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Urgent: Message to Girls Leaving School. Find your inner rod of steel

Recently I gave a talk to almost 800 people…girls, staff, pupils and parents at St Mary’s Calne, the Wiltshire Girls’ School celebrating  its 140th birthday this year with a new, dynamic American headmistress.  Reflecting on wishy washy prizegivings of my youth, I wanted to strike as stirring a note as possible because we all know the stats; girls seem to outperform boys in schools, universities and early training courses. Yet why are more of them not running major Global Corporations, Banks or Arts Institutions? What happens?  Some blame all- girl schools for feeding their pupils a diet of so called skills which ultimately damage them in the workplace. “They are not so much skills, I think, as dating tips for women who will grow to live – or, if you prefer, die – by the rules.” Here is what Tanya Gold says:

https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/22/baking-botox-traps-road-womens-emancipation

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Of Books and Babies

Before you read this post here is a short film to remember all those pioneering women reporters:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/newsevents/news/newsrecords/2013/07-July/Anne-Sebba-The-Rise-of-the-Woman-Reporter.aspx

I am in the happy position of seeing a book that I wrote twenty years ago republished this month. Most excitingly, the book has been reviewed – a great surprise in these days of such tight space for reviewing even new books.  But then it wasn’t merely the old book in a new jacket. I had been allowed to add a whole new chapter, to update it – a rare treat as few writers get the chance to change an old book. It’s way too expensive and publishers aren’t keen on allowing anything more than dates and typos to be corrected; in other words nothing which requires resetting paragraphs or adding pages. I have quite a fat file of ‘Material that emerges after the book has been written,’ bulging with interesting information on all my other books. But what to do with it? Sadly, probably nothing. Yet often in the case of biography it is only after a book has been published that someone whose existence you may not even have known about approaches you with information they have been holding on to, not knowing what to do with it until your book appears. I have had some wonderful stories told to me (often in confidence) at an event when someone has approached me quietly, afterwards, and asked to share a story or a letter. It’s often a breathholding moment

 

But this time it was a history book that was republished –Battling for News  is an account of how women reporters have fought over the centuries for the right to report, not only wars but sporting and political events, or other danger spots normally left to men. I finished writing this book, heavily pregnant with my last child, a daughter, and was correcting proofs in the middle of the night at the same time as soothing or feeding her. Her early months were very much tied up with my thoughts about women’s progress in the world of work. As I wished this book on its way, I whispered sweet nothings to her, reassuring her she could be whatever she wanted to be. I really believed that to be the case. For this was in many ways the most personal book I had ever written.In 1972, twenty years before her birth, I had been hired by Reuters, the first woman they had risked on their prestigious graduate trainee scheme. I was sent to Rome as a trainee and had hoped to report on many danger spots around the world. But then I became pregnant for the first time and Reuters was not keen on foreign correspondents who were also mothers…unreasonably as I thought at the time. By the time I came to write Battling for News, which includes a historical account of the first women to report wars – women like Jessie White Mario who had to tend the wounded on the battle field before writing up her reports about Garibaldi’s progress in unifying Italy – I believed that all the barriers against women reporting wars on equal footing with their male counterparts were now torn down, that women reporters had achieved equality with their male counterparts. And so they had in many ways. After all in World War 2 British women were refused accreditation to the front line, hence their need to resort to ruses like dressing up as a hospital orderly or stretcher bearer in order to report on D Day landings as Martha Gellhorn did.

But now, another twenty years on, I saw that in fact women reporters, especially those on TV, faced different difficulties. They were expected to be young and pretty as well as brave and fearless and, if they were putting themselves in harm’s way, not to be a mother as well, as Yvonne Ridley learned to her cost when she was kidnapped and very publicly criticised for abandoning her daughter. I saw too that if women are passionately engaged in a story perhaps it makes them better reporters because they never give up but ferret out the details in a determined effort ‘to bear witness’. But that also comes with a cost. Marie Colvin was determined never to give up and was tragically killed in Homs in February, 2012. Several women reporters I have written about after facing relentless dangers and witnessing the carnage of bombs and IEDs finally succumb to post traumatic stress disorder. Some, like Christiane Amanpour of CNN, and Janine di Giovanni, now freelance, are very successful and offer a powerful role model to myriad young girls emerging from media college who want to emulate them. But, as I was repeatedly told, achieving that success has not been an easy ride and what may seem like a glamorous and exciting lifestyle is behind the scenes, dangerous, demanding and dirty. It is made tolerable by the support of colleagues and a solid media organisation. But even that can go wrong as when Lara Logan was attacked and brutally raped in Tahrir Square and came within an inch of her life. And she was one of the most experienced women reporters in the field. I know that twenty years on it’s a more complicated world and any young woman, not just a reporter, will face a difficult time in myriad ways getting a job, staying employed in that job, staying sane and – if she wants it – having a family.

As for my daughter I still tell her she can have anything she wants if she is prepared to work for it. But she is clever enough to know that is only half true.

April 23rd…white roses and free books

April 23rd…white roses and free books

Last Saturday I was sitting in the grounds of London’s Middle Temple. It was a sunny day and I’d arrived early to hear the formidable Madeleine Albright talk about global political changes since her time in office as the US’s first female Secretary of State. There was no one else around, except a lazy gardener pushing his broom to and fro, so I enjoyed the tepid sunshine. But then a group of tourists ambled down some steps to the pond, near my seat, all clutching long-stemmed white roses.

Ah, religious nutters, I assumed, about to lay down their roses and pray? I was about to move away. But the yellow-jacketed gardener moved towards them and suddenly addressed them with an intensity and directness that forced me to look up from my engrossing thriller and listen. Was he deranged too…someone given to clearing rubbish one minute, uttering beautiful poetry to strangers the next? He soon finished, they went on their way and I continued with my book in the sunshine wondering if I’d stumbled upon a meeting of reformed addicts. But addicts of what?

Fifteen minutes later the ‘gardener’ started picking out the litter from his black bag and, bizarrely, spreading it out on the ground, just as another group of rose clutching tourists wandered down the steps. They too got no further than the pond when they were accosted by the man, who swept for a minute or two before declaiming his love poem. They were mesmerised, as was I. When he cleared up the litter for a second time I could not resist asking him, what on earth was going on?

Ah, he said – big surprise this – he wasn’t really a gardener at all! He was an actor from the Globe Theatre taking part in a special project in honour of Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23rd and the tourists were on a ‘Sonnet Walk,’  the brainchild of director Mark Rylance.  After all, Middle Temple Hall was where,  at Candlemas 1602,  Shakespeare’s newly completed ‘Twelfth Night’ was performed for the first time. So, when the white roses were eventually laid at the gates of the Globe Theatre, perhaps it was a form of prayer, giving thanks for the survival of such literary treasures? https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/whats-on/special-events/sonnet-walks

But actually today is important for another reason. It’s the day when half a million books are given away by 20,000 volunteers to people who would not otherwise read or have access to books https://www.worldbooknight.org/books/2013  Chosen authors waive their royalties, publishers their production costs and Shakespeare, I am sure, would be proud to share his birthday with such an original idea.

Transformational Journeys

Since all life is a journey it’s hardly surprising that novels about transformational journeys are as old as the hills… well, older actually. Homer’s Odyssey, which sees Odysseus journeying around the wine dark Mediterranean is, in part, planned by the Gods up on Mount Olympus.  And, like all the best transformational journeys, by the time Odysseus returns not only is he a different person but so is his long suffering wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachos.

It’s a useful format for novelists from Conrad in Heart of Darkness to Hermann Hesse in Siddartha and more recently Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, where the hero journeys around the Pacific for 227 days and not to forget John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  It works for non-fiction too. Cherry Apsley Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is one of the most powerful books I have ever read.

Last week I read about two other, quite different journeys: Rachel Joyce’s compulsively enjoyable  account of the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg’s deeply humane account of his real journey walking from Frankfurt, the city where his grandfather had been Rabbi until 1939, to Finchley in north London, where he is now the Rabbi. The idea was that, as his community was constructing a new building, he would bring back from the one to the other the Eternal Light, or Ner Tamid, and so the book is called Walking with the Light. As Jonathan walked along the Rhine with his faithful dog Mizpah he talked to many Germans, young and not so young, Christian, Muslim and even Jewish about matters of political, social and cultural. He intersperses these encounters along the way with extracts from ancient texts, insights into the world today, musings about Literary Germany which his grandparents never ceased to love and a funny blog written by Mizpah the dog. I’ve been reading it slowly, not gulping it down, and marked many passages for further reflection. When he sees the rock of the Lorelei, immortalised by Heine the poet whom his parents especially revered, he weeps. Could it be, he wonders, because the fate of Heine’s Lorelei somehow epitomised that of his own family and history?

Jonathan Wittenberg recognises in a passage that brought me, too, close to tears that surely all is life is a journey, his destiny to spend all his life exploring, not just geographically but between generations. ‘The light I spire to carry,’ he writes, ‘will come to rest more than anywhere else in my children’s hearts. The depth of this responsibility disturbs me and I pray that nothing I ever do may cause them hurt and that I may be given the grace to transmit the flame as wisdom and love.’

I worried when I thought Harold Fry (or his creator, Rachel Joyce?) was veering towards the pseudo religious when his journey attracts a gaggle of hangers on who threaten to take over the journey. But the way Harold gracefully gives in to his uninvited followers turned out to be part of the book’s enormous charm. This was not a book about spirituality, almost the reverse. What Joyce was celebrating (it seemed to me) were old fashioned virtues like friendship, shared history, trust, loyalty and finally the possibility of renewal while religion per se was if anything eschewed. What both walkers have in common, apart from suffering blisters and enjoying the company of dogs, is that by doing something themselves they engage the human desire to encourage others. The number of onlookers who offer food both to Jonathan and Mizpah in reality and the fictional Harold is what I so often do in clicking the ‘justgiving’ button for someone else doing the marathon when I myself should be doing (okay, so not THAT) but something similar.

In very different ways these are both ‘feel good’ books. But where The Pilgrimage of Harold Fry occasionally veers towards sentimentality, in Walking with the Light the experience of reading about so much suffering, brutality and murder within living memory inevitably gives it a dark undertow. When Jonathan Wittenberg meets a priest who tells him how he misses the possibility of a deep spiritual dialogue with the Jewish community he is puzzled how to respond. The Germans either expelled the Jews or killed them and then they complain about a missed conversation, he reflects. But at every stage of the way he reminds himself of the importance of listening, of constantly engaging in dialogue. ‘This is not to betray the present through a punitive unwillingness to allow the past to be gone,’ he insists. Nor will he give in ‘to a heartless unpreparedness to listen to the echoes of the past and read the signs of the terrors which it wrought.’

It’s a tolerance, a refusal to be baited, that seems so sadly lacking as most of us journey through life, whizzing from one airport to another, never actually stopping to see what lies beyond, no time to engage with some of the world’s seven billion and rising who do not always tell us what we’d like to hear. Perhaps there is a very simple moral to be drawn from both these books: get out and walk more. At least that’s the last word from Rabbi Wittenberg, well, actually, it’s from Mizpah the dog.

 

Walking with the Light:  from Frankfurt to Finchley by Jonathan Wittenberg  Quartet £20.00

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce Random House £12.99

Throwing Away Time

My Empty StudyAfter 20 years of accumulating detritus on a ridiculously wide range of subjects, I have finally been forced to clear out my study. It’s a grim business that I’ve been postponing for months. This is my private sanctuary, the room of my own where eight books have been written, and it’s the only room where the muse strikes, since I believe a muse is nothing more than concentration, wide reading and being near the laptop at the critical moment. But the builders are arriving tomorrow so no further delay is possible. I have done mini culls before; in fact there is a sort of ritual clearance after each book is finished, putting the mounds of documents and letters into a big plastic box away in the attic hoping no one will ever ask me to search for some obscure reference. But they invariably do and it’s not fun searching on my knees in the dark and dusty attic where wasps make their nest among a different set of rafters every summer. These days there is much less paper generated per book as so much of the information comes through email and is stored on various obsolete hard disks, so why do I feel the necessity to store the old paper version at all? Is there a cut off point, say five years and then shred? But in truth it’s not just the documentation for the books that I keep…I am guilty of keeping hundreds of copies of old magazines (or I did until last week when almost all found their way into the recycling lorry). And I cannot read a newspaper without tearing out pages, half pages or just a column making it impossible for anyone else to read a newspaper if I have got there first. But the trouble with old newspaper articles is that once you have kept them for a few years they acquire a hallowed importance way beyond what is actually in the words or story so then they cannot be thrown away. Mostly these articles go into a pink box labelled: ‘Keep for the novel’. But I have not yet written a novel. Is it because I know real life is always stranger than fiction.The box is staring at me now as I type this. Perhaps this is the moment? Read More