When they came in the morning

Extract

On Monday, 9th August, 1971, I was kidnapped from my bed by armed men, taken away and held as a hostage for five and a half weeks. I was not in Uruguay, Brazil, Greece or Russia. I was in the United Kingdom, an hour’s flight from London. Belfast.

A crashing on the door awoke me. It was 4.45 a.m. I went downstairs in my pyjamas to answer. As I opened it I was forced back against the wall by two soldiers who screamed at me: ‘Do you live here?’ Overwhelmed by their perspicacity I admitted that this was so, whereupon they ordered me to get dressed. I foolishly asked why. ‘Under the Special Powers Act we don’t have to give a reason for anything’, the officer said. ‘You have two minutes to get dressed.’ Through the window I could see in the dawn light half-a-dozen armed men in our tiny front garden.

I was given exactly two minutes to get dressed while a young soldier boosted his ego by sticking a SLR up my nose. My wife, not surprisingly was almost in tears as I was dragged down the stairs and into the street. She ran after me to give me my jacket and was roughly ordered back into the house. Our quiet residential bourgeois neighbourhood hadn’t seen such excitement in years as I was frog-marched at the double down the avenue by eight soldiers. As we sped down we were joined by a dozen more who had been hiding in nearby gardens. Those who looked out into the early morning mist must have imagined that a Vietcong patrol had been sighted in the locale.

‘Tie him up and gag the fecker’ (sic), an educated English accent ordered. ‘That’s hardly necessary’, I said, as I was frisked for the second time up against the lorry (or pig as they called it). This was accepted albeit reluctantly by the corporal who was positively twitching with desire to practise his Boy Scout knots upon me. My shoes were taken off me and I was put none too gently into the back of the ‘pig’. Two men with Sten guns covered me.