There’s Champagne and Tears at News of Release : Reaction: Friends of John McCarthy celebrate. But for others, there’s only the continuing agony.

LONDON —  Church bells rang out, champagne corks popped and tears of joy were shed Thursday to celebrate the release of British hostage John McCarthy in Lebanon.

“Time can start again now,” said Jill Morrell, the girlfriend he left behind five years ago when he flew to Beirut on his first foreign assignment as a television journalist.

In the London journalists’ church of St. Bride’s on Fleet Street, friends pasted the word “Released” over the number 1,943, his days in captivity, on a placard beside his photograph.

The bells of St. Bride’s and nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral greeted the news that the Islamic Jihad had freed McCarthy, 34.

He was kidnaped April 17, 1986, in Beirut on his way to the airport after a six-week assignment as a producer for Worldwide Television News.

“I just feel ecstatic,” said Morrell, who had masterminded a dogged five-year campaign to keep his plight before the British public and politicians.

And Chris Pearson, president of the Friends of John McCarthy, said the celebrations of McCarthy’s release were “tempered very firmly” by the hostages remaining in Lebanon.

A former hostage, Irishman Brian Keenan, who spent 52 months in captivity and once shared a cell with McCarthy, said the freed Briton would be calm but perhaps dazed.

Later, “the awful process of finding out who you are begins in earnest.” But he is sure McCarthy will cope.

McCarthy’s release leaves two Britons still among the hostages in Lebanon, retired airline pilot Jack Mann, 77, and Terry Waite, 52, special envoy of the Anglican Church.

Sunnie Mann, whose husband was taken hostage in 1989, said she is happy for McCarthy but upset that Mann is still held.

“Nobody has heard anything about Jackie at all, absolutely nothing. I’m at the end of my wits here. I don’t know what I’m doing any more. I have spent two days with my bags packed waiting by the phone to go to Damascus--everyone thought it would be Jackie, and it’s John,” she said in Cyprus.

But McCarthy cheered Waite’s family by reporting that he was alive, although he said Waite had been ill from asthma. McCarthy was the first person to report seeing Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy, since his capture Jan. 20, 1987.

McCarthy also said he was with American hostages Terry A. Anderson and Thomas Sutherland on Tuesday. He said they were “in good health and in good spirits.”

“That’s certainly a relief, but we don’t have any information so far as to how well he is,” Sutherland’s daughter Kit said in a Colorado radio interview.

Other relatives of hostages and those who once shared their plight in Lebanon expressed joy Thursday at McCarthy’s freedom, but also anxiety about waiting for the possible release of another captive.

“My prayer is not that it will be Terry Anderson. My prayer is that it will be all of them,” said Anderson’s sister, Peggy Say.

Virginia Rose Steen said she was watching for news about her professor husband, Alann, who was captured in Lebanon on Jan. 24, 1987.

“I’m certainly pleased that John has been released. We’ll just have to see what he’s heard,” Virginia Steen said from her parents’ home in Clarklake, Mich.

Thomas Cicippio, whose brother, Joseph, is held by a different Shiite Muslim group than the one that released McCarthy, said that “things are looking better.”

“I’m getting the impression that things will start to happen,” Thomas Cicippio said from his home in Norristown, Pa. “How long it will take no one knows. There’s movement, and that’s very important.”

Estelle Ronneburg of Boise, Ida., went to work rather than stay home to await news about her son, Jesse Turner, kidnaped in early 1987. “If I were at home I would be pacing, wearing out my new carpet and biting my nails. I’m better off here,” she said.