BBC News | UK | Former hostage McCarthy weds in private Monday, April 19, 1999 Published at 15:43 GMT 16:43 UK UK Former hostage McCarthy weds in private John McCarthy at RAF Lyneham after his 1991 release Former hostage John McCarthy has married his girlfriend Anna Ottewill in a private ceremony. Guests at the service at St Mary's Church in Bepton, West Sussex, included Mr McCarthy's fellow Beirut captives Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, Terry Anderson and their wives. Jill Morrell, Mr McCarthy's former girlfriend who campaigned for his release throughout the five-year ordeal, was not present. News of the wedding, which took place last Friday, emerged on Monday. Terry Waite: 'Perfect day' Mr Waite said: "It was a perfect day - a marvellous day, just as the couple wanted it to be. It really was a very small occasion, as they deliberately wanted it, quiet and private." Mr McCarthy, 43, met Ms Ottewill, 32, a BBC Publications editor who comes from the Bepton area, when they worked on the book of the television series Island Race.

Mr McCarthy starred in the series with comedienne Sandi Toksvig. The journalist was taken hostage in Lebanon in April 1986, and eventually freed in August in 1991. He was the youngest of the Beirut hostages and had spent only five weeks in Lebanon before he disappeared. He was standing in for the bureau chief of Worldwide Television News, his first foreign assignment. Betrayed Former hostage McCarthy goes back to Beirut - Telegraph Former hostage McCarthy goes back to Beirut By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter 12:01AM GMT 11 Jan 2004 John McCarthy, the television journalist and author, is to return to Beirut this week for the first time since he was freed after being held hostage there for more than five years. McCarthy will spend two weeks in Lebanon as part of his research for a documentary that he hopes will provide an insight into Shia Muslims, the largest group in Iraq. It was a militant Iranian-backed Shia group that held McCarthy hostage - along with other westerners including Terry Waite and Brian Keenan - after he was kidnapped on his first foreign assignment as a television news producer in April 1986.

He was eventually released in August 1991 after being held in chains in 13 locations around Beirut. In an interview with the Telegraph yesterday, McCarthy spoke of his mixed feelings about flying to Lebanon this Tuesday. "For a long time I had no interest in going back. I have never felt I needed to go back to lay any ghosts to rest," he said. Related Articles "As the years went by and the civil war came to an end and the country settled down, I still felt no great pull to go back to confront my past. But now I'm excited to be going back to carry out a journalistic project that really interests me." McCarthy 47, was married four years ago to Anna Ottewill, a photographer. They have homes in Suffolk and London. He has written or co-written four books since he was freed, including Some Other Rainbow with Jill Morrell, his former girlfriend, about his time in captivity, and Between Extremes with Brian Keenan, his fellow hostage. McCarthy has few feelings of anger towards his captors and no desire for revenge.

His deepest regret is that the kidnappers, believed to have been linked to the Hizbollah group, were not willing to get a message to his elderly, sick mother Sheila that her son was alive and well. She died of cancer in 1989 while he was in captivity. McCarthy does not intend to try to make contact with his former captors and does not know the precise locations where he was held. "I want to see how Lebanon has moved on and how the Shia population has moved on," he said. He believes that Lebanon is now a safe place, and he does not fear that he will be in any danger upon his return. McCarthy also plans to visit Iran and Iraq to research his programme, due to be shown on ITV in April. "The whole thing was inspired by the fact that, after the Iraq war, there is little understanding in the West of the Shia people." John McCarthy: interview on the release of his new memoir | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close Ten years ago, John McCarthy was holed up in a Cotswolds cottage with Jill Morrell working on the final chapters of their memoir, Some Other Rainbow.

He was 12 months out of captivity, feeling his way back into the world, trying to make a go of his relationship and some sense of his life. Writing the book was a help; therapy, in a way. A moving account of his years as a hostage, it was also the story of a love affair, ostensibly between McCarthy and Morrell, but in truth between McCarthy and his fellow detainee, Brian Keenan. Now McCarthy has published another memoir, A Ghost Upon Your Path, this time about a journey he made earlier this year to Ireland. Much has happened in his life since Some Other Rainbow - his father's death, his split with Morrell, his subsequent marriage - but, curiously, his new book repeats almost exactly the pattern of the first. Hiding behind the main narrative - a quirky tale of McCarthy's search for his family roots in Kerry - is an unexpected and moving love story, one that he never intended to tell: the story of his love for his mother and his grief and guilt over her death. Sheila McCarthy died of cancer in 1989 when John was still a hostage.

He had been chained up in his Beirut cell for three years and she had no idea whether he was alive or dead, in good health or bad, mad or sane. Having no access to the outside world, he didn't find out she had died until a year later, when Keenan was released and his place alongside McCarthy was taken by Tom Sutherland and Terry Anderson. They had had a radio in their previous cell and had heard her death reported on the World Service. 'It made me very angry that she died not knowing how I was,' he says. 'When I think of how that must have made her last years unbearably more painful, I still find it very hard. I never understood why my captors never released any photographs of us to the newspapers. It would have cost them nothing, it wouldn't have jeopardised their security and it would have meant so much to people who loved us, especially my mother: she would have known I was alive and had some indication of my health and state of mind. Why be so callous?

It would have been no problem to have let her know.' We're sitting in the sunny drawing room of a friend's house in north London (after the media frenzy that followed his release McCarthy fights shy now of letting the press too near his own home). He is speaking quietly and with genuine emotion, yet he seems at ease. He is warm and solicitous and, when we move on to less painful subjects, he smiles a lot. Dressed in a white shirt and beige cords, with a new, fashionably distressed haircut, he looks fresh and confident, much younger than his 45 years. He strikes me as a man - at last - at peace with himself. 'Yes, I think maybe I am,' he says. 'It's been a long process.' And being able recently, finally, to resolve his relationship with his mother, albeit only in his head, felt in many ways like the last piece in the jigsaw. For a while, McCarthy drew a strange comfort from having found out about his mother's death so long after it happened. 'She'd been dead a year but throughout that time she'd been there supporting me just like when she had been alive.

That was lovely in a way, a very gentle letting go.' But after a time, he felt 'a growing need to get in touch with her again' and to bring their relationship up to date. 'Before my dad died in 1994, I'd had a chance after my release to get to know him again and we became very much closer. Our relationship moved on and became more grown-up and that was good. But I'd missed out on doing this with my mother and that jarred with me.' He began to feel increasing guilt about having added to Sheila McCarthy's pain in her final months. 'I felt terrible for having gone to Lebanon in the first place, especially when she'd just been diagnosed with cancer. Obviously, I'd only intended to go for a month and although like any mother she was worried about her child going off to a war zone, she'd encouraged me. But the point is, I went for my own selfish reasons and I didn't come back. Or not in time. I wanted to hug her and say I was sorry, but I couldn't. And in some irrational way I suppose I was frightened that after so much pain she'd find it hard to forgive. I began to doubt she'd ever loved me.

Eventually I realised I needed to spend some time alone with her in my thoughts trying, I suppose, to catch up.' McCarthy had a box of old photographs and letters from his mother which he'd rescued from the family home in Essex after his father died. He had always hoped that sifting through the memorabilia would help him bring his relationship with his mother into the present and enable him to grieve for her properly. But he had never been able to bring himself to do it. 'Just looking at her handwriting made my chest tighten. I knew the letters would tell me the truth but I was afraid of finding it out,' he says. He decided to take the box with him on the journey he'd been planning to make to Ireland in search of his family history. There, in his rented cottage on the remote and beautiful Dingle peninsula in Kerry, in the isolation of a rural Irish winter, he imagined he would find the space and calm finally to read the letters. 'I never intended to include my mother or her letters in the book. That was supposed to be a private experience. But it became integral to my time there,' he says.

McCarthy is a good storyteller and he interweaves the story of his quest for his roots with a suspenseful will-he-won't-he sub-plot that hinges on whether or not he will ever be able to face opening the box. Eventually, he does and in an instant, he writes, 'the anxieties that have kept me from reading the letters for so long seem ridiculous. I suppose by not addressing them I'd let them build up into a form of neurosis and in the process almost managed to forget how close we'd been.' Memories flood back. He can see her clearly again - her image has been blurred for years - rushing to greet him when he returns home from school or university 'taking quick small steps, her arms open'. He can hear her good-natured gossipy chat about family friends and neighbours, her laughter as she recited a really bad joke. He remembers with a start how he was actually in some ways much closer to her than to his father. On holidays, John and Sheila would linger in shops and cafes, talking and drinking tea, while his brother Terence and their father went off to engage in more masculine pursuits.

He is surprised to learn from the letters that she was always encouraging his plans and schemes - to travel with friends, go parachute jumping, work abroad - and that, far from being always disappointed with him, as he had sometimes feared, his parents were proud and supportive. 'Have no fear that if you don't make it to Oxford we will be disappointed,' she wrote as he approached A-levels, 'for we certainly will not. We only want you to do what you want.' Having gone through the contents of the box, he says now, he felt 'the most enormous relief'. And he writes: 'I wish that we could know each other now but the pain of that wishing is eased because, at last, I can see that we had known each other then. I can go home with my relationship with my mother firmly re-established.' McCarthy's increasing need to come to terms with his mother's death was driven at least in part by what he calls a 'desire to have a clear head and heart' before starting his own family. 'Because my mother and I never had the chance to talk again, it's as if I've been marooned emotionally in my late twenties, which was when I last saw her.

I knew I needed to be certain of her again before I was able to carry on with my own family.' In the months following his release from Beirut, the nation willed McCarthy to have that family with Jill Morrell. A wedding and children was the only possible ending to their love affair, it seemed. Morrell had founded a pressure group, Friends of John McCarthy, soon after he was kidnapped and conducted an inspired campaign to secure his release - there were yellow ribbons, candlelit vigils, posters, benefit gigs, badges, cinema ads. By the time he finally emerged, McCarthy, a previously unknown television producer, and this intelligent, independent woman who realised she had to present herself as 'the girlfriend who waits' in order to secure sympathy - and airtime - were famous throughout the Western world. As they tried gamely to pick up the pieces of their relationship, the press followed them everywhere. 'Adjusting to the real world was much more difficult than I'd imagined,' McCarthy said a couple of years ago. 'I had assumed you would just come home.' They stayed together for four more years until they split up in 1995. In retrospect, it seems astonishing that they managed to carry on for so long.

When they parted they professed continuing love and friendship for each other but over the years their relationship has inevitably cooled. McCarthy's robust Radio 4 voice falters for the only time in our conversation when I ask if he still sees her. 'We're not really in touch a great deal now. It's so many years since we went our separate ways. We had dinner a few months ago and it was very nice. I think having had a strong relationship at one point, particularly one that went through so much, means there will probably always be a bond of some kind. She invested so much on my behalf in my absence. I will never forget that, you know. So in terms of regular contact, no, we don't see each other much. But we will, I think, always remain good friends.' However, when I ask him if Morrell, who must now be around 44, has ever married, he looks embarrassed and replies unconvincingly, 'I don't know.' McCarthy married Anna Ottewill in 1999. A former editor for BBC Publications, he met her when she edited Island Race, the book he co-wrote with Sandi Toksvig to accompany their television series of the same name.

'Anna gives me confidence,' he says. 'She has allowed me to move on and not in any way live in the past.' He does indeed seem confident - in a quiet way, he's never brash - as he tells me about the projects he has lined up for the future: more books, radio and television programmes, including a major ITV series shooting over the next six months about politics and religion around the world. He says he knows he would never have got the chance to make the programmes he has made and write the books he has written had he not been kidnapped. But he's used his opportunities wisely: 'After Some Other Rainbow, I consciously tried to avoid writing any books or making any programmes directly about my own experience. People asked me to do that a lot but I always fought shy of it because I thought I might get stuck doing that and then it would obviously burn out after a while.' So instead of ensuring that he lived on in our consciousnesses simply as a 'former hostage' - a tag he acknowledges he will never wholly shake off, nor would he wish to - he has gradually reinvented himself as a 'writer/broadcaster' across a range of issues. 'That's how I describe myself now on my passport or whatever.

Writer/broadcaster. It sounds very pompous, I know. But I suppose that is what I do now, and I feel very lucky to have found something I'm good at and I enjoy.' A few years ago he used to find it disconcerting when people embraced him in the street, choked up often with stories of their own they wished to tell him. 'I am never sure what to do or say,' he said at the time. 'I always think I'm just little John McCarthy, I'm no one special.' Now he seems positively to welcome such encounters. His new book is full of them. 'Yes, people do still seek me out because I think they see me as a kindred spirit. I'm honoured that they want to share their stories with me. It certainly puts one's whole life into perspective. No one would ask to be kidnapped but it does perhaps make you understand more about the world and, from a journalist's point of view, obviously it's amazing that somebody will open up and tell you their story and that you have a way of connecting with them. It is definitely a privileged position to be in.' McCarthy says he has a 'lovely life' now.

When he's not off somewhere filming or researching a book, he and his wife, Anna, who's 35, divide their time between their house in Suffolk and a Barbican flat in London. She has given up her job in publishing and is retraining as a photographer. She is very easy-going about his absences. 'I think we both feel that it's good to be able to get away and get on with our own thing,' he says. 'Too many months solidly apart would mean we would get lonely and miss each other, but a bit of coming and going, and being able to then meet up and go through our adventures together, that's great. We haven't got any anxiety about that.' As for children, McCarthy is still procrastinating. 'It's one of my worst qualities,' he admits, 'putting important things off. After Ireland, I felt I'd done all the emotional groundwork, but I'm still - we're still - not quite sure. We both love children and would like to have a family but we're both very conscious that we have a lovely life together. We've both got interesting new careers just taking off, so we haven't made the crucial decision yet.

We keep wondering, do we really want to change our life at the moment?' It is, he confesses, a dilemma he's enjoying, one he feared he might never face. 'It's a wonderful thing to be able to think purely and simply about the present and the future,' he says, 'and no longer to feel the past looking over my shoulder.' · A Ghost Upon Your Path: An Irish Journey is published by Bantam Press,£16.99. To order a copy for £14.99 plus p&p call the Observer Books Service on 0870 066 7989 Bookshop brings back fond memories (From Oxford Mail) Bookshop brings back fond memories Former hostage John McCarthy. Picture: OX51668 Antony Moore 0 comments FORMER hostage John McCarthy returned to Waterstones in Oxford to promote his new book about the Middle East. About 80 fans visited Waterstones in Cornmarket Street on Thursday to hear Mr McCarthy’s talk about You Can’t Hide the Sun, in which he documents his travels through Israel and Palestine.

The last time Mr McCarthy was at the bookstore he was promoting Some Other Rainbow, the memoirs he co-wrote with Jill Morrell about the five years he spent in captivity after being captured by terrorists in Lebanon in 1986 while working as a journalist. Mr McCarthy said: “I’ve got great memories of coming here in 1993 with Jill – some of the staff were clapping on the stairs when we came in.” Waterstones events manager Charlie Hayes added: “It was great to have John back. He talked about his love for the Middle East – he still has a passion for the region despite his personal experience. Lots of people bought copies of the book and got them signed.” Best Sellers In Chains Best Sellers In Chains News One of the first things Terry Anderson was asked after he emerged from almost seven years of captivity in Lebanon was whether he planned to write a book. "Now, there's an ideal" he said with a mischievous grin. And he has lost no time; the memoir, "Den of Lions," will go on sale next October, less than two years after his release. But his former cellmates, not surprisingly, had the same idea.

British hostages Brian Keenan and John McCarthy both have new books on the market; Terry Waite's will be published the month before Anderson's. And outsiders are horning in on the action: "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me," a hostage drama that opened in London, is a hit on Broadway. How much of this genre can even a sympathetic public take? Plenty, publishers bet. Advances to the authors total more than $1 million; newspapers and magazines are spending thousands more on serial rights. (NEWSWEEK will excerpt "Den of Lions.") So far, that confidence seems justified. In England, both Keenan's and McCarthy's books are best sellers, despite the fact that the two spent four years chained up within a few feet of each other. Indeed, the remarkably different books have only built interest in each other-proving, as Keenan notes, that "each man experienced his imprisonment in his own way." Keenan's poetic "An Evil Cradling," which he describes as a literary attempt to "imprison" insanity on paper in the same way he held it at bay while in captivity, topped The Sunday Times of London's bestseller list for nine weeks last year.

When the more down-to-earth "Some Other Rainbow," by McCarthy and girlfriend Jill Morrell, debuted last month as Britain's No. 1 hardback, "An Evil Cradling" reigned as the top-selling paperback and quickly moved back up the hardback list. "Jill and John have had a tremendous knock-on effect," says Keenan's publicist, Alex Hippisley-Cox. "The hostage thing is back on." Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week Clearly, love stories provide some of the commercial magic. McCarthy and Morrell thrilled an adoring public with their recent engagement. "I've never seen a book signing where half the people cry and the rest bring presents," says bookstore staffer Matthew Frost. Keenan, who writes movingly of being in love, quietly married his physiotherapist last week in Dublin. The stories of the women who waited help distinguish the narratives. Morrell's account of the Foreign Office's coldness to her as she attempted to organize the "Friends of John McCarthy" has outraged Britons. Anderson's book, too, will include chapters from his wife, Madeleine, to serve as a counterpoint to his hostage narrative.

The books' main drama, though, is in the human will to survive. "People who have gone through the hostage experience are modern prophets," says Anthony Grey, who wrote "Hostage in Peking" after two years of solitary confinement. McCarthy hides behind a sense of the absurd; he and Keenan dub one jail "The House of Fun." Anderson examines his Roman Catholic faith. "Hate the sin, love the sinner," he writes of his early efforts to cope with his rage at his captors. "[But] how can you separate a person from his actions?" The prisoners sometimes clashed, but more often they helped each other through the bad times. Undoubtedly they will relish their reunions-on the new author circuit. You Can't Hide the Sun: A Journey Through Palestine book by John McCarthy | 3 available editions | Alibris Books Palestine Transported as a young boy by his father's tales of Palestine, John McCarthy has always been drawn to the mystique of the Middle East. Remarkably, his first-hand experience of its brutal conflicts - he was kidnapped and held hostage in the Lebanon for five years - only strengthened his determination to return and explore its myriad complexities.

In the years since his ordeal, McCarthy travelled through Israel and East Jerusalem, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Bedouin encampments of the Negev desert. His ... Read More Transported as a young boy by his father's tales of Palestine, John McCarthy has always been drawn to the mystique of the Middle East. Remarkably, his first-hand experience of its brutal conflicts - he was kidnapped and held hostage in the Lebanon for five years - only strengthened his determination to return and explore its myriad complexities. In the years since his ordeal, McCarthy travelled through Israel and East Jerusalem, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Bedouin encampments of the Negev desert. His intensely moving encounters with the inhabitants of this beautiful but tormented region reveal the continuing tragedy of the Palestinians who remained in Israel after its formation in 1948 - and who still dare to think of it as home. "You Can't Hide the Sun" weaves their vivid testimonies with McCarthy's own experience of living under constant threat. And in doing so it asks: how can humanity endure in the face of unimaginable oppression, and how can any of us thrive without a place of safety?

Read Less High Rated Sellers Only (Above 4 stars) Highest Rated Sellers Only (5 stars only) Shipping Attribute PO BOX 318, OXON, UNITED KINGDOM $10.99 $43.25 PO BOX 318, OXON, UNITED KINGDOM $10.99 $43.25 Milton Keynes, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM $10.99 $43.25 'It's sad I haven't settled down': John McCarthy's ex reveals the lasting effects of the Beirut hostage crisis | Daily Mail Online comments A few weeks ago, John McCarthy and I travelled from Hammersmith to King’s Cross together on the Tube. The carriage was crowded and we stood all the way, chatting and catching up with each other’s news. It was a perfectly ordinary thing to do with an old friend and might seem hardly worth mentioning. It was only afterwards that I realised it was the first time in 23 years that we had been able to do such an everyday thing together and feel completely natural about it.

Trauma: Jill Morell says she is still on the road to back to a 'normal' life after her campaign to free John We had just taken part in a recording of The Reunion, a programme for Radio 4 about the Beirut hostage crisis of the late Eighties, with John’s former cell-mates Brian Keenan and Terry Waite. Since that time I have rarely discussed those extraordinary events in public or in private. The reality of getting on with life has taken over and pushed the past to one side. Yet seeing the former hostages again made me realise quite how much the events I had been caught up in had affected me and how much they had changed my life. When John was kidnapped in April 1986, I was 28 and he was 29. We had been a couple for three years. Like most other people of our age, our lives revolved around work and a good social life. Just before he went to Beirut on a two-month posting as a journalist with the WTN news agency, we had decided to move in together and to get married at some point. We found a two-bedroom flat with a lovely garden in North London that we wanted to buy.

But John’s two-month posting turned into five-and-a-half years of captivity at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Reunited: The couple shortly after his release He was kidnapped on his way to Beirut airport – and a flight home – a few days after the American bombing of Libya put Westerners in the Middle East at risk of being the focus of reprisals. For most of those years there was only silence from his kidnappers. I lived with the stress of not knowing whether he was alive or dead, while trying to build a national campaign with his friends to get him released. I carried on working but my life was dominated by the campaign and, through our attempts to interest the Press, politicians and the public, I became a well-known figure. I got used to doing regular interviews with reporters, making speeches, travelling to the Middle East and meeting anyone who might help, including Yasser Arafat, the former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Prime Minister John Major and even the Queen. But during all this time what I longed for most was a return to the ‘normal’ life John and I had enjoyed. The day he came home, my life was transformed again.

Within the space of 24 hours I was told by the Foreign Office that he had been released, saw him on the lunchtime news in Damascus and met him at RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire that night with the world’s Press gathered outside. It was a fantastic, joyous, unbelievable time, but an experience for which I was wholly unprepared. Friends of Brian Keenan had warned me on Brian’s release a year earlier that I wouldn’t know what had hit me. They were right. I had to make huge adjustments. The busy campaigning suddenly stopped. I gave up my job as a TV producer at WTN to be with John and to write our book, Some Other Rainbow. We moved to Oxfordshire to escape the hurly-burly of London, so I immediately saw much less of the close friends I’d relied on for so long. But the public interest in our story remained huge. The following years were dominated by Press interviews and public engagements. We did our best to cope, but ordinary life was still on hold. There were many happy times. Yet everyday things as simple as going to the supermarket became stressful. We were recognisable and people, all of them well-meaning, approached us much of the time.

There were other, more personal stresses, too. In the middle of all this, my mother became ill with acute leukaemia. Although she eventually recovered – surviving for eight more years – she later succumbed to another cancer. Tireless: Jill marching with released hostage Brian Keenan, campaigning for John's freedom John’s mother had died while he was in captivity and, following his release, his father developed cancer and died within a much shorter period. We earned enough money from Some Other Rainbow to see us through these years, but I felt that I was as much in the grip of events beyond my control as I had been during John’s captivity. Many of our close friends were marrying and having children, yet for me the ‘normal’ life I imagined John and I would resume on his return still seemed unattainable. Inevitably our relationship suffered, and it came to an end. After John had been home for four years, it seemed too difficult to move forward together and we took a mutual decision to split up. We had tried to make it work and I don’t believe either of us was to blame. But it was a painful, difficult choice and, although it made sense, it felt to me like a personal failure.

Certainly it has helped to colour my view of that time. Since then I have found it hard to view the Friends of John McCarthy campaign with any real sense of personal achievement. I can see in theory that it was, but I haven’t felt it until now. There was the question of what to do with my life after the campaign. I became involved with the Bridgewater Four, fighting for justice for four men wrongly imprisoned for the murder of the paperboy Carl Bridgewater. Freedom: John McCarthy back in Britain after 1,943 days' captivity in Lebanon When the three surviving members of the four were released in 1997 after 18 years in jail for a murder they didn’t commit, I knew that the initial excitement and elation of their re-entry to life as free men would inevitably be followed by difficult times for them and for their families and friends. But I was still floundering. And with that campaign over, I was again left wondering what to do with my life. Returning to TV journalism was a life-saver.

I joined Associated Press Television News (which, having merged with WTN, was effectively the same company that had employed John and me during his captivity), where I could be just another employee and get on with my job. I felt at home there, writing and producing news and features stories. Since then, I have moved on to work for charities and other organisations, using and developing the skills I learned during the years spent campaigning for John’s release. My friends from the campaigning years were, and still are, a very important part of my life and I have also made new and strong friendships. I have had a number of relationships, and some of them brought happiness, but I have not settled down into a lasting one and have not had children, something I always assumed I would do. Jill celebrates after the news of John's release from captivity in Beirut The lack of both is a source of sadness to me, although I am very close to my dad, brother and auntie and my friends are also like family to me. Ironically, while my work helps others to have a voice, I have always found it difficult to talk about the hostage and campaigning years.

A great value is placed, often quite rightly, on accepting the past for what it is, or ‘moving on’, and I have concentrated on trying to do that. I did not want to be seen as a victim of those extraordinary circumstances or to be defined by them. I have had my fair share of professional therapy, and in that safe environment I could talk about the hostage years. But I haven’t found it easy to turn the experience into palatable snippets in daily life. How do you slip it into conversation or turn it into a pithy anecdote? Who could relate to it? There were other losses to face – the death of my dear best friend Mary Delaney in 1999, and of my lovely mother Peggy a year later in 2000. Both of them had been reliable, fixed reference points in my life and living without them was hard and still is at times. So, as a result, those stolen years have been overshadowed and, to some extent, buried – like a mass of unprocessed experience that has been just sitting there. Many of my friends had been heavily involved in the campaigning years but their lives weren’t on hold in the same way as mine and their perspectives are obviously different.

And I had lost Mary. I am in touch with John and am very glad that things have worked out for him personally and professionally after everything he has been through, but he and his family live in Suffolk so I don’t see him very much. I have hardly seen Brian and Terry at all. We met up at the funeral of John’s brother Terence a few years before, another sad occasion, but I have had little contact with them since John and I went our separate ways. Enjoying a full life and relishing my freedom, I had come to feel that I had dealt with the hostage years. When I was asked to take part in The Reunion programme, I said yes more or less straight away without thinking about it too much. Jill pictured in 1991. She counted the days since John was kidnapped It seemed like a good opportunity to see John, Brian and Terry again. I was quite unprepared for the emotional impact that revisiting that time would have on me. A week or so before the recording, I decided to reread our book. I thought I knew the content pretty well and was rereading it to remind myself of the exact dates of some of the important developments.

It was strange and disorienting, then, to feel as if I was turning the pages for the first time. It was as if the impact of what had happened to us – particularly to John – was only now truly hitting me. Devastated by how he had suffered, physically and emotionally, I found it very hard to believe he had coped with it all. I felt that only now was I taking it in. I discovered that John, too, had felt something similar when he read Some Other Rainbow recently. He felt amazed at what I had been through and realised how hard it must have been for me to live in that terrible limbo, not knowing for so long if he was alive. It was as if it had taken all that time, needed that distance, for the enormity of what had happened to become comprehensible to us. John McCarthy with former Church of England envoy Terry Waite and Brian Keenan receiving their CBEs at Buckingham Palace in 1992 When I met John, Brian and Terry at the Radio 4 studio, I felt an instant connection with them all, as if those years in between had fallen away.

Of course, with John there will always be a bond, and with Brian and Terry, too, I felt a sense of belonging that surprised me. As we started to record the programme, news reports from Brian and John’s kidnapping in Beirut in April 1986 were played in the studio and I was instantly transported back. I remembered my shock and confusion at what was happening, the anger of feeling so powerless, and the sense of injustice at the lack of interest from the Foreign Office. The programme moved quickly through the major milestones of those years – the revelations of Irangate; the growing support for our campaign to free the hostages; the snippets of information from other hostages hinting that John could be alive; the death of John’s mother; the Rushdie affair, which dashed our hopes of John’s release; Brian’s release with news of John; and the final, unbelievable news that John was free. As the programme progressed, I had a growing realisation that this had been a devastating, dazzling, adrenaline-filled experience that had changed the course of my life, but also one that I had yet to acknowledge fully.

Going back to that time and talking about it again has helped me to have more respect for its importance to me and to understand that the road to the ‘normal’ life I longed for is a long one, and one that I am perhaps still on. I was so young when it happened – we all were. And, looking back, so naive. But it was this youthful energy that helped John’s friends and me believe that we could help bring him and the other hostages home. There was a huge cost in terms of years lost and I am glad that The Reunion programme has helped me to accept that the experience of those years helped make me who I am today. * The Reunion is being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 today at 11.15am and again on Friday at 9am. John's story | London Evening Standard The Evening Standard John with former girlfriend Jill Morrell, who he remains friends with For many years John McCarthy would shudder if he heard someone tearing off a strip of parcel tape. During his 1,943 days as a hostage of fundamentalist militiamen in Beirut he and fellow captive Brian Keenan were often moved by their kidnappers.

Every time they would be mummified in tape, with only a tiny airhole under their noses. The pair were bundled into the boot of a car and driven for miles. They never knew if another filthy dungeon or a bullet in the head awaited them. "Horrible," whispers McCarthy, still visibly traumatised. "That awful screech of tape - for a long time I found it terrifying." Thirteen years after his release, McCarthy is more relaxed with that sound. "Thanks to moving house and packing stuff into boxes a few times," he grins. Time has been a great healer. He left dank cells, blindfolds and beatings behind. He seldom thinks about the "dark days" of Beirut. Although sometimes he must confront his past. McCarthy's wife, Anna, who he married in 1999, found watching the upcoming film about his kidnapping (Blind Flight) a tough experience. "Particularly the taping up," says McCarthy. "Although she'd read about it and heard me talk about it, seeing that on screen was upsetting." Yet life is pretty dreamy these days for McCarthy.

"Sometimes," he says, "I'll be sitting at 11am drinking a cup of coffee and reading a really interesting book, and I have to kick myself. I love my work. I enjoy exploring the world. I'll have been married for five years this April - and that's really, really lovely." (His previous longtime relationship with researcher Jill Morrell, who had campaigned ceaselessly for his release, subsequently collapsed under the glare of publicity.) McCarthy and his wife divide their time between a flat in the Barbican and a house in Suffolk. They also own a boat - a motor cruiser they keep in Suffolk. "Every year I promise I'm going to spend a whole month on the boat but work inevitably gets in the way. But this summer [he laughs] I will definitely do that." Meeting McCarthy, it is immediately apparent why people feel such affection for him. He radiates affability and charm from the moment he enters the room. He is shorter than you imagine (I had envisaged a rugged version of Richard Madeley) and greyer, but still the same handsome, charismatic figure we remember emerging into the glare of flashbulbs in Damascus with such grace and fortitude.

Since then, he's carved out a prosperous career, dividing his time between writing books and making TV programmes which have seen him travelling to India, Iran, Brazil, Russia and the Middle East. Most of his TV work now is unconnected to his experiences in Lebanon between 1986 and 1991, when he was snatched off the street while covering Brian Keenan's disappearance. And yet he recognises that his name will probably always bear the prefix of "former Beirut hostage". "Labels are necessary," he says sanguinely. "And when you consider that I've written books about my experiences, firstly with Jill [Morrell - Some Other Rainbow], and then another with Brian [Keenan - An Evil Cradling], and I'm now promoting the Blind Flight movie, it would be hard for me to sit there and say, 'Don't ever refer to me as an ex-hostage'.'' It is easy to forget that, at the time of his kidnapping, McCarthy was a happy-go-lucky 29-year-old whose priorities were forging a career in TV journalism, enjoying a drink and seeing the world. Now he's a household name.

The first thing he said to Keenan, when thrown into the Irishman's cell at the beginning of their joint incarceration, was: "I came here to cover your story. It was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life." Perhaps it would be cynical to suggest it was something of a perverse masterstroke? "Yes, I can see the irony. Even while we were in captivity, I remember thinking, 'How the hell am I ever going to get back into journalism? I'm five years out of it.' "During the last year [after Keenan was released and replaced by Tom Sutherland and Terry Anderson] we had a radio. We heard about the internet and I was like, 'What's that? What about the Telex?' But because of the celebrity that we curiously garnered through being stuck in a hole in the ground, and thanks to Jill's efforts, we found when we came out that we were suddenly able to get jobs and leapfrog those dark years.

So, without obviously thinking, 'Oh, that was a good thing that happened', I could think, 'Well that was an awful thing that happened, but my life is now in a place where I would always have loved it to have been.''' These words are typical of a man who has always considered the bigger picture. He remains deeply sympathetic to the troubles in the Middle East. Yet one element of his captors' behaviour remains unfathomable. When he departed for the Lebanon, McCarthy's mother Sheila had just been diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1989, not knowing if he was dead or alive, even though he pleaded with the kidnappers to send some kind of message to her. After 13 years, can he finally forgive them? "No," he says without hesitation. "That's the thing that still bemuses me, family is a huge issue for Lebanese people. They could so easily have stuck a photo of me in the newspaper with a date, saying, 'Look, he's alive.' They didn't. That seems like a wanton level of cruelty against an innocent woman. Yes, it was a dark period of Lebanese history. I hope they can move on from it. Certainly I want to.

I don't want to be stuck there for ever thinking, 'Those bastards, those bastards.'" Those recollections formed an important part of his memoir, A Ghost Upon Your Path. However much he has moved on from Beirut, a certain amount of his work has involved - indirectly at least - issues thrown up by his kidnapping. He has only recently tackled it full-on, returning last month for the first time to film an ITV documentary which included him interviewing the leader of Hezbollah - reputedly the organisation behind the kidnappings. He feels very strongly about Blind Flight, the film of his incarceration. "It was really important to me that the people who kidnapped us weren't shown as some bunch of raghead lunatics," he says. "While there was a fair bit of violence perpetrated against us, I hope the film shows a balanced picture of those guys." I ask him how would he react if he met one of his guards now, and for the first time in our conversation he seems troubled. "I don't really know," he says, pausing for a few seconds with a furrowed brow. "I really don't know.

If I met one of the guys like Said, who did abuse us badly at times, I've no idea whether I would find a rage that I've held inside me. I don't know if that anger would suddenly express itself with leaping on the bloke regardless of how big or small he was. Or whether I'd just want to walk away and say, 'I'm leaving that [part of my life] where it is, in the past.''' He has had surprisingly little counselling. Just a few sessions when he was first released and about four times over the next two years. He didn't really feel he needed it, stiff upper lip and all that. Indeed, there is something quintessentially English about McCarthy. Born in Barnet, Herts, he still comes across as a sturdily middle-class chap, from his blue Oxford shirt and brown checked blazer to the signet ring he fiddles with when he is nervous. He reminds one of a well-liked Classics master at a minor public school. He sees his brother Terence often - their father died in 1994 - but relationships tend to suffer, he says, when people he comes across hold an unrealistic expectation of him.

Indeed, what made the years after his release even harder was dealing with what people thought he should be: seeing him as "heroic" when he felt like an "ordinary little bloke". It was, he says, like a bizarre and painful case of overnight stardom. Public scrutiny added extra pressure to his relationship with Jill Morrell. They split four years after his return, though he insists their parting was little to do with the goldfish bowl of publicity. Did he ever sense that people felt cheated out of a fairytale ending? "Yes, at the time people probably were thinking, 'Oh, there's going to be a lovely happy ending', which is fair enough. But once it was known that we'd just split up, the press didn't hassle us at all. I never got the feeling they were thinking, 'Gosh, you could have done better than that, mate.' Let's face it, most people have been through relationships that didn't go the distance." . He is, of course, profoundly grateful for the years Morrell devoted to his cause - making sure he wasn't left "buried". "She invested so much on my behalf in my absence," he said.

"I will never forget that." And yet the only time during our interview when he shows any irritation is when I ask him when he last spoke to Morrell. "Oh God," he says wearily. "That question. I think it was a couple of months ago - around Christmas time." Are they still in regular contact? "Not to a huge degree. Though I think we'll always be friendly." It is perfectly understandable that being linked to someone you stopped having a relationship with nine years ago - a love-life fossilised in amber - might rankle, especially if you are happily married. McCarthy wed former BBC Books editor Anna Ottewill in 1999. They met while working together on his book collaboration with comedienne Sandi Toksvig, though Anna now works as a photographer. McCarthy once described himself as having been "marooned" in his late 20s thanks to his years in captivity, mummified not only with parcel tape but also in his emotional development. "I'd forgotten I said that," he smiles. "But, in retrospect, that makes even more sense now. I was 29 when I went in and there was an element of coming home and the world having moved on.

Friends had got married, some were having children. I'd been dealing with incredible stresses, strains and responsibilities but they weren't in the real world. So coming back, it did take a lot longer than I realised to actually find my feet again." Now, finally, he seems at peace. When interviewed a couple of years ago, McCarthy admitted he and Anna were in a dilemma about having children. "I think we are decided now," he grins. "We'd both like to have children. We've got over the hurdle of thinking, 'We haven't done this yet, we haven't done that.' Particularly because I'm bloody 47! Anna's 10 years younger, so we should be all right on that score but, really, I think it's time to get on with it. I do feel I want to have what I've seen some of my friends have. It seems such a wonderful thing. I haven't met anybody who said having children was a bad idea." For McCarthy, watching Blind Flight made him realise how far he's progressed in the past 13 years: "Yes," he says, "it did stir up old emotions.

But even though you remember the sharpness of a particular moment, you know it's not going to leave you depressed or agitated. You can come out of the cinema, hug your wife, and realise you really have to let it go." Blind Flight will be released in March. More about: HOSTAGES - John McCarthy Firth, Colin Firth in Hostages. Page updated October 2000 Colin Firth as captive John McCarthy in the drama-documentary Hostages. Captive audience /.../ McCarthy has condemned the film on the basis he has no wish to see himself portrayed as "a character dreamt up by a scriptwriter". Research began on the film over a year before McCarthy was freed, initially with the support of many of the hostage's friends and relatives, including Jill Morrell. Ironically, if McCarthy was still incarcerated in a Beirut cell, the film would probably be acclaimed as a campaigning effort to draw attention to the hostages' plight. Instead. the end of the hostage ordeal and the non-coorperation of the British hostages has called into question the veracity of the drama-doc and the justification for making it. There's a whiff of exploitation, of turning trauma into entertainment.

Colin Firth, who plays McCarthy, is uneasy about the documentary tag. "this is not a documentary at all" he insists. "It's drama based on events". Firth even asked if the characters names could be changed. Unlike Falklands casualty Robert Lawrence, whom Firth befriended when he portrayed him in Tumbledown, McCarthy isn't real to Firth. "This was a man who only exists on the evidence of Alasdair's (Palmer, associate producer) research and what I've seen on television and the newspapers. I had to think 'I'm playing a fictional character who exists in this script'. It's this grey area between fact and fiction that is the film's fatal flaw. Drama documentary is only effective as a device to clarify facts - it doesn't have an imaginative life of its own. Granada TV used the technique powerfully in investigative films like Why Lockerbie and Who bombed Birmingham? but Hostages is drama-led and weighted down by the demands of documentary. When Bernard MacLaverty's script strays away from the hard facts into the cell or behind the scenes at home with Jill Morrell (Natter Richardson) or Peggy Say (Kathy Bates) the effect is jarring and intrusive.

The resilience of the human spirit, the source of fascination, is never really tackled. "We don't have a problem with a documentary that tells the truth or a drama that doesn't purport to tell the truth but tries to get to the core of the issues", explains Mark Lucas, agent of both John McCarthy and Terry Waite. "Nobody's denying the public's right to know." McCarthy has sent a letter of support to David Pugh, producer of Frank McGuinness's play Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, currently in the West End and loosely based on Brian Keenan's experiences. Hors La Vie, about French hostage Roger Auque, also told a powerful story of human fortitude. Sadly, not even expensive production values and an excellent cast can elevate Hostages above and beyond its constraints. In its efforts to be truthful, the film seems less than honest. [Article by Elaine Paterson] No longer a hostage to the past Interview with John McCarthy in The London Time, October 19, 2000. John McCarthy was in a taxi when a colleague asked how long he had been back. "Back? Back from where?" answered McCarthy.

It took several seconds for him to realise that the person was referring to the five years he spent as a political hostage, chained to a radiator in a filthy Beirut cellar. "For a minute I didn't know what he meant," he says cheerfully. "Then he was saying to me 'Is it two years now?' and I was thinking 'Or is it five?' and I couldn't remember. You do completely forget about it." McCarthy has, in fact, been free for nine years and relates the anecdote to illustrate how much he has managed to consign that dark, terrifying period to his past. It was a crystallising moment which proved that he had evolved from "John McCarthy, former hostage", to John McCarthy, 43, husband, journalist, who doesn't go to the gym as often as he should. McCarthy's recovery from 1,943 days of being shackled, blindfolded and beaten appears to have been little short of miraculous. He is well-adjusted, urbane, and, most impressively, is able to see a funny side to his ordeal. But surely he must still think about it every day, even if only for a second? "About being locked up?

No, no, not at all," he replies. "I don't have nightmares about it either but if I'm very busy at work and there are deadlines looming I might have a dream that is capture related. It's because the sub-conscious looks for something stressful to focus on." Incredibly, when he was first kidnapped and placed in solitary confinement he had a recurring dream about re-doing his A Levels. "At one point I remember saying to to myself, 'Look, this is ridiculous: you've got A Levels, you've got a degree, you've got a job and you've been kidnapped by a bunch of people in the Middle East, now try and focus on that," he says with laugh. McCarthy's public relations assistant had warned that he would not want to talk about the past. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true; it is his present that he is reluctant to discuss. Any inquiry about his domestic situation, such as plans that he may have with his new wife, Anna Ottewill, makes him visibly uncomfortable. After years of being denied any privacy or the freedom to assert the slightest control over his life, it is crucial to him now.

There is, of course, another reason why he is so guarded about his private life. His previous relationship, with Jill Morrell, his girlfriend at the time of capture and the nation's sweetheart who campaigned relentlessly for his release, was placed under a global magnifying glass. Everybody wanted John and Jill to get back together after his release. They did. Then they wanted them to get married. They didn't. The relationship was tracked until it ended in a short statement issued by McCarthy in 1995. Friends said that they had been denied the chance to be an ordinary couple because of the pressure of producing a perfect ending. Equally significantly perhaps, medical experts who examined McCarthy said that, despite appearing more happy-go-lucky than the more complex, cerebral Brian Keenan, the hostage with whom he spent most of his captivity, he was the most traumatised. McCarthy stresses that while he and Jill are still good friends, he has learnt lessons from the way they handled the public gaze. He was determined from the outset that the media would stay out of his new relationship with Ottewill, a former BBC books editor who has given up work to spend more time with him. "We agreed the wedding would be a private affair," he says.

"When I came home from Lebanon it was a massive shock to see how famous (Jill and I) were, but we soon realised that if you didn't give interviews all the time about the latest stage of development it didn't matter a damn and you could get on with your life." His relationship with Ottewill is strong, he says, because from the outset she saw him not as a former hostage but as simply John McCarthy. "She helped me to move on. I suppose it's in giving one a sense of normality and building a new home and a new future and doing it within a partnership. My idea of hell is letting the cameras into my house, like Through the Keyhole," he says. "There is a danger when you start living your private life in public. In modern times being in the public eye can be seen as the be all and end all. It's easy to read the Hello! magazines and the tabloid gossip pages or whatever and think 'goodness, how fascinating', but then you take a step back and think, surely that's not the right thing to do?" McCarthy is aware of the paradox here.

He wrote a book with Jill, Some Other Rainbow, which was marketed as a love story: the account of a relationship that endured despite forcible separation. It was a bestseller and it was natural that its readers would continue to be interested in what they did next. "There is a part of your life that you've written about and it is public property. And it's a privilege to work in the public domain but you must be wary of living like that because you put an inbalance on a real existence. My private life is ultimately most important, and that's the bit I think's just for me and the intimates around me." One of those intimates continues to be Keenan. While chained together they fantasised about trekking through the wide open spaces of Chile. Years after their release they managed it, and together wrote a humorous, inspiring travel book, Between Extremes, which is now available in paperback (Between Extremesby John McCarthy and Brian KeenanBantam, £6.99). "This book says we've both gone on, we've had this great adventure together which was born of that time . . .

but now we can carry on and be separate and be like any other couple of mates." The book illustrates the difference between the two men's attitudes to their private lives. McCarthy scarcely mentions Anna or explains who she is, save for writing that she packed some blue cycling shorts into his rucksack for the trip. Keenan is more relaxed about revealing his emotions, and publishes his personal faxes home, always beginning each one "Hello Sweetheart". McCarthy would rather talk about issues, such as the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, for which he still works and to whom he donated his £80,000 fee when he appeared in a commercial for One 2 One mobile phones. "Working with the Foundation gave a valid purpose to my experience, it made sense of it. When I came out people lauded me, celebrated me, but there are people who had suffered far worse and lost much more than I did." "These were not people who were chained up for years and occasionally got beaten, they were appallingly tortured. A lot of them are having the final humiliation of being driven out of their countries. They lost career and status.

They deserve a bit of the welcoming and warmth Brian and I had." McCarthy's own career continues to be a priority for him. He wants to be taken seriously as a journalist in his own right rather than as a "celebrity" writer "The experience, " he says has changed him. "I'm not such a time waster now. I take the view that life is for living but also to be fulfilling. It seems to be much more purposeful these days. I'm not so much of a lad.. I've realised there's a lot more to life than just to party." Yet McCarthy can never forgive his captors for the fact that his mother Sheila died while he was still a captive, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. "I can never forget the times of horror that I and my friends and family went through. My mother being very ill and dying without a cast iron reassurance that I was even there . . . ", he tails off, but recovers. "But I've learned to grieve now. My father then died but I've got my brother. That's great, but you can't say it's all for the good. There have been some very bad times." McCarthy once famously described himself as "uptight".

Has he learnt to show his emotions more now? "I wouldn't now call myself uptight but I don't cry a lot. The last time I was close to tears was over the story of the Siamese twins. It was a desperate situation for the parents, and for the judges having to make a terrible decision. I found it incredibly moving." McCarthy mentions twice that Keenan now has a young family. Might he and Anna have a family? There is a long silence before he says: "I really don't want to get into all that." He looks distractedly around the room before adding "I'm sure I would like to at some point." The subject is closed and McCarthy wraps his blanket of privacy around him once again. He wants to get on with his life, and it is probably time that we let him. [Article by Carol Midgley]

Question: Which former Middle East hostage co-wrote the book 'Some Other Rainbow'?
Answer: John McCarthy