Quiet courage

McCarthy himself was bundled into a sack and dumped in the boot of a car on several occasions as he was moved between safe houses by his captors. What he experienced, as did all those he talked to, was an intense psychological battle. As Alan Johnstone, the BBC reporter most recently held hostage by Palestinian militants in Gaza, explains, ‘They had everything in their hands...absolutely everything was in their hands and the only thing I had left was to attempt to control my own state of mind.’

Johnstone and McCarthy coped with the ordeal because of their ability to face it with determination (and their love of radio, listening to the World Service). The poet Lemn Sissay’s response to a solitary childhood spent with a series of foster parents and then moving between children’s homes was to spend a year refusing to wear shoes. He walked everywhere barefoot, in the hope that someone, anyone would ‘care enough to force me to put shoes back on’.

In Child of the State (Radio Four, Monday) Sissay took us through his attempts to retrieve the files that the state kept on him; files that might contain photos of him as a child, of which he has none. Five months later he is still waiting for them to be found by Wigan Social Services. ‘If no one is there to confirm my childhood memories, how can I be sure who I was, or who I am?’ he asked in a programme (produced by Jo Wheeler) that resonated with quiet courage.