Name: Roger Cooper
Date: 1985
Place: Tehran, Iran
Facts: Roger Cooper was taken hostage in Iran and spent more than five years in prison in Tehran. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his release, but now runs a holiday business in Spain.
I worked in the Middle East on and off for over 30 years as a journalist and translator. I had an Iranian wife, and she had custody of our daughter after we divorced. When I had to leave Iran because of the revolution, leaving behind all my properties I'd built up, I started working as a freelance journalist in London. Around this time, however, my ex-wife decided Iran wasn't the place for our daughter and that she should live in England with me. Even though she arrived with no English, she did very well in her A levels, and wanted to study medicine at university.
Somehow, I had to get the money together for her studies. The only way I could do it was by going back to the Middle East to work in the oil industry, which paid very well. On a business trip to Tehran, I was suddenly pulled off the street and bundled into a car by a group of men. At first I thought the whole thing was ridiculous and that it would soon be cleared up, but then it turned nasty and they started beating me up. In the end, I was accused of spying and spent five-and-a-half years in jail. Most of the time, I knew there was no chance of getting out because of the political situation, such as when the Salman Rushdie affair broke. It was a little bit terrifying, but having worked as a journalist, I knew it was no good panicking.
Most of the time I was in solitary confinement, and I think I preferred it to being among the other prisoners. My cell was roughly 3m by 2m, which made a pretty small world, and the heat really built up in that very tiny space. I had a whole network of guards who loved coming in to chat when they got bored, and the governor even began to slip me newspapers. I already spoke fluent Persian, so I began to do a lot of crosswords, on top of all the reading I was doing. I became quite good at them, and the guards would always call, 'Cooper, what's 10 across?'
My friends formed a Friends of Roger Cooper Society to try to secure my release. Even though it was a source of comfort, I don't believe it got me out of prison a day earlier than would otherwise have been the case. When I eventually came out of jail in 1991, I was suffering from what I found out later was post-traumatic stress disorder. It's very common among hostages, and it rather set me back. I found I couldn't do simple things like cooking. I had been on a bit of a high at first, but then I used to get depressed and wouldn't leave the flat for three days at a time. I just couldn't face the world.
I found I could still write, however, and I wrote a lot of articles about what it was like in jail. I was given a book contract, and moved to France for a while so that a change of scenery would help me finish it. Eventually, I was able to go back to being a freelance journalist based in London, but the trouble is it was quite an expensive place to live and I had to look for some other way to earn a living. Another factor is that as you get older and the editors get younger, the phone doesn't ring quite so often to offer you commissions, so I really had to find something else to do to earn a living. There was a little bit of translating work around, but my main language is Persian and as relations with Iran were so bad, there wasn't much call for that. I had almost no money.
I had worked in the self-catering industry when I was young, because an old uncle of mine used to rent out flats in a town called Blanes on the Costa Blanca in Spain. He made a bit of money and built a villa, and when he died it came to my two brothers and me. I decided to buy my brothers' shares, and build it up into a business. I have 10 properties now. It's gone well, but business is not so good any more.
More people are buying second homes here and tenants are getting more demanding and take less care of the properties. It's making me think I should do something a bit easier. We get tenants from all over the world, and about a year ago, we got a visit from a Canadian filmmaker, who read my book and would like to make a film based on something I wrote about the Hungarian uprising of 1956. We've been working on a treatment, and it would be lovely if it all came off. I rather like Hungary, and I was thinking of going to live there for part of the year. It's a lovely country and I'd have the challenge of learning a new language. As well as that, I know Iraq and Afghanistan very well, and I feel quite guilty that I haven't been able to get out there, either as a journalist or perhaps as an aid worker. I'm sure I could do a lot of things in either country if I could get there.
I don't know anyone in my family who's ever retired, so I imagine I won't either. I don't think I'd like to sit on the beach with a book. I never do that anyway and I've got a beach less than 100 yards away. I'm proud of very few things in my life, but one of them is how brilliantly my daughter's turned out. She did go on to study medicine after all, and is a successful GP in Edinburgh, married to a medical researcher. The little girl who came without a word of English 20 years ago is speaking better English than me.