A long walk home - Judith Tebbutt

This is the story of how, over a period of one hundred and ninety-two
days, I was torn away from the life I knew and loved, and dragged down
to the depths of despair; of how I endured enforced isolation and
near-starvation at the hands of Somali pirates; and of how I made a
choice to survive by any and all means that I could muster.

In September 2011
Judith Tebbutt and her husband David set out on an
adventurous holiday
to Kenya. A couple for thirty-three years, they had
first met in Zambia:
Africa had played a major part in their life
together. After a joyous week on safari in the Masai Mara, they flew on
to a beach resort forty
kilometres south of Somalia. And there, in the early hours of 11 September, tragedy struck them.

Judith
was torn away from David by a band of armed pirates, dragged over sea
and land to a village in the arid heart of lawless Somalia, and there
held hostage in a squalid room, a ransom on her head. There, too, she
learned the terrible truth that the responsibility of securing her
release now rested with her son Ollie.


Powerful, moving
and at times quite devastating, this is
Judith Tebbutt's story in her
own words.