be hidden. I told David of my predicament and how I planned to leave Zambia in a few months. Gently David told me he was aware my marriage wasn’t a happy one. A while ago I had ‘caught his eye’: he had begun to ask other people about me, been as curious about me as I had been about him. What he told me just filled me with joy. I was sure he was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with – that with him I would be happy. Incredibly, I still didn’t know his last name. But now we had made a breakthrough.

For the next two or three months David and I spent time together in a very chaste and necessarily secretive sort of romance. He drove me to places he loved, the bush, a big lake and its environs, which were home to crocodiles, egrets, hippos and blue monkeys. We took walks, confided our hopes in one another. And somehow we came to a decision – we didn’t know how but we wanted to be together. The only problem was that I was leaving Zambia, six months before his contract expired.

In the end I left my husband having packed a single suitcase. At 4 o’clock one morning a sympathetic friend drove me to the airport, where I got on a flight to Malindi and thence home to England. For six months David and I corresponded between
Zambia and Cumbria, making plans for the life we would share. We both enthused about seeing the world and the adventures we might have. For sure we knew we wanted to make a home together, but we also shared a yen for far shores and fresh experiences: together, without doubt, we would be travellers. People might have thought we were crazy, deluded – but in ourselves and in each other we had unshakeable faith.

So in all it was a long way we had come, David and I, from our respective and disparate upbringings, from Zambia and across thirty-three years spent together, to where we now stood in September 2011, taking in the fantastic views from the top of the Siria escarpment down over the plains of the Masai Mara, which stretched as far as one could see.

We were advised of a daring optional extra to the itinerary of this trek, namely that we could stay out overnight, sleeping in the Suguroi Hill Tree House without doors or windows, under ‘moonbeams and starlight’. David, adventurous as ever, looked very tempted.

‘You must be crazy,’ I told him.

‘Oh, I’m sure it would be safe.’

‘From lions and cheetahs? How?’

‘They post a guard just a ways off with a rifle.’

‘Oh, great. Now are you quite sure you paid up that Air Ambulance insurance you told us about?’

In all I thought this was one gamble that wasn’t worth taking, and David came round to my point of view. It was a simple compromise. On the way back to our camp, as we retraversed the rope bridge, he affected a ‘no-hands’ pose, grinning at me.

On the final morning at Serian, 10 September, we rose at our usual 6 a.m. Over breakfast we met Dr Ben U, a brain surgeon from Santa Monica, California, who had helped us out during the week with some medicine for upset stomachs. He snapped a photo of us. David had grown a little beard, adding to his air of contentment. Ben and his wife had been in Uganda looking at gorillas. David and I had decided that would be our next jaunt – that, or else the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania.

We said our farewells, got in the truck, took a meandering drive of a few hours to the airstrip. It was cold. As usual I affected a windcheater, hat, scarf and gloves, while David remained impervious in his shorts. To our delight John produced a couple of Masai blankets for us to take home, a gift I’d hoped to pick up at some local store. We could take them back to Bishop’s Stortford, sit outside, light the chiminea and be cosy, as we loved to be outdoors on summer evenings.

At the airstrip Steve and John stayed with us until the plane came, by which time David and I had met up again with Ben and his wife, who were also leaving. We regaled them with stories of the animals we’d seen. In truth we were a shade rueful to be on our way. I had loved our week, though not as much as David – I’m not sure it was possible to exceed the evident pleasure he took in all aspects of it. He said we would be sure to return one day. The talk turned to our next stop, Kiwayu Safari Village. David was looking ahead keenly.