Nigel Brennan

I said, so I need paper and pen.

I need a pencil and paper because you're going to have to say it phonetically and I'll write it and then I can learn it.

So I got them to start teaching me verses of the Qur'an, which enabled me to then draw and create.

And it was weird in the last few months of captivity, maybe in the last four months, I had my crossword puzzle and I created a scale from the crossword.

to give me a ruler and I started designing houses because I've done technical drawing at school and have a love for architecture and

so i literally had like a shot of mirror which was my eraser if i made a mistake i would just slightly scratch the paper to to get rid of the lead pencil and it's like okay i'm going to design a house so the first house i designed i called it the greenhouse because it had a 15 meter by 5 meter internal garden and i was like so i can plant five plants that way and 15 marijuana plants that way like

had done the math on how many pounds i could get because it's like i'm gonna owe people money i'll build the greenhouse that'll that'll make some money back but it became like this obsessive compulsive thing that i did from morning to night to literally like i can't

tell you how, you know, 14 hours a day from when you wake up from morning prayer to when you can go back to sleep at last prayer.

I'm trying to fill your day with something when you're in four walls with nothing to do.

Like I said, you know, I'd read Mandela's book over a hundred times, but I would do that for an hour every day, knowing what the next page was going to say.

But it was a part of my routine.

But also began to use the Koran again as a weapon.

And I'd been writing numbers in the back of the Koran about things that I wanted to question them about or things that I thought I wanted clarity on and those sorts of things.

and Amanda, she'd never got her Koran back and I basically convinced them, I said, Amanda's our sister in the religion of Islam and she needs a Koran and she should be reading it because they were like, we don't believe she's Muslim.

I said, well, let her borrow my Koran and finally got my Koran back after she'd had it for a few days and obviously looking through it, see if she'd left a note or anything in it and I'd noticed numbers that she had written down on the same page as me and I was like,

Oh, she's obviously got some questions as well.

So I went to those pages and I'd noticed that she'd underlined single words on each page.

So she'd literally written, we can communicate through this.

And it was like, right, it sounded like Donkey Kong.

So basically, you know, giving this book to our captors so that we could communicate.