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As far as Colombia is concerned, much has changed over forty years. Today, it is a vibrant, progressive and, in the main, safe place, but when my mother was growing up there in the 1950s and ’60s certain parts were plagued by kidnapping, trafficking, corruption, drugs, crime and injustice. The country’s response to attempted social reform by the liberals in the late 1940s brought forward a decade of rebellion and banditry. They call this era ‘La Violencia’. Accounts of killings, torture, abduction and rape were common, and there was an atmosphere of insecurity and fear. Hundreds of thousands of deaths (including those of innocent children) came about because of this unrest.
That Colombia is very much still in Mum’s blood. When she had just given birth to my sister Joanna, she wouldn’t let the nurses take her from her because, from what she knew, a hospital was a market place for swapping a handicapped child for a healthy one or stealing newborn babies to sell on.
In 1997, it was estimated that one in three of the world’s abductions happened in Colombia. Sadly, kidnapping is still a regular occurrence. For the past few decades on a Saturday night, there has been a radio show called Las Voces del Secuestro (Voices of Kidnapping), and from midnight until 6 a.m. the phone lines ring continuously with family members wanting to send messages to their loved ones in captivity. It’s heartbreaking.
For those children – for all children who have been affected by other people’s greed, as my mother’s life has – she is living proof that circumstances don’t need to be the end of anyone’s story. In fact, it is her upbringing that has made her into the strong, grateful, loving, generous, selfless, positive – and of course wild and unconventional – woman she is today.
While we were growing up, Mum would never allow us to sulk for too long. Instead, she would inspire us, saying something like, ‘Pick yourself up, stand up tall, invent something with what you do have, be grateful in the little, and get moving!’
Mum sees the value in everything – for the breath in our lungs, for a new day and for the greatest joy in her life, of being a mother, a grandmother, a wife and a friend. So allow me to introduce to you an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary tale to tell. Marina – my mother and my hero.
Vanessa James
Prologue
I have a story to tell you. The story of my life. And I had thought that this bit, where I introduce myself to you, would be the easiest thing in the world. I was wrong. In fact, it is the hardest.
When meeting someone for the first time, it’s customary to tell them your name. It’s the first thing that we all do and gives others a way to identify us. I do this. I tell people that my name is Marina. But rather than it being a name given to me by my parents at birth, this is a name I chose for myself at the age of around fourteen. My birth name, like everything else from my early childhood, has been lost over time.
The things that matter, you see – the early memories that help us to establish our identity and which most people take for granted – have, for me, long been forgotten. Who were my parents? What were their names and what were they like? I don’t know. I have no picture in my head of them at all, no hazy memories. I have no idea what they even looked like. I have so many questions that will never be answered. What was my home like and how did we live? Did I get on with my family? Do I have any siblings who remember their sister, and if so, who and where are they now? What did I enjoy doing? Was I loved? Was I happy? When is my birthday? Who am I?
For now, this is everything I know about myself: I was born sometime around 1950, somewhere in the north of South America. It is most likely to have been Venezuela or Colombia. I’m not sure which. But as most of my later life was spent in Colombia, that is where I tell people I am from.
The only real memories I have – that I can remember with sufficient clarity to be able to share them with you – are very faint and not particularly insightful. My black dolly, for instance. I do remember her. I still remember the detailing of her black frilly rah-rah skirt and the red-satin ribbons that were threaded down her blouse. Her skin was soft to touch and her hair was black and straggly; I remember how it framed her delicate, dark face.
I also remember a sewing machine. It was black with gold squiggles on the side and beside it there was a chair, on which would often be piles of fabric. Were they unfinished dresses? Perhaps my mother liked sewing? I will never know. What I do know is that my home was a humble one – our toilet was a hole in the ground. I also have a strong sense of activity going on. Of there always being lots of people around. Of the village being alive with the constant noise of children.
I recall the outside of my small world rather better. A redbrick path is very clear. I remember it ran from the house into a garden, and then on to a kind of allotment, where I am sure I spent many hours picking vegetables. I remember that place well, and alongside that memory there’s one of being called for, of being shouted at by someone to come back, to return home. Which I would mostly disobey. When this memory comes to me, it’s as if I am on the point of remembering my real name, as of course that’s what they would have been shouting. It tantalises me, remaining just outside my reach.
And what else? What other things are still clear to me? There’s an image of adults walking down a long winding hill and then toiling back up again, carrying containers full of water. I remember cars. They were very rare. No more than three or four a day came. Today, when I see mountains, something stirs in me, so I have the feeling I might have lived up in the mountains.
And that’s all I can tell you, for I know nothing more. Because one day everything changed for ever.
1
There was something about pea pods that mesmerised me. I didn’t know why, but there was something magical about the way the bloated pods burst so cleanly in my hand when I squeezed them. So the corner of the allotment where the peas grew was special, and I would spend hours there, engrossed in my own little world.
The vegetable patch was a piece of land at the end of our garden. On that day, as with many others when there was nothing else happening, I had sneaked off down the brick path that led from our back doorstep, down the garden and through the back gate. I was aware of other children being around. I could hear them but had no desire to find out the cause of their excited chatter. I just wanted to sit in the cool, leafy shade, cocooned from the glare of the sunlight.
I was four, almost five – I recall waiting impatiently for my fifth birthday – and from my diminutive vantage point, the vegetable plants were like giants. They grew in raised beds, forming bushy green bowers as well as tall vines that seemed to clamber across the fence. First there was the cabbage patch and lettuces, then the ranks of tall, straggly runner beans, then the place where the peas grew, the plants dense and bushy, a mass of tendrils and leaves and heavy pods.
I knelt down and plucked the nearest pod, marvelling at the satisfying crack! it made as I burst it open between my fingers. Inside the fat jacket were the glossy emerald globes I was after, and I popped the tiny sweet ones into my mouth.
Very soon I had a small pile of spent pods all around me and a growing pile of discarded peas neatly heaped by my side. Lost in my activity, I was oblivious to the fact that I was not the only person in the allotment that day.
It happened so quickly, it’s only a brief snippet of a memory. One minute I was squatting on the bare earth, preoccupied. The next, I saw the flash of a black hand and white cloth, and before I even had a chance to cry out it had sailed towards my face and completely covered it.
I think I probably tried to scream. It would have been instinctive to do so. Perhaps I even managed to. But away in my special place, who would have heard me? And as I jerked in surprise and terror, there was the sharp smell of some sort of chemical that had already shot into my lungs. The hand was huge and rough around my face, and the strength of whoever held me was overpowering. My last thought as I began to slip into unconsciousness