Rosie Whitehouse’s Are We There Yet?:Travels With My Frontline Family tells the extraordinary true story of what family life is like when you’re married to a war reporter. The author’s husband reported on the conflict in the former Yugoslavia for The Economist and in her book Whitehouse describes and reflects upon the five years that her family spent living in the war-torn Balkans – as well as their varied experiences in Hungary, Romania, France, Ireland and Shepherd’s Bush. Part family memoir, part portrait of contemporary Europe and part reflection on war and how it is reported, Are We There Yet? is a memorable and richly-rewarding read. I interviewed Rosie Whitehouse to find out more about her family’s remarkable story and how she came to turn it into a book.
First of all, I’d like to say how much I enjoyed and was moved by the book. Could you tell us something about the background to Are We There Yet? and how you came to write it?
The book literally erupted out of me while I was standing at the checkout at my local supermarket in the spring of 2003, during the invasion of Iraq. My husband was in Baghdad reporting for The Economist and I had just popped out to get the kids something for dinner. As you can imagine, there was a thread of tension running through my mind and concentrating on frozen peas was light relief. There was however hanging over the checkouts a large wide-screen TV showing a live feed from the frontline in Iraq. A group of soldiers were firing across a street. I stood transfixed as I realised that you could be shoving a packet of fish fingers in your carrier bag and see your husband blown up on TV. There was at the time a fierce debate among the chattering classes in the UK about the way the war was being covered in the media. That debate centred on the issue of whether or not the war should be reported 24hours a day. Now I was completely addicted to the 24 hour coverage but no-one considered what drove the supermarket manager to have the TV at the checkout switched to the news channel – I don’t know. Was it for the public good? Entertainment? Who knows but what I do know is that no-one considered what affect that might have on me or the families of those soldiers who were on screen. I felt that I wanted to make people think about what goes on the homefront. What the families of journalists do to back them up. Ask them to think: What price news? Frontline reporting can be a lonely and dirty job. It can be very rewarding but it can also be very distressing. It can mean that my husband is away from home for months on end. There’s the uncertainty of how long he will trapped in a siege. The list goes on…
One of the things that struck me very forcibly as I was reading the book is how strongly most travel writing and war reporting is centred on the impressions and opinions of a solitary figure. One of the great pleasures of Are We There Yet? for this reader was the contrast and interplay between the varied responses of the different members of your family to the places and situations that you found yourselves in. Would you describe the book as either travel writing or war reporting, in fact? Were there particular authors whose influence you found helpful or inspiring?
It’s difficult to put Are We There Yet? in a box as it works on so many layers. As well as describing what it is like to crisscross frontlines in the family saloon car, it is about bringing up children, the choices you have to make as a mother, and the fascinating process of watching your children put together their identity. One of the things I was also very keen to do with the book was to give a picture of Europe in the 1990s and of the Balkans in particular. Images of events came back into my mind with striking clarity – the cold metal door handle of the entrance to the tower block in we lived in Bucharest. The grey sky in winter. The burning heat of summer. I didn’t sit down and write the book in one go but in chunks. I think that gave it a sense of immediacy. So in this sense yes it is travel writing.
As for who influenced me. I loved Tim Parks’ Italian Education. It’s an account of bringing up dual nationality kids in Verona. My son, Ben also made me read Amos Oz’s biography and his novel My Michael. He is a wonderful writer but it was also the fact that Ben brought these books for me that added to their impact because they had mattered to him and affected him.
Part of the proceeds from sales of Are We There Yet? will go to the Rory Peck Trust. Could you tell us a little about the Trust? How did you first become involved with it?
The Rory Peck Trust help the families of freelance newsgathers who have been killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned in the course of their work. My husband is a freelance and part of what I wanted to do with the book was to give a glimpse in that precarious lifestyle. Rory Peck was a cameraman who killed in Moscow during the constitutional crisis of 1993. He was shot dead by members of the "Vitez" special forces unit of the Russian Interior Ministry while filming the storming by opposition supporters of the Ostankino TV Centre. He left four children and a widow who then devoted her life to helping those less fortunate than herself. The trust helps freelance reporters here, sending them on news safety courses. One of which was my husband. It helps families across the world put their lives back together. I have nothing but admiration for Julliette Peck who sadly died earlier this year.
I approached the trust to offer to donate the money as just after I had finished the book my husband fell seriously ill with pneumonia and was unable to work for three months. Of course nobody is interested in a sick freelance and no money came into the house for months on end.
One of the recurring themes of Are We There Yet? is the juxtaposition of violent conflict and domestic life. Early on in the book there is a moment at which ‘The world is collapsing, war is about to break out [in the former Yugoslavia] and I am tidying the car’. It’s a contrast that recurs in another form at the end of the book, when you observe that ‘Journalists dodge the bullets in front of the cameras but what you never see them do is call home to see if someone has paid the gas bill.’ To what extent would you characterize the book as an exploration of the different ways your family has found to reconcile the ‘momentous’ and the ‘banal’?
Well that is our lives. It has shaped who we are for the good and the bad. The moment I finished the book my husband came down the stairs and announced that a very good friend of his who is a journalist in Serbia had been woken in the middle of the night when two hand grenades exploded on his bedroom windowsill. The window was next to the front door and moments later his daughter came home from a late night party. If she had arrived a few minutes earlier she would have been dead. I suggested that my eldest daughter [Esti], who is a friend, called her to see how she was. Later when I asked her how she was doing Esti repied: “She’s tough. She’ll just get on with it. You have to, don’t you. You can’t choose what your parents do.”
As well as writing and everything else, you are the founder of Reportage Press, a new publishing house. What lead you to set up Reportage Press, and what can we expect from them in the near future?
Frustration with publishers not publishing interesting books about foreign affairs because the market was either small or those who would buy the books were abroad. At Reportage we publish books about foreign places and sell them directly through out website www.reportagepress.com to those people who want to read them. We have some extraordinary books coming up including one of the most moving accounts of persecution ever written, Denise Affonco’s To The End of Hell: One Woman’s Struggle to Survive in the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia which is published on 30th October. All our books give money to charity. It is important not just to take but to give back. Part of the proceeds of To The End of Hell will go to the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, where we have set up a scholarship in the name of Denise Affonco’s nine-year-old daughter who starved to death under the Khmer Rouge. The Centre is one of the organisations who have gathered evidence to the UN backed trials of the Khmer Rouge leadership which have just got underway in Cambodia. No reader will come away from Are We There Yet? without a very vivid sense of the different personalities in your family.
As a final question, is it too intrusive to ask which of them have read the book, and how they responded to seeing themselves in print?
The children were extremely helpful right from the start. Just talking about the past helped gel everything in my mind. It was even funnier after when they read the book and then told me what they had thought but not said in many situations. Ben my eldest son was especially helpful reading the text and he gave me a lot of sound advice on how to improve it. My husband was right behind me all the way and spent hours reading through the drafts. I wrote the book at the kitchen table with the buzz of family life going on around me which I think gave it a real feel. The banter of conversation and buzz of background noise seeped into the text.
It certainly did, and the book’s observations of family life are just as rewarding and unforgettable as its compelling portrait of contemporary Europe. Thank you very much for talking to us. By turns moving, amusing and thought-provoking, Are We There Yet?: Travels With My Frontline Family by Rosie Whitehouse (£8.99, Reportage) is available now.