Palestine hostage experience taught McCarthy fundamental value of home

So says John McCarthy, the journalist kidnapped in Beirut in 1986 and held captive for five and a half years.

“This simple truth is something that being held hostage taught me,” he told yesterday’s Yorkshire Post Literary Lunch in Harrogate.

He’d been fascinated by the Middle East since hearing his father’s tales of Palestine but it was his own experiences that led him to write You Can’t Hide the Sun, the hidden story of the Palestinian struggle.

“The indigenous Arab people are often forgotten,” he said, recalling an incident following a march that marked the Arab equivalent of Israeli Independence Day.

“It was a peaceful occasion,” he said. “People wanted to look across the hillside and remember how it was once full of Arab villages. Suddenly we heard loud reports – there was some conflict between Jewish people and the younger Palestinians. We found an old lady sitting on a log, getting her breath back. She’d been threatened by a guy with a pickaxe handle who called her a dirty Arab and said she had to leave or he’d kill her. I wondered how often she’d have to run from her own home.”

Author and scriptwriter Mark Wallington treated the audience to a Literary Lunch first – a rendition of Cole Porter’s Don’t Fence Me In on ukulele and kazoo. The Uke of Wallington told of his travels across the UK with his ukulele, ultimately becoming Uke of Edinburgh at the city’s festival.

“Before my sons left home they gave me a ukulele as a birthday present.

“I just needed a place to play and discovered this network of ‘open mic’ events,” he said.

The final speaker was award-winning writer Susanna Jones. Her latest book, When Nights Were Cold, is a thriller set in late Victorian times.

It centres on a heroine who plans an ambitious climbing trip to the Alps, a scenario inspired by the author’s love of hiking and her research into female mountaineers from past eras.