A Long Walk Home

<i>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.</i><br><i></i><br><i></i>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.<br><br>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. <br><br> Powerful moving and at times quite devastating this is Judith Tebbutt's story in her own words.