The Female Lead Read online

  I had it done all in black and white. The only thing in colour is the wedding band. It has faded with time. The better I’ve gotten in life, the more it’s faded. But it’s still there.

  TARYN DAVIS

  Charity leader and founder, American Widow Project

  DR MAGGIE ADERIN-POCOCK

  Maggie Aderin-Pocock is a space scientist. Since February 2014, she has presented the long-running television programme on astronomy, The Sky at Night. Born in Britain to Nigerian parents, Aderin-Pocock attended 13 different schools before going on to study physics at Imperial College London and taking a PhD in mechanical engineering. She has worked in private industry, on government contracts and in academic research. While she was lead scientist at Astrium, the optical instrumentation group, researching for the European Space Agency and NASA, she started giving talks to children and young people, which led to her becoming a television presenter. Since having her daughter in 2010, she has concentrated on consultancy and on her career as a presenter and a promoter of science.

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  I always wanted to be an astronaut. I still do. It’s been the driving force in my life. I applied to go to the International Space Station when Tim Peake was chosen – but he’s a lot thinner than I am. I knew I was interested in science really quite early in my life, and that space was my main focus. I thought The Clangers [the children’s television animation featuring puppets that spoke in whistles and lived on a moon-like planet] was fantastic.

  Our sun is one of 200 billion stars in our galaxy. What else is out there? What are the possibilities?

  The moon and I have a personal relationship. I am mesmerised by it. Not long after I was born, people landed on the moon and I grew up with a sense of the possibilities of space. I felt strongly that it was this amazing thing waiting to be explored. I lived mostly in London and you don’t see much of the night sky there, but you can usually see the moon. When I was studying for my GCSEs, I found a local telescope-making class and I used to go every week – ten middle-aged men and me, polishing and grinding our mirrors. Later, I spent a wonderful six months working in Chile on one of the huge telescopes in the desert, and I used to watch the moon rise over the mountains. Often, the moon was my only companion.

  My father came to Britain from Nigeria, hoping to study medicine, but it didn’t happen. He took a job in a restaurant, became a manager and then started his own business. I was lucky that he was ambitious for me. When I was three, he used to ask me which university I wanted to go to. But I was dyslexic at school and I was put in a remedial class. My parents split up when I was four and after that, I changed schools a lot – but that was quite useful because I was able to give myself a promotion. I’d been in the lower streams but when my new school asked what class I should be in, I said the top stream.

  Science saved me. I had a problem with reading and writing and once you have a label or a stigma, it’s hard to shake it off. At the age of about ten, I put my hand up in a science class when we were asked a question about the weight of a cubic centimetre of water. I thought it was easy, but no one else had their hands up so I put mine down again. But then I thought, ‘No, I know this.’ Then, ‘If I can do this, what else can I do?’

  At school I used to say I wasn’t English, I was Nigerian, even though I’d never been to Nigeria and couldn’t speak the language. I wanted to make the point that I was proud of being different. There were no other black children in the class and I was teased. Looking back, that may have been part of the attraction of space. You don’t see the barriers. I loved Star Wars partly because it involved all kinds of different people working together.

  Physics truly is the study of everything, from the smallest particles to the expanding universe. There is demand for physicists in all walks of life – it would be useful to have more physicists in parliament, for example, because politicians have to make scientific decisions. I began a presentation at a conference recently by saying, ‘I know nothing about art, literature or history,’ which is a shocking thing to say, yet people say that sort of thing about science all the time and don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.

  The moon and I have a personal relationship. I am mesmerised by it. Not long after I was born, people landed on the moon and I grew up with a sense of the possibilities of space.

  Every culture has been fascinated by the magic of the night sky, interpreting its beauty and mystery in many different ways, but pretty much everywhere there has been this sense of ‘wow!’ – and the more we learn, the more ‘wow’ it is. Our sun is one of 200 billion stars in our galaxy. What else is out there? What are the possibilities? We are so much closer now to making that discovery.

  I have been lucky enough to work on the James Webb telescope, Hubble’s big brother, which I think will transform our knowledge of the universe once it launches in 2018. Around 5,000 scientists have worked on this project across the world. I collaborated with people in Germany, France and America. I do hope our little piece of it works because it will be fired a million miles away from earth so if anything goes wrong, we won’t be able to fix it.

  More than 2,000 exoplanets [those that orbit stars other than our sun] have been identified so far, of which a few thousand are the right size to support life and are orbiting in the habitable zone. Some people are scared by the idea that there could be life out there and some people are really excited. I’m one of those who are excited.

  When I was pregnant, I was effectively doing three jobs and I decided something had to give, so I stopped doing research in industry. I miss engineering – there is a pure joy in building things in the lab – but I love presenting The Sky at Night, which is not only the longest-running television programme but has had the longest-running presenter. In 57 years, Patrick Moore missed just one episode. It has many die-hard fans and we explain the universe in a very friendly way. My daughter travels everywhere with me. Before she started school she had done 120 flights, including to Tokyo and Hong Kong, and to the States many times. I give lots of talks and speak to tens of thousands of young people a year. And I’m devising a TV cartoon, inspired by The Clangers, with the working title Interstellar Ella, about a girl who travels the universe on her space scooter. I am hoping to explain cosmology to four to seven-year-olds.

  Maggie’s Object

  My wedding dress. I married my husband 12 years ago, after we met doing our PhDs in mechanical engineering. I wanted to wear something simple, a concept of my own. I can’t sew for toffee and getting something made to measure in the UK was way beyond my budget. Then I thought about stopping off on one of my many trips and getting it custom-made in Thailand to my own spec, and that sums up quite a lot for me – take your dreams to the stars, be an opportunist, see how far you can get.

  DR MAGGIE ADERIN-POCOCK

  Space scientist

  CLARISSA WARD

  Clarissa Ward is an award-winning television foreign correspondent. Born in London, she spent her childhood there and in New York, attending boarding school in the UK and then Yale University. She began her career at Fox News, subsequently moving to ABC and CBS before joining CNN as senior international correspondent based in London. She has reported many times from Syria, dodging gunfire and bombs and, on one occasion, confronting a jihadist with evidence that he had killed prisoners he claimed to have been protecting. She has also covered events in Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan; the revolution in Ukraine; the Russian incursion into Georgia; and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She has lived and worked in the Middle East, Russia and China and speaks six languages, including Arabic, Russian and Mandarin.

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  For most of my childhood I wanted to be an actress. I loved plays and film and I was a member of the National Youth Theatre. But then I was in New York when 9/11 happened and that was it. From then on there was never any doubt about what I wanted to do. I had always been interested in different cultures but from that moment I wanted to try to facilitate better communication. Reporting became a voc
ation.

  I started at the very bottom – subterranean. I was a freelancer on the overnight desk at Fox News. I would go in to work at midnight and come out at 9am and then go to my Arabic lessons. My body didn’t take well to the overnights. I hadn’t dreamed of working at Fox but I didn’t want to wait. So I did that for a year and then, to their credit, Fox sent me to Iraq to produce and I got the opportunity to go on air. I was working during Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year and that happened to be the time that Saddam Hussein was executed.

  I would go in to work at midnight and come out at 9am and then go to my Arabic lessons.

  I have a natural aptitude for languages. My grandmother was a linguist and a pianist. I was useless at the piano but I have inherited the language ability. Growing up in New York and London also gave me an ear for mimicry – I can sound more American or English, depending where I am. I speak different languages with varying degrees of fluency – French and Italian very well; I have a good understanding of Spanish; Russian and Arabic conversationally. Mandarin is the toughest. I lived in China for two and a half years and fought hard to get the basics but you lose it if you’re not there. I know that my reporting has added depth when I speak the language of the people I’m working with. A language can also teach you a lot about a culture.

  It’s a man’s world and I kind of like that, being one of the guys. I tend to eschew sexuality.

  Sometimes being a woman is a drawback. Occasionally, it’s clear you’re not going to get the interview and then you just have to suck it up. But quite often it makes things easier. Wear an abaya in Syria or Sinai and when you go through checkpoints, you can pretend to be asleep in the back of the car. Sometimes, being a woman gives you access to 50 per cent of the population that your male colleagues might not be able to approach. The women may not want to go on camera, but they know who’s who, who’s responsible. I remember being in a house on the outskirts of Aleppo when the shelling was getting closer. The men became tense and they were smoking heavily and arguing with each other. To get away from the bickering and simmering violence, I went to sit with the women. They were petrified. One was rocking back and forth, hugging a pillow and crying. Others were rubbing each other’s shoulders or trying to keep themselves distracted. I felt their fear and claustrophobia and it gave me a quite different perspective.

  I am frightened a lot. I hate shelling and bombing. I don’t like being on the front line. It happens that I end up there because that’s where the stories are. I’ve lost a lot of friends and it takes its toll. In the moment, fear can be useful because it helps you to get out of trouble but it can also paralyse you. I try to be rational – to think that it would be very unlucky if the bomb dropped on the very building where I am – and, of course, while you have to take risks, you also calculate them. When I confronted the jihadist about the men he’d killed, we’d worked out how much time it would take us to get back to the border. It is very difficult to look in a man’s face and call him a liar, but it was important to do it – not least because that was when it became clear that the war in Syria had reached a turning point, the people’s uprising had been completely hijacked and we were entering a new phase.

  I am frightened a lot. I hate shelling and bombing. I don’t like being on the front line. It happens that I end up there because that’s where the ories are.

  I am very conservative about the way I dress and behave in the field. It’s a man’s world and I kind of like that, being one of the guys. I tend to eschew sexuality. Some women reporters have made it their trademark – there is a fashion in the US for breathless war correspondents with plunging cleavages. I resent it, because it creates a bad impression on people overseas whose stories we’re covering. And it creates the wrong idea about what is needed for success. A producer once asked me why I always wear my hair up. The answer is that I have more important things to think about. Some day maybe we’ll go out for dinner with friends and I’ll wear my hair down, but right now I’m at work.

  It really troubles me when I hear educated people in the US or the UK saying things about Muslims that are rooted in fear. I worry about how the media is contributing to that. I wish people could experience all the wonderful interactions that I have had – and that is what drives me, really. I want to tell the geopolitical story, but I also want to make our viewers understand their fellow human beings. Fundamentally, I think people are open to understanding others and seeing things from their point of view. It’s all about exposure. We need to open up to others.

  Clarissa’s Object

  A little paper with sura yasin [one of the chapters of the Qur’an] written on it, given to me by a very sweet Syrian woman who believed that reading it over and over again protects you. During the phase of the civil war when it was still possible to get into Syria, I was being hidden in a safe house, waiting to be smuggled out. Trying to cross a border illegally in the middle of the night is not fun. I have always held on to the sura. My understanding of written Arabic is not very good but this woman’s gesture is more important than what the sura actually says. She gave the paper to me in a spirit of love and out of a desire to protect me, a stranger, someone she didn’t know but wanted to help.

  CLARISSA WARD

  CNN senior international correspondent

  TRACY EDWARDS

  Tracy Edwards skippered the first all-women crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race in 1989. Her boat Maiden won two legs of the race and came second overall; she became the first woman to receive the Yachtsman of the Year Trophy. Tracy Edwards learned to sail as a stewardess on a charter yacht after being expelled from school, and was the first woman to race around the world on a Maxi (a boat of at least 21 metres). Her Whitbread triumph with Maiden’s 12-woman crew broke a number of records. A subsequent attempt to win the Jules Verne trophy with an all-female crew in 1998 foundered when their mast broke near Cape Horn. In 2014, she discovered that Maiden was decaying in the Indian Ocean and launched a successful public bid to restore the yacht and return it to Britain to be used to raise funds for girls’ education.

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  My father died when I was ten and my world collapsed. My mother married a man I loathed and we moved from Berkshire to a village in Wales. My stepfather was an alcoholic, violent and abusive. I didn’t do the sensible thing and tell my mother. She was working as a cleaner, in a shoe shop and behind the bar in a pub and he would come in and drink away what she earned. I was bullied at school, so I was being beaten up at home and beaten up at school. I became very rebellious, aggressive and angry. After I was expelled, my courageous mum launched me off backpacking.

  I ended up working in a bar in Piraeus. I’d see all these beautiful yachts in the harbour but I didn’t think they were anything to do with me because I thought I was worthless and didn’t deserve any luck. But then someone who used to come into the bar offered me a job. His girlfriend was the cook and, although I was 17 and had no experience, she gave me the job. Within days, I thought, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ I don’t think it was immediately the ocean or the boat – it was the people. I’d always felt I was on the outside looking in. After my father died I never seemed to fit in. I wasn’t very good at anything. On the boat there were people from diverse backgrounds who’d all fallen into sailing; no one had planned it. I didn’t feel judged.

  There are a lot of women in the charter world, because it’s a skivvy’s job. But then I moved into racing – for fun, initially, until a boyfriend pointed me towards a boat that had done the Whitbread. He suggested I speak to the skipper and in 1985–6, I took part in the Whitbread as a cook. My first reaction was, ‘Why don’t more women do this?’ – not from a feminist point of view, initially, but just because it’s such fun. Through a mutual friend, I met Howard Gibbons, who had fingers in a lot of pies. He was quiet and balanced and thoughtful where I’m very emotional, yet we formed this bizarre partnership. If Howard saw I was going to lose my temper, he made sure it happened out
of sight of any journalists. He helped me harness my anger and turn it into something really good.

  My first reaction was, ‘Why don’t more women do this?’ – not from a feminist point of view, initially, but just because it’s such fun.

  It was difficult to get sponsorship – people were worried we’d kill ourselves. Even people I liked didn’t believe we could do it. Journalists were having bets on whether we’d get to the first stop. Maiden wouldn’t have got anywhere without King Hussein of Jordan [Royal Jordanian Airlines became the project’s sponsor]. He was interested in everything and he was the person who persuaded me to be the skipper. I intended to be the navigator, but a year before the race we were having dinner and I was worrying that I couldn’t find a skipper. He said, ‘You’re deluding yourself and putting off the inevitable. You already are the skipper; you’re just faffing around about a title.’ So that’s how I became the skipper and the navigator – which is unusual because the reason you have a skipper and a navigator is so the skipper can blame the navigator.

  On the second leg we were beyond determined, and we came in 36 hours ahead of our nearest rivals. By the halfway point, we led by 19 hours.

  We were the only team that stayed together for the whole race. It had been so difficult for us to get to the start line that it bound us together. We were third on the first leg, coming into Uruguay, and everyone was having a party, delighted that we’d made it – but we were gutted. On the second leg we were beyond determined, and we came in 36 hours ahead of our nearest rivals. By the halfway point, we led by 19 hours. And then I made a couple of bad navigational mistakes and we finished in second place overall. It was still the best result for a British boat since 1977 and, sadly, it remains the best result for an all-female crew.