The One That Got Away - Junior edition

CHAPTER 13 Safe or Sorry?

Thursday 31 January: Escape — Day Eight

I closed in on the barn.

The building was made of dirty-white stone, with a low wall running out of its right-hand end. The doorway was open. Outside it was a young woman with a black scarf tied round her head in a band. She was bending over a wood fire and cooking pieces of dough over what looked like an upturned wok. Two or three children were playing in the open.

The woman saw me coming but did not react much. As I approached, my weapon in my hands, she lifted her head and called into the house. I was only five or six metres off when a young man came out. He looked about eighteen and had dark curly hair. He touched his chest and then his forehead with his right hand — a typical Arab greeting.

I went up and shook his hand, and pointed at the ground, asking, ‘Syria? Is this Syria?’

He nodded, repeating, ‘Seeria! Seeria!’ Then he pointed over my shoulder and said, ‘Iraq. Iraq.’

I looked back the way he was gesturing, and in the distance behind me, over the mounds to the east, I saw a town with a mast. Krabilah! Looking westward, I saw another town, also with a mast. Abu Kamal! The one to the east was miles behind me. Both towns had masts. I realized that I must have passed Krabilah early in the night, and that most of the walking I’d done since then had been unnecessary — nothing but self-inflicted torture. That line of barbed wire had been the frontier after all.

I’d been in Syria for hours.

The young man could see the state I was in. A worried look came over his face, and he began touching my hands. He took me by the sleeve and drew me into the barn. In the middle was a round oil stove with a glass door and a metal chimney that rose straight through the roof. At the far end of the room lay rolls of bedding and some straw. There was practically no furniture, and it was obvious the people were very poor. A woman with tattoos on her face sat breast-feeding a baby, and did not move as I came in.

I sat on a mat on the ground next to the stove with my weapon laid across my lap. The young man looked at me and asked in gestures if I wanted something to eat.

‘Water!’ I croaked, tipping up an imaginary glass. ‘Water!’

A moment later he handed me a shiny metal bowl full of water, which tasted incredibly fresh and cold. Never in my life had I had a more delicious drink. I tipped it straight down my neck. The boy brought another bowlful, and I drank that as well. Next he gave me a cup of sweet tea, thick with dissolved sugar, and I put that down too. Then the woman came in with some of the bread she’d been making, and gave me a piece. It was still hot, and smelled delicious, but when I bit off a mouthful and tried to swallow it, it locked in my throat and would not go down.

I had to get my boots off. It was four days since I’d seen my feet, and I was dreading what I would find. As I undid the laces and eased the boots off, the stink was repulsive. Like my hands, my feet were rotting. I smelled as if my whole body was putrefying.

When the man saw the state of my feet, with pus oozing along the sides, he let out a yell. The woman who’d been cooking brought me over a wide bowl full of cold water and began to wash my feet. All my toenails had come off, and I couldn’t feel my toes. But the water stung the rest of my feet like fire.

In spite of the pain, I forced myself to scrape the pus out of the cuts along the sides and round the heels. I also washed the blood off my face. With that done, it was bliss to lie back with my bare feet raised to the warmth of the stove and let them breathe. Another girl appeared from outside, took my socks and rinsed them through. When she brought them back they were still wet, but I pulled them on, and got my boots back on as well.

In sign language, and by making aircraft sounds, I tried to explain that I was a pilot and had been in a crash. Then I made some siren sounds — dee-dah, dee-dah, dee-dah — to show that I wanted to go to the police. A boy of about six had been drawing pictures of tanks and aircraft on sheets of dirty white paper. With my numb fingers I drew a police car with a blue lamp on the roof. Suddenly the message got through: the young man nodded vigorously and pointed towards the distant town.

‘Go to the town?’ I suggested, and I made driving motions. ‘You have a vehicle?’

Again he nodded and pointed. What he meant, I soon found out, was that we should start walking down the road towards the town and hitch a lift.

With the water and tea inside me, my body seemed to have switched back on. I felt sharp again, as if there was nothing wrong, as if I could do the whole walk again. Everything seemed so relaxed that for a while I just sat there, recovering.

The old man came back with his goats and stood looking at me. Then, to get some action, I dug a sovereign out of my belt and showed it round. I started saying ‘Felous, felous’ — ‘money, money’.

As soon as he saw the gold, the young man clearly wanted to go into town. Maybe he thought that if he took me in I would give him the money. Soon everyone was staring at the sovereign. Another girl came in, and somehow I knew she said, ‘He’s got more on him somewhere.’

The old man appeared with a gun — some ancient hunting rifle. ‘More,’ he said. ‘More.’ By gestures he showed he wanted another coin, to make the girl a pair of earrings. Then he started demanding gold for the other girls as well.

‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘This is for goats, clothes and stuff. No more.’

The Arabs began muttering to each other. For half an hour things remained tense. I lay with my feet against the oil fire, warming up. It was the first time in a week that I hadn’t felt half frozen. I had begun to hope that I could sleep in the farmhouse that night. But the young man had become determined to go into town, and indicated that I should come outside.

I decided not to wait any longer. To look less aggressive, I took off my webbing and smock, so I was left wearing my dark green jersey and camouflage trousers. Using sign language, I asked the man for some sort of bag. He produced a white plastic fertilizer sack, and I put my kit into that. I slung the sack over my shoulder and we set off along the dirt road.

Then I thought, It’s hardly the thing, to walk into a civilian town carrying a rifle. So after we’d gone about two hundred metres, I broke my weapon down in two and put it in the bag. I still had my knife, but in this situation I could have done with a weapon that was easy to hide, like a pistol.

The young man was walking quite fast and I shuffled behind him, in too much pain to move quickly. Every minute or two he stopped and waited for me to catch up. Then, seeing I was in difficulties, he took the bag off me, and without the weight I made better progress.

‘Tractor?’ I kept saying. ‘Where’s a tractor?’

He answered me in Arabic. I think he was saying, ‘One’ll come soon.’

Wagons were rolling out from the town, and after a while one of them stopped. It was a Land Cruiser loaded with bales of hay. The driver could speak a little broken English. He said he was a camel farmer, and asked who I was.

‘My aircraft’s crashed,’ I told him.

‘Your aircraft? Where is it?’

‘Over the hill, over there. I need to go to the police.’

‘OK. I’ll take you.’

He swung his vehicle round, and I got into the middle of the front seat, between him and the young man. I soon regretted it, though, because he started making aggressive comments. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘This is our country. This is a bad war.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I replied, and kept as quiet as possible.

When we hit the edge of town, I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I’d been imagining a fairly built-up place, with banks and shops. There was nothing here but crude houses made of grey breeze blocks, with heaps of rubbish lying round them. No vegetation. No sign of gardens. Burned-out cars in the streets. To my surprise, the Syrians