Clare Hollingworth is, quite possibly, the most famous female foreign correspondent of the 20th century. That she would be destined to be linked with extraordinary moments in world history was evident from the moment of her birth - on October 10, 1911, the day the Chinese empire fell - and although she wasn't able to send a dispatch about that remarkable event, she has certainly made up for it in the intervening 88 years.
She is probably best known for being the reporter who broke the story that World War II had commenced, when she heard German tanks crossing into Poland on Friday, September 1, 1939, but she also won acclaim for her coverage of the Algerian and Vietnam wars, and for her 1963 scoop on the defection to Moscow of spy Kim Philby. She had, naturally, met Philby 25 years earlier at a ball in London: her ability to encounter those who would subsequently be the stuff of headlines is uncanny. She cultivated Charles De Gaulle (later president of France) at a time when the British Army Press Relations office had him filed, loosely, under the category 'some Froggie general', and she became friendly with Indira Gandhi (later prime minister of India) when that young woman was working in Paris. Donald Maclean (later Russian spy) was once her next-door neighbour.
In honour of this extraordinary career, British television programme What The Papers Say decided to present her with an award 10 days ago and the afternoon we met she was about to fly to London for the ceremony. She lives in a second-floor flat on Upper Albert Road; the lift that day had an apologetic maintenance sign on it, which must be worrying when you're 88. 'Really frightful,' agreed Hollingworth. 'The lift is out of order, on and off - do mention that in your piece. I'm terrified of being stuck in a lift, I'd rather be under machine-gun fire for an hour or two than stuck in a lift.' I thought she meant this as a sweeping generalisation - it sounded like the sort of comment people make when they want to be colourful rather than truthful - but when I asked what she was scared of, she rapidly said, 'That I'd die, that I'd never get out, that I'd want to go to the loo, that I'd never get water.' So she'd clearly brooded on it.
In any case, as I soon realised, she has an adherence to facts quite unlike anybody else I've ever interviewed. Such scrupulousness is, perhaps, the result of years in journalism (cynics may find that hard to believe) but two phrases she used continuously were 'I can't tell you the truth about that because I don't know' and 'I wouldn't put my hand on the Bible about that'. This, combined with an air of disinterest about her past (to a journalist, like an actor, the most interesting job is always the next one), made her sound unintentionally evasive. At one point when I asked her if she'd ever met the writer Vera Brittain she replied, 'It would be a lie to say I hadn't and a lie to say I had.' There was a third phrase she used, which might explain why the future presses on her more than the past. 'I'm almost completely blind,' she had informed me on the phone, and throughout the afternoon when people rang to wish her luck on her trip she repeated this fact, even to those who surely knew. She had problems with her eyes as a child in England, but her vision is now deteriorating at a drastic rate, and her flat is filled with magnifying glasses and sheets of paper covered in enormous, wobbly names with people's numbers alongside. That history's witness is now unable to see the face in front of her ('I'm sorry to tell you that I will not recognise you again,' she told me) is a profoundly bitter irony.
She did not set out to be a journalist. She variously dreamed of being either a politician or an academic 'but I haven't got the brain you need for that'. When she fell into reporting, her wealthy parents 'thought it was rather a tradesman's-entrance kind of job' until she became a war correspondent which was, presumably, smarter. (She has inherited their sense of hierarchy: she told me that her strict code of punctuality decreed being 10 minutes early for a general, five minutes early for a colonel and three minutes for everyone else. And her manner can be, to put it mildly, breathtakingly imperious.) She was a month short of her 28th birthday and a junior reporter when she rang The Daily Telegraph and told its editors the war had started, so it's no wonder covering battles became a lifelong addiction. Her first husband divorced her for desertion but she speaks of her second, journalist Geoffrey Hoare, with great affection. Even so, she wasn't exactly a stay-at-home wife. When I asked her when she was happiest, she said, 'I was extremely happy covering the Algerian war and going back to Paris, and my husband, every few months.' Later, I asked her about the ring which hangs loosely on her ring-finger ('Geoffrey and I bought it second-hand from the Army and Navy Store [in London]'), and something about the way she looked at it made me ask if she missed him terribly. Her reply, this time, was unequivocal: 'Yes. Still ... I choose to forget when he died. It was over 20 years ago.' Did Hong Kong become her home accidentally? 'In a way, yes. I used it as a base for covering the Vietnam war, coming from Saigon for R&R, then as a place to get news.' But now the news has moved on to other places. Every hour, she listens intently to the headlines on her radio, holding it to her cheek, looking like a bird crouched in a nest of papers. In the middle of the afternoon, she asked me to find the World Service and while I was fiddling around, there was a piercing burst of an Elgar concerto which seemed to heighten the poignancy of the dreary winter's afternoon in her accidental home.
Wouldn't it be better to live in London? 'It might be,' she agreed. 'One of the things I'm going to discuss with friends on this trip back is where there are homes for the blind. Ha, ha, not that I want to be in one. Is this interesting to you or boring?' I said it was perfectly interesting, and she looked, briefly, satisfied. But after a while she began to worry about her packing, and we stopped the interview and sorted out her wardrobe. Because it would be cold in London, she had placed a mink coat on her bed ready for the journey to the airport. It transpired that many years ago, the coat had belonged to Melinda Maclean, the treacherous Donald's wife, until she, too, disappeared into another country.