Lindsey Hilsum, journalist

0:00BBC 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.

0:44My cast away 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. 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.

1:24That's how, in April 1994, while she was working for an NGO in Kigali, she found herself the only English-speaking journalist present to witness the horror of Rwanda's genocide as it began. In 1996, she was named Amnesty International Journalist of the Year for her reporting. She also testified at the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal the following year. 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 DC. She says, even if our reporting changes nothing, when it's over, politicians should not be able to say that they didn't know.

2:04They 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 Hilsom, 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.

2:37So 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 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.

3:15But that's what I'm trying to do. I was amazed to read that you described yourself as a coward. I am a coward because, 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. Not death? Well, not 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. I suppose what I really fear 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.

3:56If something happened to one of them, 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 metres 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.

4:31How difficult was it to put them together? It was exquisite agony. 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.

5:17So this is Dancing in the Dark. I'm home in the morning I go to bed feeling the same way I ain't nothing but tired Man, I'm just tired and bored with myself Hey there, baby I could use just a little help You can't start a fire You can't start a fire without a spark This comes for hire Even if we're just dancing in the dark 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. Lindsay Hilsom, something happening somewhere and reaching for it.

6:10Let'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, Bessie. 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.

6:42So 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.

7:25And 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, won the Faraday Medal, the Royal Medal, a CBE, and once beat Alan Turing at chess. Look, my father, who is 100 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.

8:11What about his dad though, Alan Turing? How did that happen? 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.

8:45I think 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 Social Democrats. And they came from very working class backgrounds. I mean, I think that's the important thing as well. My father grew up in the East End. His father had a stall selling flat caps and chamois leathers on the petticoat lane. And 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.

9:22It'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 Hilsom. What are we going to hear? As a teenager, I was very into Joni Mitchell. and of course I experienced every agony that she did and I analysed all of 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.

10:11You weren't? I was. I did my share of sex, drugs and rock and roll 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.

10:37The wind is in from Africa. Last night I couldn't sleep. Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here, Kerry But it's really not my home My fingernails are filthy I've got beach tar on my feet And I miss my clean white linen And my fancy French cologne Joni Mitchell and Kerry 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? 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.

11:25I 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 had even worse judgment. So tell me about that. I mean, did you rebel from feeling hemmed in? in the way that you describe? Well, I was suspended from school. I wasn't expelled. OK. What for? What did you do? I went down the river with the King School boys and a bottle of wine instead of going to school. I was 15. 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.

12:08How did you get caught? I'm curious. 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 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.

12:40And it so happened that my letter, and it was a letter, it was snail mail in those days, fell on the desk of the Oxfam Guatemala office. The day there, the secretary 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. And went to work as a waitress. to get the money. Anyway, I arrived and of course I could not type or do accounting, which they discovered fairly early on. So they thought, what are we going to do with this girl?

13:21And they sent me off to a project, an Oxfam 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. And 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 had never driven on the right hand side of the road or on a dirt road it's all right did it got there and of course it was fascinating I was in this village full of peasants who lived a completely different life they're very poor people but very determined and they eked out this living off the land.

14:04And it was very unjust because there were farmers with huge coffee farms around. And so it was just fascinating. So, you know, I did all these interviews and then I got on a hill and said, you know, compañeros y compañeras, blah, blah, blah, you know. And now I know that was journalism, wasn't it? And how did it feel? I mean, you've 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 20. And I can remember waking up one morning and thinking, I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. And I kind of have.

14:41Lindsay 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 And I went freelance as a journalist. 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. Shariyako 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.

15:23And if you don't like it, Shariyako. It's your problem.

15:57Orchestra Super Mazembe and Shari Yako. So, Lindsay Hilson, 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 Woldridge, 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, you know, this girl who'd sort of turned up in Nairobi. And they often wouldn't believe it if I came up with a story because I was very hungry for stories.

16:42Of 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 the 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'd say, oh, yes, you can do that, we've got it on two agencies. Lindsay, it was while you were working in Kenya that you heard the news that your mother had become ill.

17:15You went back to see her and spent three months with her in the UK before she died. She was only 61. You were 29. It must have been a very traumatic time. How did you deal with what was happening? It's all right, take your time. It was awful 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 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.

17:57She had a brain tumour. But I think that I was very lucky to have those months with her before she died. When it comes to saying goodbye to someone, that's often when we turn to music, we turn to poetry, the things that your mum loved. Were you able to do that for her with her memorial? Yes. When my mother was dying, she called me, as it were, to her bedside and said, right, 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 and the music as well. So I wrote it all down and I read the poems at her funeral.

18:35I 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. I think she and my father had seen Poggy and Bess, 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.

19:17And your ma is good looking

19:24So harsh, little baby Summertime from Gershwin's Poggin' Bess, performed by Billie Holiday and her orchestra. Lindsay Yilson, 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, 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? I suppose it must have done, although I can't really define how. I mean, Karen was very brilliant.

20:03Karen was the first female space engineer in this country. She was an absolutely extraordinary scientist. And she had a stroke when she was 40 and died at 42, leaving her husband and a nine-year-old son. 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? Poetry always helps. Music, trying to make sense of things. It also coincided with a time when my career had taken a nosedive.

20:49I had failed in my attempts to become a foreign correspondent for the BBC, so I had left and I was freelance again. So, I don't know, just kept going, I guess. And I did find this in Rwanda that, you know, 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 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.

21:33Let'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. Then just two months after you got there, on the night of the 6th of April, the plane carrying Rwanda's then president and his Burundian counterpart was shot down. Everyone on board was killed. 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? 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.

22:16And 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. And so I thought, I better go to the airport. I 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. He said, don't go.

22:53So I didn't go. And did you understand what that meant? Yes, 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 studied with nails, which they used to beat people up, and I'd 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 reporting on the sly because I never stopped.

23:32I 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. Yeah. 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.

24:17In fact, Monica survived, but the four children were killed. So those were very difficult days. and then eventually I thought 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 to go in the back of their vehicle to see what was happening. 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.

25:07But 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 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 I'm not going to describe because they're too terrible. 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 something erupt around you. That's a very different experience.

25:43And so I say I don't think my reporting was particularly brilliant, but I did at least manage to report to some extent. And you were the only English-speaking journalist in Kigali at the time. Did you know that? Yes. Right. I knew I was. Others came in after about a week. Others did come in. It coincided with the first free and democratic elections in South Africa. The journalists were all reporting this happy, wonderful story about democracy and racial justice coming to South Africa. Nobody wanted a genocide. Let's take a break for some music. It's disc number five, Lindsay. What have you chosen?