John Nichol - Tornado Down

On the wall, somebody had scratched 750 ticks, to mark the passage of his days in captivity. They were in blocks of five, and divisions of 100. I wondered how that prisoner had stood it in that dark hole, and what had happened to him in the end. I thought I would not last as long, and prayed I would not have to.

That night, a senior Iraqi Army officer came around. Blinking in the sudden glare, I stood up.

‘How are you?’ he enquired politely, as if we were in a holiday camp. When he had gone, a private threw in a couple of blankets. For the first time in many nights, there were no air raids. It was obvious something crucial was about to happen. A peculiar pall of calm hung over the prison.

About an hour after dawn, a guard came round clutching a large sack. Like a magician producing a rabbit, he triumphantly withdrew three freshly baked wholemeal rolls, holding them out to me with a big grin on his face. I stared at him, then at the rolls. A couple of them reeked, as though they had been soaked in petrol. They tasted that way too, but I ate them anyway.

‘Would you like more?’ he enquired, politely, interpreting my amazement as hunger. He stuffed another three rolls into my hands. In his wake appeared another Iraqi, an officer, younger, his hair a brilliant black. He was clutching yet more blankets.

‘Would you like more blankets? How many?’ He began doling them out, counting, his teeth flashing whitely at me in the gloom, ‘One, two, three…’ All of a sudden, it was like Christmas Day. The extra blankets were heaven, because now I could fashion a mattress. My hips were covered in thick pads of calloused skin, where I had been lying on concrete floors for six weeks.

I thought, ‘We are back with the military, perhaps we will be treated like prisoners of war – professional aircrew, not prisoners of conscience, who are treated like animals.’

Sure enough, over the next two days, food began arriving with unusual regularity, things we had never had before, like cold rice and chicken, at least once a day. On the third day, a suave civilian in a smart grey designer suit appeared. He looked utterly out of place in the bleak surroundings, but he seemed quite at ease, although wreathed in apologies.

‘Do make yourself comfortable,’ he began, greasily, a note of something very like apology in his voice, looking about my cell as though it were a hotel room, as if the blood of its many dozens of previous inmates was not spattered across its walls.

‘Now, if there is anything you would like, anything at all, do let me know. My staff is here to help you. If you want to visit the toilet just knock on the door, they will take you along to the toilet; if you would like some food, just ask. Anything we can do to help, just let us know…’

It was bizarre. Laughable. Surreal. ‘My staff…!’ Here we were, filthy, stinking and starving, and here was this character behaving like a fond uncle on a school visit. His staff? Now, would they be the same paratroopers who had beaten us up on the way in? Or had they been replaced by uniformed maids, and bellboys?

Something definitely was up.

Naturally, the immediate thought was that they were being nice to us in preparation for release. I felt a wild surge of hope and optimism, followed by an equal rush of caution. ‘No, I am not raising my hopes too high…’

Deep down, I knew I was going to get out; but superstitiously, I did not want to acknowledge this feeling, to let it surface. One of the biggest weapons any interrogator has is the weapon of emotional manipulation: raising your hopes to the skies, and then dashing them.

Delicious cheese, marmalade and baked beans appeared for breakfast, along with the rolls. The guards built an open fire, in the courtyard, cooking plain but wonderful barbecued chicken on it. The only problem was that my digestion went on strike, and a bout of diarrhoea came bucketing through my system. Quite a few of the others also found the sudden arrival of food too much: I knew because the guards were kept busy escorting people on numerous toilet trips.

John Peters: We were moved again. Every time they move you is the worst time. Every new cell, every new place, you sit and listen, trying to establish the routine of the new prison. Is it going to be good, or bad? This new place was bad, the whole floor was awash with water. I played a negative versus positive thinking game. What was positive about it? Well, there was a small dry patch in the corner, where I could park my bum. Positive. There was very little light, but there was some. Positive. I sat and waited, listening, listening, trying to work out the routine of the place from the sounds. To pass the time, I watched the light from the tiny grille in the door work its way around the cell. It grew from a small spot on the cell wall, extending and thinning slowly – around four o’clock in the afternoon – moving gradually round the room and then dying out as night fell, at about half-past six in the evening.

On 3 March, they shaved me again. They had a little pot filled with scummy cold water, awash as usual with the scrapings of other beards. The razor was half-blunt, caked with hair and the crude soap they were using. I insisted that I shave myself, but the guards held my face tight, scraping away. I managed to persuade them to leave the spade-like beard I’d grown, fearing that they would put us on television yet again. I suppose because it was thick, and looked quite Arab-like, the Iraqis let me keep it. After the shave, they took me along to a concrete cubicle, like a shower cubicle. It had a bright red plastic dustbin in it, brimming with lukewarm water, a creamy-grey colour from the washings of my fellow inmates. The guard gesticulated that I, too, should wash in this filthy muck. I took my clothes off, readily now because the atmosphere was much less intimidating in this new gaol.There was a bright green plastic jug. I dipped this in the water, and threw it over my head. The scum didn’t matter. It was a marvellous feeling after weeks of grime just to feel the warm water coursing down my body. When they took away the dirty yellow canvas suit, and issued a fresh one, it felt almost like being clean again.

On 4 March, my dreams came true: they gave me laces for my plimsolls. This could only mean one thing: we were due for release. A large party of senior officers began touring the prison. I heard them going into the next-door cell.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Lawrence Randolph Slade.’ Larry, I later discovered, had been in with John Nichol.

‘Do you know the war is over?’

John Peters: There was a silence. It was the first confirmation I’d had of the secretly hoped-for fact. There it was, they had said it, it was undeniable. And it was tremendous. A rush of emotion and relief ran through me. I had no thoughts of whether we had won or lost – only the thought of going home.

‘In twenty minutes,’ continued the unseen officer next door, ‘you will be going home to your family.’

My family. I could hardly bear to think about them. I had schooled my feelings so efficiently, screwed them down so tightly, I had almost expected never to feel things like love and closeness again.

The Iraqi Lieutenant came into my cell. ‘You are going home in ten minutes,’ he said.

I looked at him dazedly, incapable of taking it in. I began shuffling round the cell, gathering together the bits of string, the biro and the piece of cardboard, the scraps of cloth, the nail, all those little oddments that made up my most precious possessions, objects I had become obsessively attached to as a prisoner. The pen and my diary, that I had kept carefully hidden down my sock, that had helped me chart the days and my fluctuating morale, were my most carefully guarded things. Then the reality of what was happening seeped through to me. I no longer needed all this stuff. Soon, in a matter of days perhaps, I would be seeing Helen and the children, my Mum and Dad, and the rest of my family. I would be home. It was as much as I could do to contain my feelings.