Book Review: "Are we there yet? Travels with my frontline family" by Rosie Whitehouse

Alongside the Owens, Roses and the rest have come the war reporters. Their main motive seems to have been determination to record their indignation that the massacre in Srebrenica or the siege of Sarajevo were allowed to occur in the first place.

Most, though not all, these books have almost inevitably been written by men and dwell equally inevitably on political deal-making in Western capitals or the carnage at the frontlines.

Whitehouse’s account of her Balkan odyssey is an interesting addition to the existing corpus of Balkan war literature, therefore, as it comes from the perspective of a trained woman journalist who remained behind the frontlines.

After making fast progress up the BBC ladder, Whitehouse abandoned her promising career to join her reporter husband, Tim Judah, and raise a family in Romania and later Serbia against a background of seismic changes; the fall of communism, the rise of Slobodan Milosevic, and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia.

Whitehouse brings a sharp journalist’s eye to everyday life in these tumultuous times, noting how the grisly events reported on Europe’s front pages impacted on the Balkan “street” and on the lives and imaginations of her young children, Ben and Esti, for whom first Bucharest and then Belgrade became “home.”

The book is good at capturing the oddly desolate and disappointed atmosphere of Bucharest after the fall of the Ceaucescus, as Romania slowly awoke to the realisation that it

 had paid a high price for its incomplete and unfulfilled revolution. Whitehouse has a wry and surprisingly affectionate take on this world of smoke-filled cafes and secret policemen –where a single orange was still such a luxury that when she returned home with a whole bunch, her home help, Elena, lovingly squirreled away the discarded peel for further use.

Moving to Belgrade after the conflict in Slovenia had kick-started the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia, the author then finds herself at the epicentre of the great Yugoslav “twister”, living directly opposite the parliament building into which the secretive Serbian dictator, Milosevic, makes fleeting appearances.

While battles rage in the distance, Whitehouse observes the slow erosion of Serbian society from within as Weimar-style hyper inflation destroys what remains of the middle class and as hard currency dealers, sucking up every last dollar and Deutschmark, take up positions in every available alleyway.

Those searching for a tone of moral outage over what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s won’t find it here. Whitehouse takes a resolutely survivalist and practical view of the Yugoslav wars, judging matters principally in terms of their impact on her family.

That may surprise some readers but it has the virtue of honesty, and in any case there has possibly been too much emotional grandstanding about Yugoslavia from outsiders.

Either way, it’s hard to resist the pull of Whitehouse’s powerful and direct writing style. Unpretentious and free of clichés, it delivers is a tightly-paced account of a British woman’s attempt to navigate her family through strange times and events that hopefully won’t reoccur in our lifetime.

Are We There Yet? Travels with my Frontline Family by Rosie Whitehouse £8.99 is available direct from the publisher at www.reportagepress.co.uk. Part of the proceeds of this book go to the Rory Peck Trust who help the families of freelance newsgatherers killed, seriously wounded or imprisoned in the course of their work.