BOOK REVIEW : It’s Enough to End Faith in Brotherhood

“Yours Till The End” is the story of the oldest English hostage, kidnaped in his middle 70s in broad daylight on a spring day in 1989 in West Beirut; he was out on a round of errands, returning a couple of cases of empty beer bottles, before going to his local pub.

It is also the story of his wife, Sunnie, who ran an equestrian center on the other side of town and who had a little white poodle that she loved more than life itself. Sunnie survived life in West Beirut after all her horses were shot and lay writhing in agony on the ground. She survived and stayed after terrorists of unknown origin kidnaped her husband. She even stayed obstinately on after a band of ruffians kidnaped her poodle.

This is a study, then, not of the Middle East, certainly not of Lebanon, not about the great sweep of world events, not about history unfolding. It’s about how ordinary human beings sometimes get caught up in stuff they don’t understand and couldn’t care less about. But mostly it’s about being British.

Jackie and Sunnie Mann were absolutely the last British couple living in West Beirut. The embassy had pleaded with them to leave. There was a dangerous civil war going on. Israel had invaded the country and done some plundering and pillaging; Christian militias had invaded Palestinian refugee camps and done a hefty amount of massacring. Muslims held one side of the city and Christians held the other; artillery shells were raining down everywhere. Electricity was on for only about an hour a day. You couldn’t buy food.

After making a few more pleas to the Manns to, for God’s sake, leave Lebanon, the British Embassy contingent prudently shut its own doors and left. It wasn’t safe. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. After all, close to 250 American Marines had been blown to smithereens.

But Jackie and Sunnie Mann were still going on the assumption that the sun never set on the British Empire. They’d lived in Beirut for 44 years, and they weren’t going anywhere. They stayed in a fifth-floor flat and walked the stairs when the elevator went on the blink. Sunnie taught the Lebanese to ride horses. Jackie went ‘round to his pub. They were, they say repeatedly, “well known in Beirut.”

But the amazing, the British thing, is that Beirut wasn’t well known to them. They, by their own words, had only the barest clue that a civil war was going on. It was--their whole attitude seems to say--utterly beneath and beyond their attention.

Even after Jackie is kidnaped, he assumes for days that he’s being held for ransom. Sunnie, with more knowledge of the subject, very bravely swings into action. She realizes that she must grab the attention of the media and immediately does so. She learns how to survive financially even though her husband has kept their bank account in his name and the Lebanese bankers won’t give her a cent. She makes friends with a very nice journalist who becomes her standby and confidant for the next 2 1/2 years.

Meanwhile, as a hostage, Jackie is kept in chains, but he’s fed well. He’s offered shampoo, which he disdains (soap has always been good enough for him) and denied nail clippers, so that his finger nails grow as long as a mandarin’s. His teeth, unbrushed, decay and fall out. An unsavory pervert tries to drug and rape him a couple of times. When Jackie is given a radio, he can only play the FM “easy listening” stations. Gradually, the reader begins to realize that he doesn’t speak the language of the country--after 44 years there.

Thus, Jackie Mann survives his kidnaping ordeal in perfect arrogance and perfect ignorance. He does not know why he’s chained up, nor does he care to know. He passes his time in elaborate reveries of World War II, when he was a Spitfire pilot and brought down many a gentleman German flier before he was grounded for the rest of the war with serious injuries. (That’s what war ought to be, not hanging around on a foam mattress listening to FM radio.) Jackie has been betrayed by someone in his bank or his pub. He thinks it’s unmanly. He doesn’t get it that there’s a war.

After his release, England brings him “home,” debriefs and patronizes him. Sunnie has a tantrum. Where were all these do-gooders when she needed them? Mr. and Mrs. Mann are the kind of Britishers who won the Big War.

It must be exactly such studied imperviousness that drives high-strung Middle Easterners to such irritable distraction that they’ll even kidnap a French poodle. If you think the brotherhood of man is coming any time soon, it’s best not to read this book.

YOURS TILL THE END By Jackie and Sunnie Mann , Trafalgar Square, $9.95; 272 pages