Life beyond the front line

I’ve been struck by human

resilience and the extraordinary

determination to make things better; it’s staggering how kind and humane

people areWI LIFE MAY & JUNE 2016 17

Top: as the BBC chief news correspondent, Kate Adie was at the forefront in reporting the dramatic siege of the Iranian Embassy in London, 1980Above: an admirer of the WI, Kate spoke at our Centennial Fair in Harrogate last year

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Interview by LUCY COLLINS

Away from her stellar career reporting from war zones, Kate Adie now relishes village life but has lost none of her campaigning zeal for a fairer world

For two decades Kate Adie ricocheted around the world reporting from war zones. From Tiananmen Square to the Rwandan genocide, she was at the heart of the action as the BBC’s first female chief news correspondent.

We’re used to seeing her in a hard hat and flak jacket but she’s rocking an electric-blue dress and leather biker jacket as she strides into The Langham Hotel in London to meet me.

She is a deliberate, precise speaker and, I learn quickly, dismissive of the assumptions people make about how witnessing appalling tragedies has affected her. ‘So many people appear to have a rather negative view, saying, “You must have seen terrible things, therefore you must be a wreck”, which is a ludicrously shallow take on life,’ she says.

‘I’ve been struck by human resilience and the

extraordinary determination to make things better, get a country back on its feet, sort your family out, help other people. I’ve seen an amazing amount of that so I’m hugely in favour of the human race.

‘There are the dark spots but I’ve found as a journalist, it’s staggering how kind and how very humane people are.’

Kate was a war baby, conceived outside marriage and adopted as an infant. She had a happy childhood in Sunderland, but the reminders of conflict were ever-present. ‘I grew up in a house that had been bombed. There was glass down the back of the sofa and the sideboard had bits of a 1,000lb Luftwaffe bomb embedded in its walnut. I’ve still got a piece.

‘What war seems to be to me, where I’ve experienced it, is life lived at a terrible and violent extreme. It’s a complete myth that it’s confined to a battlefield. War is among us, it’s ordinary human

16 WI LIFE MAY & JUNE 2016

lives turned upside down. It came into my parents’ lives and they weren’t combatants, they weren’t soldiers, they weren’t the so-called front lines. War comes into people’s lives and it doesn’t happen in “Another Place”, it happens among decent, ordinary people.’

The desire to tell the truth still burns fiercely, except it is no longer delivered from in front of a camera but through her books. The latest, Fighting on the Home Front, explores the legacy of women in WWI.

‘It’s important to understand why women were fighting for their rights and why there was such a need for something like the WI. They had a rotten time, their legal position was poor, their education was minimal and girls were often taken out of school early to go into service. Until they were married, they had nothing but manual, back-breaking work and there were no opportunities for them.

‘You have to understand that to see why the suffrage movement got quite so agitated and determined to do something to improve women’s lot and for them to have a say in society. To appreciate how far we’ve come you have to know where we started.’

Kate rates the WI very highly. ‘The WI does well because it’s still sticking to its original principles,’ she says, ‘which are practical rather than merely social – a group of women who came together with the desire to make lives better, particularly for rural women. In a country that cares furiously for its countryside yet has to strive to keep it as we’d like it, I think this is very important.’

Kate has settled in her own rural idyll, in deepest Dorset. ‘I’m part of a village and I love it. It’s immensely enthusiastic and it’s friendly. When I first came to London I missed the easy-going northern friendliness that I grew up with.’

She enjoys her busy pace of life, making documentaries, attending literary festivals and presenting BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent, which allows reporters to share offbeat stories from around the world.

‘I choose to do what I do. Reporting really changed into a presentation job in which journalistic skills are quite secondary in some instances, so I thought “Go and do something else”.’

Kate is also patron of four charities. These cover areas ranging from establishing schools and small businesses in Africa, to preventing re-offending in Dorset, and helping children who are stranded in institutions around the world to find families that they can live with.

‘I like to fill the day doing interesting, enjoyable things. I read a huge range of non-fiction, history and good contemporary fiction. I don’t like the fluffy stuff.’ Chick lit? I venture mischievously. I’m given short shrift. ‘Pointless.’ Social media? ‘No. A lot of social media… is the voice of shouting.’

Kate is relaxed about the fact that questions regarding her career are

usually prefaced with the query ‘as a woman’. She says: ‘There are still hugely male areas of power, influence and affluence that a lot of women are nowhere near, so I think it’s probably inevitable that you get asked if you’ve moved through those worlds.

‘I’ve never considered myself to be a different kind of journalist because I’m a woman.

‘I come from a generation where women weren’t really expected to have careers. People have forgotten how much progress we have made in the last half century – more with regard to women’s expectations, their opportunities and what they have been allowed to do and have had to fight to do.

‘It has been a very swift change in a fundamental position for half the population; it’s a massive revolution and it’s not through yet.

‘There is still no affordable childcare; there is still a 19th-century view of going to work, of commuting and sitting in an office; there are still people asking how can a woman have both a job and a family.

‘That is a question for society to determinedly make provision for, to say that everything must

be valued. ‘Women are as capable as

anyone else and should be given job opportunities – we have got to work out a way of getting the best for everyone, not saying women must make sacrifices; it must be the best for everyone.

‘There ought to be more fairness in society. It’s a good word to use rather than the mechanical one of equality.

‘Fairness, equality in law and equality of opportunities, but also how tasks are shared out, how chances to do things fall to you. Ask yourself, is it fair, and if it isn’t, do something about it.’