HOWZAT

There are striking differences between them: Winder, in conservative navy fleece with limp, sandy hair is steely, restrained; Hart Dyke can’t keep still, emotion streaks out of him. Where Winder is reedy and self-contained, Hart Dyke is broad and galumphing, wears a bright green beanie and muddy gardener’s cords. More than once he interrupts Winder with a humorous aside — a protective diversion to stop his friend from going too deep.

At the first camp, the reality of the situation hit Winder. “I was the instigator of this, I’d led Tom here. I was young and the excitement of travelling had seduced me. I started to think of how my parents would react. I had the most immense sense of guilt.” He looks down.

“Oh Paul,” says Hart Dyke quietly, with feeling. “I really didn’t feel that. This was 50-50.”

But Winder’s first confessional isn’t over. “That’s one of the big, powerful feelings I had — that there are actually repercussions beyond me that will affect other people’s lives.” He pauses. “There was utter silence between Tom and me for the first two days; I was trying to work out what I’d done.”

It was Hart Dyke farting that broke the ice between kidnappers and hostages (“it sounded like a tractor starting up on a frosty morning”). Till then, the click-click of the magazines being loaded and unloaded on the captors’ guns had been the only sound. Hart Dyke’s wind provoked disbelieving laughter — “the universal appeal of toilet humour”, as he puts it.

The two young men made up nicknames for their captors: Tank Bird for a muscular female (who, at gunpoint, demanded Winder hand over his Daffy Duck boxer shorts), The Nutter for the aggressive man who had led the ambush, Mr and Mrs Comb for the couple preoccupied with their appearance.

At no time did the kidnappers reveal if they were (as suspected) members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the much-feared FARC), insisting they were “the guardians of the forest”. Unlike Hart Dyke, Winder did not speak Spanish and so could not understand them. “It was a useful self-defence mechanism. I didn’t want to know what they were talking about if they were talking about beheading us (as Hart Dyke would overhear later).”

IN THE early months, while the kidnappers thought the ransom would be paid, things remained calm. Winder carved a miniature chess set from jungle wood (he carries the pieces in a velvet bag today, the tiny pawns and knights intricately chiselled) and the pair made playing cards from the back of Hart Dyke’s camera instructions (he was devastated when the camera was confiscated by his captors, preventing him from photographing orchids). The two played cricket, using a branch as a bat and limes as balls. In a memorable incident they sang and danced the Monty Python standard, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. However, in his exuberance Hart Dyke, “kicking his legs like a can-can dancer on crack”, squashed a small bird, the perrico, much beloved of the captors, beneath his boot. The whole camp exploded in laughter.

“Day to day,” says Winder, “you went from terror to hysterical laughter in a few minutes. I’d just been negotiating a price for my head and there I was rolling around the floor after watching a little parrot die. Kidnaps should not be like this. It was like being in the school playground.”

It was Hart Dyke who puzzled the kidnappers most. Moving to a higher camp, he alighted on more orchids than he’d ever seen in one place in the wild: “Amazing sprays of Pleurothallis orchids and oncidiums, in red and yellow form, 2ft-3ft long and with hundreds of flowers per spike. I was screaming out their names in delight.” He gave his custodians a lecture about seeds — “I’ve found an unusual palm from the Palmae family. It is very similar to the Caryota urens, the fishtail palm.” Later, one guerrilla, “Smith”, accused Hart Dyke of being a drug runner. “Señor, I am a gardener,” Hart Dyke replied.

Shuttled from camp to camp, the two men maintained their friendship despite niggles: Winder worried periodically that Hart Dyke’s tomfoolery could send their kidnappers over the edge, while Hart Dyke complained that “Paul was happy to sit and not do very much, which was slightly annoying as I was really trying to make a difference.”

At one camp, Winder located the BBC World Service on a transistor radio, a moment of such joy his glasses steamed up. A frustrated Hart Dyke sent his family a letter: “Dear Mum and Dad, Our kidnappers are all idiots. They are a bunch of gits. Give them absolutely nothing ...” (He worried for the rest of his captivity that the kidnappers translated this; his parents never received the letter.)