JOYCE Ridley remembers the conversation with her daughter vividly. Yvonne simply refused to tell her mother where she was going. It was typical of any exchange between a worried mother and headstrong daughter. Only in this case, Yvonne was not being cautioned against a night out on the town, but against heading off on an adventure to one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

Yvonne, a reporter for the Sunday Express, had just filed a series of articles from the border region of Pakistan which had won her editor's praise and she wanted to cover more. And it was a determination which came through clearly in that telephone conversation last Wednesday.

Mother: "Where are you going next? Don't go any further or you might be taken hostage."

Daughter: "If you go on like that I won't tell you where I am going."

Mother: "You have to tell me where you are going."

Daughter: "I'm not going to tell you."

An exasperated Joyce, 74, says: "She wouldn't take any notice of me. She never does." With resignation borne of experience, Joyce did not give it further thought, until she went to pick up Yvonne's daughter Daisy from her boarding school in the Lake District on Friday.

"When I arrived there I was asked to go and see the head teacher. My immediate thought was that Daisy was in trouble of some sort," Joyce says. "But when I was told there was some difficult news and that Yvonne was alright . . . my heart sank. I was told she had been arrested by the Taliban but that she was alright."

In the days following the news, Joyce and her husband Allan, 77, have been on an emotional roller-coaster ride, as they tried to cope with conflicting and patchy accounts of Yvonne's well-being.

As they returned from the Lake District to their home in West Pelton, near Stanley, County Durham, they were in a complete daze, struggling to absorb every parent's nightmare.

"It did not sink in at first. It still seems so unreal. It is something that you never could imagine happening to you. Our first thought was to protect Daisy from the news, and that helped distract us from the gravity of what had happened," Joyce says.

"When we arrived home, photographers and reporters were waiting outside and Daisy wondered about the flashing bulbs, but we told her they were taking pictures of the house. We played her cartoons all weekend so that she never saw much television.

"When she saw her mother on television she got excited. We broke the news to her gradually and told her that her mother was on an adventure. Daisy's main concern was to have her mother back for her ninth birthday on Wednesday, and she was upset when she learned she would not be able to make it. We have told her the people her mother is with are insisting she stay."

It was a sleepless first night. While Allan took medication to help him through the night, Joyce tackled a crossword puzzle until the early hours.

"I slept for half an hour and was wide awake after half an hour, at 2am," she says. "I would go downstairs and not know what to do with myself, thinking about Yvonne. I took some Paracetamol to try and dope myself to sleep again."

The next morning, with the media still camped on the doorstep, the full extent of what happened started to sink in. Adding to the anxiety was a constantly ringing telephone and not knowing what tidings the next call would bring. Often it was a newspaper or television station wanting to find out more.

As parents of a journalist, the irony of having to cope with the media was not lost on the Ridleys. "I couldn't bring myself to go out to talk to them," Joyce remembers. "Then I thought Yvonne would have been standing outside too. She used to tell us about how she had stood outside other people's homes as part of her job. So I decided to talk to them so they would go away. With Yvonne being a journalist the reporters were very sympathetic, supportive and anxious to help, because she is one of their colleagues."

But the lack of reliable information since their daughter was arrested has been a major source of frustration, Joyce says. "It is the uncertainty of it all. There were so many conflicting messages. First the Taliban said if they established she was a journalist she would be released within seven days. But then I heard she could be accused of being a spy and that frightened me. When I was told that she was staying in a house, was being fed and had asked for and got cigarettes I thought it could not be all bad."

But reading an article in a Sunday newspaper describing how the Taliban tortured their victims, plunged Joyce into new despair. "It told of how they pulled their victims' arms out as far as they could and crucified them. Well I certainly did not sleep after that."

The only real relief from the constant anxiety, Joyce says, was settling down for Sunday night's episode of Coronation Street. But she knows her daughter is no stranger to danger, and this is not the first time she has waited nervously for news of Yvonne. A former journalist for The Northern Echo, Yvonne, 43, has covered many risky assignments over the years, and had just returned from Northern Ireland, where she had been shown an arms dump, before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. She had been intent on travelling to the United States to cover the disaster there, but cancelled flights meant she opted instead for Pakistan.

Joyce says: "I always used to talk to Yvonne about being taken hostage. But she would reply: 'If anyone takes me they'll soon drop me." Before heading into Afghanistan, disguised in the all-enveloping Afghan burqa, Yvonne had won plaudits from her editor for a series of articles she had completed in Pakistan's North-West Frontier region. But, with characteristic tenacity, she decided not to stay in Pakistan, but to take the risk of entering Afghanistan.

Joyce says: "She never took any notice of me. She never does. I am fearful for her. There is also Daisy as well. That is an added concern. If anything were to happen, it would not only be us who would be devastated. I would have to pick up the pieces for Daisy as well and I couldn't bear that. At the moment Daisy is doing so well. She is not aware of the danger."

Daisy has written to Tony Blair asking him to help free Yvonne, and Joyce has given radio and television interviews in the hope that they will filter through to the Taliban and go some way towards helping secure her daughter's release.

"I have asked them to, please, send her home," says Joyce. "She is no use to them. She is just a journalist and not an important person, so why keep her? Send her home and they'll make her family and her little girl happy." Despite the pressures, Joyce remains confident Yvonne will return. She says: "We are remaining positive. We have to."

She says her daughter's strength of character will help her through this ordeal. And, when Yvonne does eventually return, Joyce will have no hesitation in forgetting her daughter's refusal to come clean over her destination in that telephone call last Wednesday.