My life in Libya

But on the way one of Adrienne Brady’s friends wound down the car window to take a photo of a burnt-out vehicle.

Barely had the shutter clicked when an intelligence officer stopped the car and insisted they escort him to the country’s Central Intelligence for questioning.

“We know you work for the CIA,” she was told. “You’re under arrest.”

This was Gaddafi’s Libya with tensions running high.

For three hours in a concrete building, Adrienne and her sight-seeing friends were questioned.

“It was very scary,” said Adrienne, who now lives in Creekmoor, Poole, and has written a book about her experiences in Libya in the 1990s where she had gone to teach.

“They were convinced they had uncovered a group of western spies and from that day on I knew I was under surveillance.”

Adrienne, who had previously been teaching in Essex, started travelling after her husband died and the youngest of her four daughters went to university.

First Adrienne went to Singapore, then Brunei and then came her brave decision to take a teaching post at an international school in Tripoli in 1993.

“It was a time of extreme political turmoil in a country that was extremely difficult to get into,” she said. It didn’t open its doors until a decade later.

Libya’s relationship with the West was turbulent following incidents like the shooting dead years earlier of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in London and the Lockerbie bombing aftermath.

“But the residency I was offered was a passport to travel and explore the country,” she recalled.

“My first impression on arriving was that it was a madhouse. Everything seemed to be falling down.”

She was advised by other ex-pats not to mention the country’s leader, Colonel Gaddafi, and to talk only about the weather and health.

Spies, she was warned, were everywhere with phones tapped and mail intercepted.

“It was as if it wasn’t real,” she remembered. ”But I found my sanity through members of a diving group at the compound where we all lived.”

They would spend their leisure time diving off nearby beaches. Then, one day, she went with a colleague to a private club, also used by high-ranking Libyans, intending to refill their diving cylinders, as they often would.

“There were soldiers with guns and blood on the ground... we left straight away.”

News later filtered through that whatever happened there was related to a failed plot to assassinate Gaddafi, who had seized power himself in 1969.

Throughout her two-year stay in Libya, Adrienne managed to travel and visited the sights such as Appolonia and Cyrene.

And she loved the desert. “In spite of the dangers of travel I was haunted by its timeless beauty,” she recalled, having been guided on one trip by two members of the Tuareg – nomads of the Sahara – whom she found had a sparkling sense of humour.

The Libyan people she met were resourceful, friendly and curious about the outside world. But they were also cautious and worn down by the growing poverty, bizarre policies – including the burning of all texts in English and a ban on making a profit – and estrangement.

“They just wanted peace and to get on with their lives,” she said.

The women, swathed in cotton wraps from head to foot, wore a veil – the farashiya – to cover almost all their face leaving just one eye exposed. But the women she met teaching at her school were not downtrodden.

“They were quite forceful and sure of themselves,” she said. “And the local people at the shops, especially the souk, were nice to us.”

What was it like being a single western woman there?

“Because I spent time with the other ex-pats I did not feel vulnerable,” she said – though she recounts in the book an edgy time she was stopped at a checkpoint when travelling with a male colleague.

“Next time wear a ring and say you are married,” her colleague afterwards advised.

“I felt most paranoid worrying in case they found out I was using computer,” she said. “Nobody knew I had brought it in and I had to hide it.”

She destroyed all her print-outs of her experiences by emptying tea on to them and pulping them. It was too risky to dispose of them in a bin.

But after her year was up she returned to Libya to teach again at the oil base at Syrte, believing it would offer a fresh start.

For a while it did... until the records of her “espionage activities” were forwarded on from Tripoli.

She had found attention thrust upon her when she accused one troublesome student among the otherwise hard-working class of cheating.

And he responded with a rage.

He was, she found out, a member of a powerful tribe related to Gaddafi and had been in jail for murder in Greece.

It was time to move on.

Since then, Adrienne has travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East with her late partner, Richard, who died two years ago. She’s currently writing a “memorial book” about their travels.

Now she is settled in Dorset, where some of her family also live.

But she plans to travel further, with a visit to the Holy Land already booked for next year.

And Libya? She recalls with fondness the ancient sites such as Sabratha and Cyrene, the prehistoric cave art, the Berber oasis town of Ghadames, the extraordinary desert… and, of course, the people she befriended.

Would she like to go back today? “ “No. It’s so dangerous now. It’s terrifying,” she said.

• Kiss the Hand You Cannot Sever by Adrienne Brady, Melrose Books £13.99