Daring to be different

It’s not often a radio programme makes me laugh these days (have we lost the ability to be funny without being scatalogical or vindictive) and yet, as Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion series (Radio Four, Sundays) so often shows, it’s laughter that bonds people and helps them through crisis situations. This week she brought together again for the first time four key figures from the Beirut hostage crisis of the mid- to late-1980s — Terry Waite, Brian Keenan, John McCarthy and Jill Morrell. McCarthy was flung into a room blindfold when he first met Keenan. He described with vivid recall how once the blindfold was removed he looked up first at a pair of shoes and then blue jeans and finally a very hairy face (Keenan had already been incarcerated for four months) and thought that he’d met a character straight out of Treasure Island. ‘Ben Gunn,’ he shrieked, terrifying Keenan who wondered how he was going to get on with this new cellmate. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s first encounter with Terry Waite was in the boot of a car, when Waite, all six foot six of him, was flung in on top of him tied up in a sack. What kind of car could have had such a large boot, they now wondered.

Jill Morrell, in contrast, said very little. Her life was turned upside down when McCarthy, her boyfriend, was kidnapped, finding herself as the spearhead for the campaign to release the hostages. But when McCarthy was eventually released in August 1991 after five years in captivity, much of which was spent in a small cell with Brian Keenan, she felt jealous of their friendship. He knew John better than she did.