Lindsey Hilsum

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

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My castaway this week is the journalist Lindsay Hilsom. She's been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades and Channel 4 News international editor for 22 years. During that time, she's reported from every continent except Antarctica, covering the major conflicts of our time and winning numerous awards for her work. She has a reputation for bringing clarity and insight to complex stories, as well as an eye for the human details that help her coverage resonate with viewers at home.

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She grew up in Worcestershire, with a keen desire to see the world. Starting out as an aid worker in Guatemala and Haiti, she soon began working as a freelance writer alongside her humanitarian work.

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That's how, in april nineteen ninety four, while she was working for an N G O in Kigali, she found herself the only English speaking journalist present to witness the horror of Rwanda's genocide as it began.

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In nineteen ninety six, she was named Amnesty International Journalist of the Year for her reporting. She also testified at the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal the following year.

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If journalism is, as the saying goes, the first draft of history, then she has helped write the story of our times, from Iraq to Kosovo, Ukraine to China, and most recently, Washington, D.C. She says, even if our reporting changes nothing, when it's over, politicians should not be able to say that they didn't know. They knew because we told them. Be an eyewitness and explain why things are happening. That's all I'm trying to do, and that's enough. Lindsay Hilson, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you, Lauren. What a lovely introduction. Can I go now? You said it all. Oh, there's so much more to dig into. Now, let's start, Lindsay, with explaining why things are happening. That's tricky at the best of times, but particularly hard in conflict zones already. You have said it's not difficult to get the truth, but it's hard to get the whole truth. Tell me about that. Well, I think what I've always tried to do is combine being a frontline reporter. So being there and trying to show people what it's like, what it feels like, what it feels like for the soldiers, the conscripts, or for the people who are being shelled in the apartment blocks, say, in Ukraine at the moment. But also, I think that if you just show the pity of war, the pity war distills, as Wilfred Owen said, then...

Presenter3:00

People just end up feeling despairing, so I feel it's always important to try and understand why things are happening as well. So to combine that frontline reporting with analysis and with history and with context. It's not always easy on television because you don't have much time, but that's what I'm trying to do. I was amazed to read that you described yourself as a coward.

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I am a coward because

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I mean, what's my greatest fear? My greatest fear is failure. I think that's, you know, a lot of journalists feel like that.

Speaker 13:29

No death.

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Hm? Not deaf.

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Really? I mean, of course nobody wants to die, and I don't want to die, but, you know, if you do die, well, you know, then you're gone, aren't you? So you're not going to worry about it later.

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Um

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I suppose what I really fear

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Is something happening to one of the team I'm working with? Because I love the people I work with. The people I work with, you know, the camera operators, the producer, the local producer, the driver, all of these people.

Speaker 23:47

Yeah.

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If something happened to one of them

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That would be the worst thing because you form these incredibly strong bonds. And, you know, love isn't too strong a word. Shell comes in a few hundred meters away and you all hit the deck and then you run and all of these things do happen. And then you all laugh afterwards and have a drink. And that's a really strong connection. And it's a connection you don't really get with anybody else. So I suppose that's my greatest fear. Lindsay Hilsom, I cannot wait to get into our conversation today in earnest. And of course, we're going to hear your discs. You've got eight to choose and eight to share with us. How difficult was it to put them together?

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It was exquisite agony.

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Because I listen to songs all the time and I read poetry. So songs and poetry are always going through my head. Well let's make a start. Hopefully it'll be worth it. Disc number one, what's it going to be? So I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen since the early 70s. And yes, I am a creature of my generation. And I chose this song because there's a great line in it, which is, there's something happening somewhere. Baby, you just don't know where it is. And I feel that that was very much how I felt through certainly through my teenage years and maybe most of my life. I've always been looking for the place where there's something happening. So this is Dancing in the Dark.

Lindsey Hilsum5:19

In the morning

Lindsey Hilsum5:21

I go to bed feeling the same way I ain't nothing but tired

Lindsey Hilsum5:28

Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself, here they baby.

Lindsey Hilsum5:35

I can use just a little, it can't start a fire.

Lindsey Hilsum5:41

You can't start a fire without a spot, this guns were hired.

Lindsey Hilsum5:47

Even if we're just dancing in the dark

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Bruce Springsteen and Dancing in the Dark. Did you ever get to see Springsteen live? I've seen him a couple of times, and once I missed a coup in Egypt because I had tickets for Springsteen, and you know what? It was the right decision.

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Lindsay Hilsom, something happening somewhere and reaching for it. Let's go back to the beginning. You grew up in Malvern in Worcestershire, born in 1958, the youngest of two daughters, to your physicist father, Cyril, and your French teacher mother, Betty. So by the sounds of that, I'm guessing education was very much valued at home, was it? Oh, very much so. And, you know, in the evenings, quite often, my father would go back to work and my mother would be marking books, and my sister and I would be doing our homework. And I can remember going to friends' houses at some point and being surprised that people didn't work all evening. I thought that's what everybody did. So quite studious. Was it a serious household then? No, it was also a lot of fun. Certainly, education and debate was important. What kind of debate? Pretty much everything. You know, politics, religion. My parents were not religious. My father was brought up Jewish. My mother was brought up going to chapel. They both rejected that. And in fact, I can remember, I suppose I must have been about nine or ten or something. I was in the back of a friend's car and the friend's father was driving. And in my annoying, precocious, piping little voice, I said, Well, I don't believe in God. And I can remember the father saying, I don't want that kind of talk in my car. And I had no idea what I'd done wrong. Because in our household, everything was up for discussion. So tell me more about your parents then. Your dad sounds incredibly impressive. Chief scientist at the General Electric Company. He won the Faraday Medal, the Royal Medal, a CBE, and once beat Alan Turing at chess.

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Look, my father, who is a hundred years old this year and still sharp. Fantastic. My father led the team in the civil service, he worked for the Ministry of Defence, which invented the liquid crystal technology behind the flat screen television. He's pretty brilliant. My sister, my late sister Karen, she inherited all of his brilliance at science and I inherited just the argumentative temperament.

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But what about his death though, Alan Turing? How did that happen?

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Do you know, I'm not even quite sure. I mean, he knew Turing after the war. My father was a county chess champion. That was his thing. But yeah, look, my father is a very brilliant man, and he looks like Einstein. He's got a bald head and then long white hair. He looks the part. And he is the part. Fantastic. And what about your mother, Betty? She sounds very smart, too. Oh, yes. My mother taught French, and it was from my mother I really got my love of poetry and literature. And she was a very thoughtful person. She read a lot of Sartre and Camus. I think she, you know, she was an existentialist, as it were. She was also very involved with the local Oxfam group. So she was very concerned about injustice and what went on in the world. I think both my parents were. They were quite political as well. They were Labour voters, and then later on.

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Social Democrats, and they came from very working-class backgrounds. I mean, I think that's an important thing as well. My father grew up in the East End.

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Father had a stall selling flat caps and chamois leathers on the petticoat lane. My mother's parents had a shop, like an ironmonger's shop. And they met at University College London and they both got scholarships to university. It's hard to talk about my mother because my mother died very young. She was 61 when she died. I think she imbued in my sister and me a lot of values which were important, but also a lot of freedom. And I think that's an amazing thing to give to your children. Disc number two, please, Lindsay Hilson. What are we going to hear?

Lindsey Hilsum9:37

Uh

Presenter9:43

As a teenager, I was very into Joni Mitchell and of course I experienced every agony that she did and I analyzed all of the the love I had in me for various useless long forgotten boys and all the rest of it. But I've chosen one of her happy songs because it's about being carefree and it's about being young. And I sometimes wish that I had been a bit more carefree. I think that I was always I was, you know, I did my share of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

Speaker 110:09

And I

Speaker 110:11

Think that I was always

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I wish I'd done a bit more, but I was always driven and trying to find out the place where something was happening. And this is a song about being on an island. It's a Greek island, not a desert island, and just living for the moment. It's Cary.

Lindsey Hilsum10:38

The wind is in from Africa Last night I couldn't sleep Oh you know it sure is hard to leave you Carrie, but it's really not my home

Lindsey Hilsum10:51

My fingernails are filthy, I've got beach tar on my feet, and I miss my clean white linen and my fancy French glove.

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Joni Mitchell and Carrie.

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So, Lindsay Hilsom, you've described your time at school as grim and miserable and boring and unimaginative. Tell me more, what was so bad?

Presenter11:13

It was all of that. Look, I went to a girls' grammar school and I didn't get a bad education. I can't complain about that. But I think I was always chafing against it. I didn't really like being a child. I thought being a child was dull. I wanted to be a grown-up because grown-ups seemed to have more freedom. But I was a child, and therefore I had extremely bad judgment. And then when I got to be a teenager, I got had even worse judgment. So tell me about that. I mean, did you did you rebel from feeling hemmed in in in the way that you describe?

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Well, I was suspended from school. I wasn't expelled. Okay. What for? What did you do?

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Mm

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I went down the river with the King School boys and a bottle of wine instead of going to school. I was fifteen.

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You don't look particularly regretful. Well, the thing was I was stupid because instead of just taking the day off, I then went to school slightly pissed and therefore got caught. How did you get caught? Oh, I can remember only too well being hauled before the headmistress. Anyway, it was just embarrassing. You were obviously good at school. In 1976, you went to study French and Spanish at Exeter University. You spent a year as part of that course in Guatemala working for Oxfam. What were you doing out there? In the course, you were supposed to go.

Presenter12:30

To either Spain or France and teach English, which I thought sounded a bit boring. I wanted to go to Latin America because I was very interested in Latin American literature at the time. So I just wrote to anybody I could think of. And it so happened that my letter and it was a letter, it was snail mail in those days, fell on the desk of the Oxford Guatemala office the day there the secretary went fell pregnant for the third time. And so they wrote back and said, Can you type and can you do accounting and can you pay your own airfare out? So I wrote back saying yes, yes, and yes. And then I went out and bought two books, Teach Yourself Typing, Teach Yourself Accounting.

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and went to work um as a waitress to to get the money. Anyway, I arrived and of course I could not type or do accounting, which they discovered fairly early on.

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So they thought, what are we going to do with this girl? And they sent me off to a project, an Oxam project, which was closing down. And they said, well, do you think that you could just, you know, talk to the villagers? It was a project which had done nutrition and agriculture and childcare and all of those good things.

Lindsey Hilsum13:35

Mm-hmm.

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and um just find out what was going on and then make a little speech. And I said, sure So got in the car, only just passed my driving test, I'd never driven on the right hand side of the road or on a dirt road.

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So right, did it?

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I got there and of course it was fascinating. I was in this village full of peasants who lived a completely different life. They were very poor people but very determined and they eked out this living off the land and it was very unjust because there were farmers with huge coffee farms around and so it was just fascinating. So I did all these interviews and then I got on a hill and said, you know, compagneros y compagneras, blah blah blah, you know. And now I know that was journalism, wasn't it? And how did it feel? I mean you'd been desperate to see the world. I was so excited. And I was excited and I was outraged. I was outraged by the injustice that I saw. And I was young, I was twenty, and I can remember waking up one morning and thinking.

Speaker 114:26

Uh

Speaker 214:26

And

Speaker 114:27

Uh

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I'm going to do this for the rest of my life.

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And I kind of have. Lindsay Hilsom, it's time for another piece of music. Your third choice today. What have we got next? So after I left Latin America, I went to Kenya in East Africa. And first of all, I was working for UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund. I did that for about three years, and then I went to freelance as a journalist.

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And I had a good time. I had a lovely group of friends and the Starlight Club on a Saturday night. This was the one that got us out there dancing. It's Orchestra Supermazembe and Shariyako. Shariako means it's your problem. It's the story of a young man who says to the woman he loves, look, I'm poor, I've got nothing, and if you don't like it, shariako, it's your problem.

Lindsey Hilsum15:42

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Lindsey Hilsum15:52

Ma pensia puetuel, ai ta kawiya kama.

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Orchestra Super Mazembe and Shariako.

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So, Lindsay Hilsom, you moved to Kenya in 1982. As you mentioned, you were working for UNICEF at first. You eventually became the BBC stringer in Nairobi. When you think back to those days, what do you remember? I remember how little I knew and how grateful I am to Mike Wooldridge, who was the correspondent there, who was really my mentor, and how quickly I had to learn. And also, I was basically the BBC were not completely convinced by this girl who'd sort of turned up in Nairobi.

Presenter16:37

They often wouldn't believe it if I came up with a story, because I was very hungry for stories. Of course I was young. And so they would only accept the story if they saw it on two agencies, Reuters and the Associated Press. So my friend Colin, who worked for Voice of America, had exactly the same problem. So when we found a story, and we often found stories first, he would go and give a tip off to the AP, I would go and give a tip off to Reuters, and then we'd wait an hour, and then he'd call Voice of America, I'd call the BBC, and they say, Oh, yes, you can do that, we've got it on two agencies.

Speaker 116:48

Yeah.

Lindsey Hilsum16:48

Uh

Speaker 116:48

Reuter

Speaker 117:09

Jim Sir

Presenter17:10

Lindsay, it was while you were working in Kenya that you heard the news that your mother had become ill.

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You went back to see her and spent three months with her in the UK before she died. She was only sixty one. You were twenty nine. It must have been a very traumatic time. How did you deal with what was happening?

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Take your time.

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It was awful.

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to lose my mother. I was very close to my mother. She had been out to visit me in Guatemala when I lived there. She and my father had come out to visit me in Kenya. We wrote to each other every week. It was awful. And she had

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basically hidden from me that she was ill because she didn't want to worry me. So when I came by the time they had to tell me I came back, she was quite ill, she had a brain tumor.

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But I think that I was very lucky to have those months with her and before she died.

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When it comes to saying goodbye to someone, you know, that's often when we turn to music, we turn to poetry, you know, the things that your mum loved. Were you able to do that for her, you know, with her memorial? Yes. When my mother was dying, she called me, as it were, to her bedside and said, Wright, I want you to write down what I want at my funeral. Also because there was French poetry that she wanted there, which she knew I would know the French poems.

Speaker 118:28

Uh

Lindsey Hilsum18:28

Yeah.

Presenter18:29

And the music as well, so I wrote it all down and I read the poems at her funeral. I didn't read them live because I knew I wouldn't be able to manage to do that, but I recorded the poetry that she wanted. And her favourite song was Summertime, as I think she and my father had seen Poggy and Bessie in a production back in the 40s or 50s. And so we played this at her funeral. And the version I have chosen is the one by Billie Holiday.

Speaker 118:37

The recorder

Lindsey Hilsum18:55

So much time

Lindsey Hilsum18:59

And the living is easy.

Lindsey Hilsum19:04

Be shot jumping

Lindsey Hilsum19:08

And the cotton is high.

Lindsey Hilsum19:14

Oh, your dad is rich.

Lindsey Hilsum19:18

And your mom is good looking.

Lindsey Hilsum19:23

So harshly made it.

Presenter19:28

Summertime from Gershwin's Pogin Best, performed by Billie Holiday and her orchestra. Lindsay Ilsom, you lost your mum when you were 29 and tragically, ten years later, you lost your older sister Karen too. She suffered a stroke and died, she was 42 in 1997. Those losses are absolutely devastating for you and your family, of course. But some losses, I think, shape us as people. Looking back, did losing your sister and then your mum quite close together in that way change you?

Presenter19:58

I suppose it must have done, although I can't really define how. I mean, Karen was very brilliant. Karen was the first female space engineer in this country. She was an absolutely extraordinary scientist. And she had a stroke when she was forty and died at forty two, leaving her husband and a nine year old son.

Presenter20:18

That was pretty dreadful and pretty dreadful for my father and for them. So, yeah, look, it was a period of great sadness and it coincided with the time that I spent in Rwanda and the genocide. So, I would say that the sorrow of the world was fairly overwhelming at that point in my life, yes. How did you get through that? What helped?

Speaker 120:19

Yeah.

Presenter20:41

Poetry always helps. Music, trying to make sense of things. It also coincided with a time when my career had taken a a nosedive. I had failed in my attempts to become a a foreign correspondent for the BBC, so I had left and I was freelance again. So I dunno, just kept going, I guess.

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And I did find this in Rwanda that people would ask about me and I would you know, I've lost my mother, I've lost my sister and they had lost so many people. So maybe I had a better maybe it made me a better journalist in that I had more understanding of how people

Lindsey Hilsum21:10

Uh Uh

Lindsey Hilsum21:17

See that

Speaker 121:17

Uh

Presenter21:20

Felt when they were telling me about the losses they had. Their losses were much greater than mine and in different and very violent circumstances. But maybe I had a little bit more understanding of it because I had suffered my own losses too. Let's talk about Rwanda then, Lindsay. In 1994, you left the BBC to go freelance, and you'd taken a job as an aid worker in Rwanda.

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Then just two months after you got there, on the night of the sixth of April, the plane carrying Rwanda's then President and his Burundian counterpart was shot down, everyone on board was killed.

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And this event became the catalyst for a horrific civil war and genocide that began to unfold within a matter of hours. What do you remember about that night and the days that followed?

Presenter22:05

I was at the house of some people I knew, and we heard the plane crash, and we ran out into the garden, and we could see a glow over the horizon. And of course, we didn't know what it was. We knew it was in the direction of the airport. I then drove back to the house where I was staying. I was sharing with a friend, but she wasn't there at the time. And the phone was ringing, and I got to the phone, and it was my then partner ringing to tell me that the plane carrying the Presidents had crashed.

Speaker 122:36

And s

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I thought I'd better go to the airport, I'd better you know, I'd better be a journalist, that's what I do and I rang the local BBC stringer and I said, I'm going to go to the airport and he said, Don't go to the airport, the roadblocks are already up.

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He said, Don't go.

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So I didn't go?

Presenter22:55

And did you understand what that meant? Except that I understood what that meant because there was already a civil war and there had been a practice run for the genocide a couple of months earlier where the members of the Hutu majority had slaughtered some members of the Tutsi minority after a politician was killed. And I had been to the hospitals and I had seen the clubs studded with nails which they used to beat people up and I had seen the machetes. So I already knew what violence there could be in that society. Because although I was working for UNICEF, I was always

Speaker 122:58

Yeah.

Speaker 222:58

Yes.

Speaker 123:21

So I

Presenter23:29

I was always reporting on the sly because I never stopped. I knew that it would be bad and I knew that there would be killings. And I understood that it would not be a good idea to drive out by myself through the dark. And in fact, I didn't go out for a couple of days. My phone never stopped ringing because, of course, I'd been living there for two months, and so I knew quite a lot of Rwandans. And they started to ring me to tell me that they were going to be killed. And could I come and save them? Oh, my God. What was that like? It was very difficult, because I couldn't. And so I took down Monica's last words. Her husband, Marcel, was away and she wanted me to give them to him and to her children, her four children. In fact, Monica survived, but the four children were killed.

Lindsey Hilsum24:21

Hmm.

Presenter24:23

So those were very difficult days.

Presenter24:27

And then eventually I thought I have to I have to go out and see for myself. So I got in my car and I drove to the Red Cross. And then I committed a war crime, which was that I impersonated a Red Cross worker.

Presenter24:42

To go in the back of their vehicle to see what was happening. You know, you'd been in the house, couldn't leave for several days, and then you go outside, what's happening? Well, I drove through this roadblock with bodies at the side and men with red eyes and broken beer bottles and machetes. And I knew they were killing Belgians, so the main thing was to not be Belgian, Belgium having been the colonial power. But I figured that if I just drove with enough confidence, I'd be able to get through the roadblocks, and that was right, I could. I just.

Speaker 124:51

What?

Presenter25:13

Drove through. You must have been terrified. I can't remember whether I was terrified. I presume I was. But I went around with the Red Cross and I saw things that I'm not going to describe because they're too terrible.

Lindsey Hilsum25:25

Yeah.

Presenter25:25

but I was able to report what was happening. I don't think my reporting was very brilliant because it's very different to go into a conflict from the outside with the purpose of reporting and to have

Presenter25:40

Something erupt around you. That's a very different experience. And so I don't think my reporting was particularly brilliant, but.

Speaker 225:43

And so

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I did at least manage to report to

Presenter25:51

To some extent. And and you were you were the only English speaking journalist in Kigali at the time. Did you know that? Were you right? I knew I was. Others came in after about um a week, others did come in. It coincided with the um first uh free and democratic elections in South Africa. The journalists were all reporting this happy, wonderful story.

Speaker 125:58

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 126:08

Yeah.

Presenter26:12

About democracy and racial justice coming to South Africa.

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Nobody wanted a genocide.

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Let's take a break for some music. It's disc number five, Lindsay. What have you chosen?

Presenter26:24

One of the things that journalists can do or should do is expose injustice and racism and sexism and prejudice and all the terrible things that happen. But sometimes songwriters do it better. And this is an example of that. Reuben Carter's very famous case of a black boxer who in the sixties was framed by the police in New York for a murder that he didn't commit.

Presenter26:53

Now that was reported by journalists, but in nineteen seventy five Bob Dylan wrote the song Hurricane. He told that story better than any of us ever could.

Lindsey Hilsum27:08

Pistol shots ring out in the fire room night.

Lindsey Hilsum27:11

It's a Patty Valentine from the Upper Hall.

Lindsey Hilsum27:15

She sees a bartender in a pool of blood Cries out, my God, they've killed them all. Here comes the story of the hurricane.

Lindsey Hilsum27:27

The many authorities came to blame

Lindsey Hilsum27:30

For something that he never done

Lindsey Hilsum27:34

Put in a prison cell, but one time you gotta be

Presenter27:38

Bob Dylan and Hurricane.

Presenter27:42

Lindsay Hilsom, in nineteen ninety six you joined Channel Four, becoming its international editor in two thousand three, a post that you still hold. That same year you were sent to Iraq to cover the US invasion there. You were assigned a government minder and translator called Mohammed. How did you get on with him?

Presenter27:59

Mohammed was a wonderful man. And in the time of Saddam Hussein, when he was supposed to always write down what we'd done and hand in his report, you know, the dog had always eaten his homework.

Presenter28:12

Whenever I was interviewing somebody, he would always pretend he needed to go to the loo or something so that, you know, they could all and then after the Americans came in,

Presenter28:23

He was an extraordinary person. He really wanted change. He really wanted Saddam Hussein to fall, as all the Iraqis I knew did, because Saddam Hussein was an appalling dictator.

Presenter28:33

But they didn't know how careless and cruel the Americans would be.

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They were in a particular palace, one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, and we went there and we knew that they were trigger happy. So we walked up.

Presenter28:47

and we had a white scarf on the end of a stick.

Presenter28:51

to show that we were not the enemy, and we were shouting that we were journalists.

Presenter28:55

But they had not put any signs up to say that people shouldn't drive down the road or anything, and when anybody drove down the road, they just shot.

Presenter29:04

They just shot.

Presenter29:06

And

Presenter29:07

At one point we were with them and they were shooting across the road and then we heard the sound of crying.

Presenter29:13

And Muhammad said to them, I'm going to go and see what's happening, which was very brave of him because.

Presenter29:19

It meant that he was running across the road and they might have shot him.

Presenter29:22

And then I will never forget like it seared in my brain. He came back carrying something. It was with orange spots. What was that? It was a little girl in an orange spotty dress, called Zara, with her hair dangling down. She was seven years old, and they had shot her in the head.

Presenter29:40

And Tim went and got the other people who'd been shot, and then the Americans started to patch them up. And then they told us to stop filming. And we said, You stop shooting and we'll stop filming. And Mohammed saved Zahra's life. What happened to her? She was then medivaced by the Americans, who had shot her, to Kuwait. And we kept in touch for some time. Her family and she moved eventually up north to Iraqi Kurdistan. I haven't heard from them in many years now, but she survived. And she survived only because of Mohammed. If he hadn't been brave enough to go across the road to defy the Americans, then she'd be dead.

Presenter30:14

What happened to Mohammed? Because as you said, he'd he'd wanted change and then to go through this experience so early and the change that he'd longed for must have been terrible.

Presenter30:25

Lovely Mohammed, he disappeared after the Civil War started during the American occupation, which was a basically a sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. He was a Shiite. He was in a car, in a collective taxi, going down to Kerbala, which is where he came from, and uh the car was ambushed and we never heard from him again. So he was killed. He was one of the people I've lost, we've lost. He was very close to my heart, Mohammed. You think about him still? Oh yeah, oh yeah.'Cause he was a wonderful person and he was a brave man and he always tried to do the right thing.

Presenter31:00

Lindsay Hilsom, it's time for some more music. Your sixth choice today. What are we going to hear next? Oh, now we're in the bit of my life which isn't about conflict. So I was lucky enough to get to China for two years. So before the Olympics, so Jan Von News agreed that I could go to become China correspondent for two years. And I was so desperate to stop doing conflict for a bit and do something else. And my qualification was that I knew so little about China and was so desperate to learn. And I loved the two years I spent there because it was so different. And it was a time when you could do a lot of reporting in China. They were opening up. They've closed down again now. So I got to Tibet, I got to Xinjiang, I got to all sorts of places. In fact, what I used to say to Bessie, who was our producer, is I would look at the map and I'd say, I want to go there, let's find a story. And one of the stories I did was about violins and classical music. Because in the Cultural Revolution under Mao, classical music, Western classical music was banned.

Presenter32:04

But then afterwards, they allowed it again, and now some of the greatest musicians in the world are Chinese. And that's partly because in Chinese culture, you can force your child to practice for eight hours a day, which you can't in most cultures. Anyway, this story was about violins and violinists, and it started with 47-year-olds soaring away at Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on their violins. It's all right, we're not going to play that, don't worry.

Speaker 132:31

Play that

Presenter32:33

And it ended with one of the greatest violinists in the world, Liu Su Ching, who played for us, especially for us. Can you imagine what an honor is that? Butterfly Lovers, which is the Chinese Romeo and Juliet.

Presenter33:50

Butterfly Lovers performed by Lu Su Ching and the Taipei Orchestra. Conducted by Yu Guangzheng.

Presenter33:57

Lindsay Hilsom, you were great friends with the war correspondent Marie Colvin. She was killed in Syria in twenty twelve, and her death made headlines all around the world. How did you find out what had happened to her?

Presenter34:10

I had seen Marie in Beirut just a few days earlier and we had had a conversation. Four of us had had dinner and all foreign correspondents and three of us had said it was too dangerous to go into Babaramah, which was the besieged part of Homs in Syria at the time. And one of us had said, Anyway, that's what we do. So she went in and the rest of us didn't. And the night before, I had spoken to her on the satellite phone and I said, What is your exit plan, Marie? And she said, That's just it. I haven't got one, but we're working on it now. And I was like, oh, God.

Presenter34:48

And then the next day I was on bus going to work and a Spanish friend whose husband was also in Babarama messaged me and she said

Presenter34:59

Lindsay, I think something terrible has happened to your friend Marie. And then I started to make calls and then suddenly everybody knew and I had heard that there had been a rocket attack on the um rebel media centre where Marie had been staying, and Marie and uh French photographer Remy Auschlick had been killed and my very close friend Paul Conroy, who was a photographer working with Marie, had been badly injured, as had Dec Bouvier, another French journalist, and two others had not been.

Presenter35:30

Injured.

Presenter35:31

The two of you obviously had your job in common. How long had you known each other and how close were you? I was Marie's outer circle rather than inner circle. So parties not dinner parties. So I'd see her sometimes in London and quite often on the road and we always got along really well. There must have been a level of understanding that that is different than with other people. Absolutely. And also she was that bit braver, that bit more adventurous. That bit more rackety. She drank more. She had more lovers. She did, oh, she was crazy. So I kind of loved that about her. I loved that adventurous side about her. I always felt so boring and sensible compared to Marie. Marie had this reputation for fearlessness, which obviously, you know, was well earned, but a very glamorous figure as well. She was very glamorous, and you know, she loved the Vodka Martini. There's a story of once Adam Hussein was captured, when the news came in, she was at a cocktail party and she ended up just going directly to Jordan and into Iraq, still wearing her short black cocktail dress. She lost her eye. She had an eye patch with rhinestones, didn't she, for parties? Her eye was shot when she was trying to cross the front line in Sri Lanka. And yeah, so she had a normal black eye patch. But then she also had one with rhinestones and sequins for parties. That was Marie.

Speaker 136:37

Duck.

Speaker 136:38

Shot and I

Presenter36:53

Marie very much believed that the work that she was doing could bring about meaningful change. Is that a view that you share, particularly in in view of what happened to her at the how she died?

Presenter37:07

Not really. I think that as a journalist with other journalists you can put a lot of pressure on and that is important. And you can bring things to light that are not necessarily well known. And I think that, for example, at the moment I feel very strongly I went to Chad and to Sudan last year. The war in Sudan is appalling.

Presenter37:30

I've been going there a long time. I feel very strongly that these neglected conflicts should be covered and I do my best to cover them and I don't always succeed. But I think that that's really important to try and bring those things to public attention. Whether that actually leads to a change in policy, mostly it doesn't. But you know, light is always better than darkness. It's better to expose what's happening than just to leave it hidden. And you know, Marie's death, there was a huge fuss about it.

Presenter37:59

And then things went back as they were and the war in Syria continued for a long time and the atrocities that Bashar al-Assad was committing, he went on committing them. Now eventually, in twenty twenty four, twelve years after Marie's death, he was eventually ousted. And I went back to Babar Amar, which was the place where she was killed, and I met some of the people who'd been with her, and I saw the place where she was was killed, which was a kind of, I don't know, what closure, I suppose, for me.

Speaker 238:26

Okay.

Speaker 138:26

Uh

Presenter38:28

And I saw how much she was loved. They loved Marie. That sort of sense of solidarity, of that she had been with the people who were suffering. That, I think, means

Presenter38:40

Something. But I I guess she was more idealistic about our reporting making a difference than than I'm able to be. You mentioned uh Marie not having an exit plan that day. Is that something that you always have?

Presenter38:56

Always. And that's because I work with a team.

Presenter38:59

And one of the things about working with a team is that I can sometimes pretend to be braver than I am and say that I want to go in further and nearer the front line and whatever, safe in the knowledge that the team I work with will say, Yes, Lindsay, absolutely, and not let me do that. But yeah, we we always have an exit plan.

Presenter39:19

It's time for your seventh track, Lindsay. What are you going to take with you? Marie always had a broken heart, and I also had a a fairly tumultuous love life, certainly early on.

Presenter39:31

And then I was with somebody for nearly a quarter of a century.

Presenter39:36

But I've had a broken heart too, and this song it's one of those heartbreak songs. It's not a sad one, it's an angry one, and you have to play it very loudly. It's Janice Joplin, and take another little piece of my heart. You could blast it on your island.

Lindsey Hilsum39:58

I think I've hit a knot

Lindsey Hilsum40:00

I wanna show you, baby.

Lindsey Hilsum40:04

Can't be tough, I want you to come!

Lindsey Hilsum40:08

Come on, come on, come on, let's take a look.

Lindsey Hilsum40:21

Oh the love is

Presenter40:23

Big Brother and the holding company, James Joplin, of course, peace of my heart. Lindsay Hilsom, you've said that war correspondents hate being asked about the emotional toll of what they're exposed to and you're shaking your head already, but I do have to ask about it because it's a reality of the job. How do you deal with the memories that you can't unsee?

Presenter40:44

I don't consider myself a war correspondent. I think I'm a foreign correspondent. Of course you see horrible and difficult things. And I've talked about this whole issue of sort of sometimes feeling the weight of you know other people's pain on you. And so what you have to do is try and balance things out. I spend a l quite a lot of time in spring and summer in my garden. It's a very small garden. It's absolutely full of flowers. I could enter it for the Chelsea Flower Show for a special category, which is largest amount of money spent on smallest space.

Presenter41:23

There's nothing sensible in there, like vegetables. So it's all colour. And actually colour, you know, colour is an amazing thing. Clothes. I love clothes. Well, you always have a scarf on, I don't know. I love scarves. How many do you have? Oh, I don't know, a few hundred.

Speaker 141:30

What?

Speaker 141:32

I love scarves.

Presenter41:35

My favourite place is the sofa in my kitchen, from which I can see my very colourful garden, and I can lie there with a glass of wine reading an a novel, an absorbing novel.

Presenter41:49

And, you know, you used the word love when you were talking about the people that you work with. You said love's not too strong a word. Is that a big part of the job? The relationships, the people that you're with? Absolutely it is. The relationships you have with the people who you're with on the road, people you meet on the road, and obviously also, you know, coming back to friends and my father and, you know, all of that. Does a job like yours have an impact on your personal life? Is that unavoidable? Yeah, I mean, it means that you're constantly letting people down, which isn't very easy. I mean, I think I missed all my friends' weddings. They're very tolerant. They've got used to me being unreliable.

Presenter42:32

My friends are very understanding, and I'm always a little bit guilty.

Presenter42:36

You know, I feel that the job I do is a bit like being a faithless lover. You move from one conflict to the next, from Ukraine to Sudan to Syria to wherever.

Presenter42:48

But I do always leave a little bit of myself behind in each place, and I also do carry some of those people.

Speaker 142:52

Yeah.

Presenter42:55

With me. Sometimes it's overwhelming. You know, it's the sorrow of the world, right? Sometimes I do find that overwhelming. You and Lise Du Set at one point set up an informal campaign group called More Old Bats on the Box. I assume it does what it says on the tin, but it I'd love more details if you have any. Look, that's me and Lise thinking that as we get older, you always have this concern, ooh, you know, they say that.

Speaker 142:59

Yeah.

Presenter43:18

Women, as they get older, maybe should not be on the television any longer. Although I think there's far less of that. So, more old bats on the box is part of our determination to keep going. If you need any other members, I'll apply. You, Lauren, are far too young to be in our group. Trust me, I'm on the way. Is there an advantage, though, in being an older woman doing your job? I wonder you're often in situations dealing with angry, volatile young men. How they interact with you, I can imagine it might help. It's definitely helpful. It definitely diffuses situations. And it also

Speaker 243:29

Yeah.

Speaker 143:35

To be an app.

Presenter43:53

Just always surprises people. Sort of roadblocks in Ukraine, which are on the whole very benign anyway. At one point, the translator we worked with, he said that there were three things that worked very well getting through roadblocks. People look at me in the back with my grey hair. And the first one was very famous journalist, not true. Knows the Queen personally, also not true. And saw Gaddafi's body with her own eyes.

Speaker 144:17

Also not true.

Presenter44:23

I don't know why that worked on getting us through roadblocks, but it did. The only issue is if you need to run, and I'm not quite as fast as I was. But you know, I was never very fast at running because I've got lousy knees. Do you ever think about retirement, the lure of the sofa and your kitchen and the lovely garden? Sometimes I think I'd like to change the balance of my life and do more writing and a bit less television. I would like to write more history, but the problem is that so much is going on. And this is a period in the world and in my life as a journalist, which seems to me very urgent and very dangerous. And I would find it hard not to report that. I still want to be in those places. And I can't imagine

Presenter45:05

Sitting back and watching other people's reporting and not being able to do that myself. At some point, I will have to stop. I'm not an idiot, I know that. But I'm not there yet. Well, you've got another adventure in store for you, Lindsay, because I'm about to cast you away to the island, which I can't imagine will it phase you for a moment. Would you be able to cope by yourself? You've talked a lot about how much you care about your team, and having them with you means a lot to you.

Presenter45:29

I would gather some sticks and I would make myself a little shelter and I would be very proud of myself for doing it. And then the first breath of wind it would blow over because I think I'm much better practically than I really am, unfortunately. How are you on the food front? I know you're vegetarian. What would you be eating?

Presenter45:50

When I'm travelling I live off cheese sandwiches and muesley bars, and I certainly couldn't shoot anything, or fish, or whatever.

Presenter45:58

I'd probably die, wouldn't I? I'd probably eat some berries and they'd poison me. We're going to hope for coconuts, I think. One more track before we cast you away. Your final choice to day, please, Lindsay Hilsom. What is it? Ooh, it's a bit sentimental. It is about getting older.

Presenter46:13

and about time, which we all think about as we get older, and it was written by someone when they were nineteen. And I find that sort of extraordinary and wonderful, that the most profound song I know about aging was written by someone when she was a teenager and who never aged, because this is Sandy Denny and she tragically died at thirty one. It's Who Knows Where the Time Goes.

Lindsey Hilsum46:52

Wait a minute.

Presenter47:05

Fairport Convention and who knows where the time goes. The time has come. You're off.

Speaker 147:09

Oh no.

Presenter47:10

I am going to cast her away, but I will give you the books to take with you: the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and also a book of your choice. What will it be?

Presenter47:18

The Complete Poems of WH Orden.

Presenter47:20

Because Auden, I think, is a great poet and he deals with a lot of the same things that I have been concerned about in my life, but then there are also some quite delicate love poems and so on in there. So I think there's a lot of variety which will keep me going. Oh, fabulous. It's yours. You can have a luxury item too. What do you fancy?

Presenter47:39

I want a horse? Oh.

Presenter47:41

Well, we're not allowed to give you a living creature, sadly. That's what I thought. Is this a girlhood dream that you wanted to live out, presumably?

Speaker 147:43

Electric.

Presenter47:48

Of course, because my parents never let me have a pony. Okay, come look to me to sort out your psychodramas. I can't give you an animal. It's that simple.

Lindsey Hilsum47:52

Yeah.

Presenter47:56

So can I have a Tang Dynasty horse? Ah. So that's like a Chinese earthenware horse which is, you know, glazed and with pigment from about a thousand years ago. There's some beautiful ones which you get in the British Museum. How many Han Tai are we talking? They are quite small, I suppose. On the whole, Tang Dynasty horse might be what, sort of a foot or two feet tall, but I wonder if we can find a life-size one. Possibly. Well, I think if I can rustle one up, it's absolutely yours. What will you do with it? Will you just admire it, or would you be on it? I'll talk to it.

Presenter48:35

Well in that case, Lindsay Elsom, the Tang Dynasty horse is yours. And finally, which track of the eight that we've heard today would you rush to save from the waves if you needed to? It's going to be Cary by Joni Mitchell, because it's a song about being happy and carefree on an island. So I guess that would encourage me to be that way myself.

Presenter48:56

Lindsay Hilson, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you very much, Lauren. It's a pleasure.

Presenter49:14

Hello, it was lovely to chat to Lindsay and I hope she's very happy on her island looking at her Tang Dynasty horse.

Presenter49:21

There are more than 2,000 programmes in our archive that you can listen to. We've cast many journalists away to the island, including Lise Dussette, Alex Crawford and Christine Le Lam. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or on our own Desert Island Disc's website. The studio manager for today's programme was Sarah Hockley, the assistant producer was Christine Pavlovsky, the executive production coordinator was Susie Roylence and the producer was Sarah Taylor.

Presenter50:19

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Speaker 250:22

They said, Oh, it's a boy and I was holding my hands out ready to cuddle him, and they took him away.

Presenter50:29

A switch at birth discovered with the gift of a home DNA test.

Speaker 150:34

The so-called brother that we grew up with wasn't a brother, and there's someone out there, if he's still alive, is.

Presenter50:42

A race against time. I don't want this woman to leave this earth not knowing what happened to her son.

Presenter50:48

The Gift from Radio 4 with me, Jenny Clemen.

Presenter50:52

Listen now on BBC Sounds.