Still best after all these years

"The age of the war correspondent as hero is clearly over," Phillip Knightley concluded in The First Casualty, his classic history of war reporting. Not yet, it seems - as long as the likes of Bill Deedes, Ann Leslie, Jon Swain, Marie Colvin and Robert Fisk, among others, are still around. This week Leslie won the Edgar Wallace trophy at the London Press Club's annual awards, an honour that went to Deedes a year ago.

"This business isn't for grown-ups," said the Daily Mail's Ann Leslie of Deedes (89 next month) and herself (sixtysomething and recovering from major surgery last year). "We have a childlike quality that makes us go on asking the simple questions in the most complex situations. I'd hate to be endlessly self-referential, like those pundits on radio and television who have never smelled a place or never said anything about them that hasn't already been said by other people."

The Telegraph's Lord Deedes told me: "After Canary Wharf, going abroad anywhere is positively recreational, and, after the toils and troubles of this country, it raises your estimation of human nature to see the good these aid agencies do. In my 80s, it stops me getting too depressed about the human condition."

His son, Jeremy, managing director of the Telegraph papers, said: "There's an inquisitiveness that doesn't go away. It's like a race that never ends, keeping going to find out what happens next. As in all journalism, you have to be a nosy-parker. As you get older, you get a better grasp of the scale of things. You learn not to be hysterical, but to see things in perspective, perhaps with more wisdom and sagacity and better judgment. You don't say things unless you know they are true because you understand the impact of what you write."

There was something extremely touching last weekend about the byline photograph that accompanied a long and typically cogent report by Deedes from Sudan's forgotten war in the Upper Nile. It showed a very old man in a white sun hat and check shirt with his tie slightly awry, at least two generations older than the people he was writing about.

As someone who started as a foreign correspondent in Africa nearly 40 years ago, mixing with legendary figures such as Donald Wise (Daily Mirror), John Monks (Daily Express), Peter Younghusband (Daily Mail) and Gavin Young (The Observer), I can understand the bewitching "smell" (Leslie's word) that takes people back to the front line. I soon gave it up myself for editing, as did John Witherow (The Sunday Times) and Max Hastings (The Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard) after the Falklands war. Others give it up because they become jaded, covering what seems to be the same old story over and over again.

Some correspondents, however, acquire a second wind, discovering that their past is a useful reference point for what is happening now. Leslie agrees: "History never quite repeats itself, of course. You learn to sniff out the difference, but it helps to have been there before." For her, after three lifethreatening operations and four months in hospital, "the whiff of adrenaline is the best recuperation, because you have to get out of yourself." Her illness has not deterred her from returning to danger spots armed only with her battered old handbag. "I promised my husband I wouldn't go to Jenin," she grins, "but I didn't say anything about Bethlehem." She has to take numerous tablets and keeps them hidden in her bra - "I was nervous in Zimbabwe recently because I was told they strip-search you if you're caught."

One reason the convent- educated veteran isn't caught is that she does her homework. "I read a lot, do my research and, over time, you develop a whole string of contacts and fixers. In fact, you get to know them and their families and become involved in their lives."

For Deedes, there is "terrific fulfilment", according to his son, in remaining involved with countries he first saw 60 years ago. "It's like being a local reporter who has to answer to the people he writes about. It gives you a special-responsibility that 'firemen' reporters don't always feel."

One characteristic the two reporters share is an authoritative upper-class accent which may be a help in tight corners.

But why do they go on and on when they could enjoy a comfortable retirement? Jeremy Deedes says his father relishes "the excitement of reality. He says he wants to put something on the right side of the ledger for when he meets his maker".

Leslie says simply: "Because it's the most interesting job in the world. I remember being in East Germany in 1989 when the communist world started to implode. It was thrilling to be the only person on the east of the wall. I filled much of the paper and complained to David English that I was exhausted. 'Don't complain to me, woman,' he said. 'I shouldn't be paying you. You should be paying me.' He was right. My husband thinks I should be writing neat little essays about supermarket trolleys, but I'll go on until I'm too ill to do it, or I'm asked not to, or I'm felled by a bullet."

The final word goes to Deedes: "Getting into a dangerous place and then escaping - well, it's adventure, better than sex, especially at my age."