6 minute read
Interview: Style of Wight meets
Harriet ishome
Style of Wight meets journalist and broadcaster Harriet Hadfield
By Emma Elobeid Pictures Christopher Jelf
Harriet Hadfield sits crosslegged on a sea-wall ledge in Seaview; me opposite – social distancing is naturally provided by her much-loved black Labrador, Maud. It is a bright winter day, and we have coffee
‘to-go’ from the legendary Lily’s café.
Here – sheltered from the Solent’s cross-shore breeze – Harriet tells me, looking out to sea, is her favourite
“thinking and planning spot.”
Thinking and planning are two things
Harriet has done a lot of in the past six months. Because half a year ago, half a world away, Harriet’s life in
Geneva – where she lived with her young family – changed “overnight and without warning”, in a change of personal circumstances she describes as “completely outside her control”.
Living through an experience like this takes courage – something that, I suggest to her – she appears to have in spades. She nods: “I definitely feel it’s so important to be open about our struggles as well as our successes; it is such a cliché to say that life isn’t always as glossy as it looks on Instagram, but in my case that was certainly true last year.” In the eye of the storm, Harriet’s family all urged the same thing: come home. And so – leaving behind her life in Switzerland – she did; to the comfort of her grandmother’s house in the heart of Seaview village. Harriet credits the most basic tenets of Island life with her journey through adversity to acceptance: sea air to breathe, space to regroup, and openwater swimming enabling an almost constant process of reset. “Allowing myself to let go is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Now it’s done, I feel lighter. And free.” Surrounded by the sights and sounds of her own childhood memories on the Island – and now joined by her parents (who live just around the corner) and sister (also recently returned home to the Island from New Zealand) – she has made the decision to stay and raise her two-year-old son Jack here. Reflecting on her new favourite quote from American novelist Ellie Wiesel: ‘there are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes when you lose, you win,’ Harriet is “absolutely convinced we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.”
As we sit, chat, and sip our coffee, almost every other person stops to say hello; to ask after Harriet’s family,
From Number 10 Downing Street to Calais refugee camps; just some of the highlights from Harriet Hadfield’s 15-year career in broadcast journalism.
say hello to Maud (who, open-hearted and friendly, is every bit as charismatic as her owner), or simply to check on how Harriet is doing. It is an almost perfect demonstration of the Seaview sense of community that Harriet talks so fondly of. “When we arrived home in June, Seaview was buzzing with that unique summer energy. It felt to me like an entire community wrapped its protective arms around us – not just from Seaview, but friends and family from all across the Island.”
Though her 15-year career in broadcast journalism has taken her all over the world – from reporting live outside Number 10 Downing Street to covering the refugee crisis all the way from Serbia, through Hungary and Austria and into Germany – there is something encouragingly circular about being back where it all started. “The Isle of Wight has always been the one constant in my life,” she explains. “I’d always quietly dreamed of living here and raising a family on the Island. I never really imagined I’d be doing it on my own, but I can’t think of another place in the world where we’d be so well-supported.” What strikes me most about Harriet’s story is how her decision to ‘stay put’ offers an important antidote to the sometimes-toxic narrative that moving away equals moving forward. More often, we ‘become’ our truest selves by returning, and reclaiming parts of ourselves we thought we had lost. Harriet agrees. “So many of my closest friends and colleagues tell me that the Harriet they’re seeing now is ‘the real Harriet.’”
If by ‘real Harriet’ her friends mean the kind of no-fear, talk-to-anyone brand of journalism with ‘gumption’ (“Oh, I certainly have gumption!” she says) that we saw in her most recent return to screen, then Harriet is indeed back. She describes the call from her former Sky News TV editor last October - which led to her reporting live on the hijacking of the Nave Andromeda off
the Luccombe-Ventnor coast – despite “no make-up and curly hair!” “It was a normal Sunday afternoon when I got the call. I just had to drop everything, grab my camera and go. That’s when you have to rely so heavily on your support network – and I’m very lucky now to have wonderful and flexible childcare that allows me to start rebuilding my career.” This wasn’t the first time that Harriet has had to live-report a hijacking at a moment’s notice, she tells me, recalling the Ethiopian Airlines flight forced to land at Geneva Airport in 2014. But the timing of this chance commission – immediately after a summer of reflection – she credits with the push she needed to rekindle her passion for audio and visual storytelling. Since then, Harriet has successfully relaunched her weekly email newsletter ‘5-stories’ – which provides her personal take on the week’s top local news – for the Isle of Wight and secure a contract as a Sky News correspondent across the South Coast.
The future is looking very bright. “The way people consume their news has changed so much during my career. I’ve found the combination of a more personal take and the ease of a newsletter subscription has become really popular, while the news ‘digest’ model also allows me to link through to the work of our brilliant and hardworking local journalists. “I’m hoping to steadily grow my audience – with the aim of introducing audio and visual content in the future – all about stories from the Isle of Wight of course!”
A couple of days post-interview, I realise (from Harriet’s third email newsletter instalment, which has become somewhat of a Sunday morning ritual for myself and hundreds of other Island subscribers) that, as we perched on that sea wall, the first phase of the Fawley Power Station demolition was underway. In her newsletter, Harriet reported that sources had heard a ‘loud bang’ from Ryde through to Carisbrooke. It is surely testament to Harriet that even a thunderous cross-Solent explosion couldn’t distract me from the effervescence of her creative energy. If one were to be ‘meaningfullyinclined’ (and this is something Harriet readily admits to), it is possible to draw another parallel here too. In her 5-stories newsletter, Harriet says the demolition will “change the Solent’s skyline and our sunsets from NorthEast-Wight forever”. Though Harriet’s personal skyscape may have changed beyond recognition over the past twelve months, her ‘powerhouse’ remains standing – and all the best sunsets are yet to come.
5-stories.co.uk Instagram: @harriet.hadfield Twitter: @harriethadfield
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