(This book was written when I was twenty-seven and first published in 1983. I had spent a year with a stranger on an uninhabited island called Tuin, in the Torres Strait. Castaway describes the experience. )

Somewhere around August, September or October (1981) we completely lost track of the date. Neither of us had made any entries in our small, bought diaries for some time. Gerald asked me, out of the blue, what day it was. I had no idea.

'Well, what month then?'

'August?'

'No, no, way past that. Probably nearer October.'

'It can't be, surely, it doesn't seem that long…'

Tuintime had quietly taken over. It became a matter of day: dawn, morning, heat-of-the-day,sun-over-the-yard-arm, sun-over-Tukupai, sunset - and night: sandflies out, Oh Dear Bird, moon, scrubfowl sounds - and then dawn again. We had the biggest waterclock in the world, the whole of Camp Bay, to tell us when it was time to go fishing. When the sea fell below a certain rock we had to go, or wait until the tide had been right out and was coming in again…. Leaving it too long meant no supper….

(I wrote this book after Castaway although it tracks the years before it. People kept asking me why I went on the island venture and I had to look back in time to find the real answer. In the extract below I was not on holiday. I had hitchhiked from Scotland to Greece and was now on my way to Turkey and Israel )

Crete passed; the ferry ploughed on towards Rhodes. Abandoning my place by the foghorn for a while I made my way forward and commandeered a giant coil of rope. A warm breeze blew wrinkles over the sea's fine skin and I drowsed, watching the skyline through slitted eyes and noting in the distance islands like lopped fangs appearing whenever the ferry rose on the highest point of a wave.

Without brooding on what had happened in Greece, I was aware that in a short space of time I had been the object of not one, but two extremes of human behaviour: the first remarkable for its ugliness; the second for its beauty. And resilient as my sixteen-year-old body and psyche were, the example of rare selflessness shown by Costas and Uschi occurring almost immediately after that contrastingly horrible event seemed in a way to cancel it out. It had to. I could not live with the memory of the rape so, consciously or otherwise, I decided to live without it. It had not happened. It did not exist.
I was unaware then of how deep the bruise had gone; how there are some things the body, if not the mind, can never forget…. (or which the secret part of the mind, if not the body, holds until there's an implosion….)

" I wanted to cry out to God, to plead and vilify, but couldn't open my lips. I wanted to close my eyes and believe what was happening was only a nightmare. I wanted to be anywhere but in the middle of the ocean, no land in sight, in an eighteen-foot canoe with three terrified children, on waves which ceaselessly battered and drenched us. And I wanted to smack Diana Hepworth's face. Why had she let us set off today, when the wind had risen in the night and everyone on Santa Cruz had shaken their heads as they gazed out at the swell? Why hadn't I put my foot down, waiting, if necessary, weeks for a cargo boat to take us? Joe, (aged 10) red hair sodden against a dead white brow, bailed automatically with blanched hands. Magnus (13) no less white but with eyes darkened by understanding, mouth grim, swept sea from our laps in double handfuls. He'd tried using a hat but hands seemed faster. Benji, (8) my Benji, screamed and screamed… "

Author's Note. In fairness to Diana Hepworth, the island we were going to was at times Paradisial. But there were dark sides to it as well.