The news from Afghanistan...a reporter's tale of conflict, pain and resilience

A family of six had been killed in just one house – three of them small children. Jill McGivering, who was embedded with British forces in Afghanistan's Helmand Province, says she will never

forget the sight of their bodies, so tiny and wrapped in cloth ready for burial.

It was September 2007, and after 20 years of reporting for the BBC from conflict zones around the world, there was something more than usually distressing about these civilian deaths at the hands of British forces who had believed they were under fire from Talilban fighters inside the house.

"What could I have done?" she says. "Nothing, I was just an observer, but I felt involved and guilty." Seeing the bombing had left her with a strong but misplaced sense of responsibility.

Yet no young men were among the dead, and the foreign correspondent was left wondering how the killing of innocents had happened. Haunted by the cadavers of children, she had to find out more. McGivering climbed through the rubble remains of the house, which still bore the tattered vestiges of everyday life – a rag of curtain, a fragment of mirror, and school books, a map, dictionary and family photo album inside a battered trunk.

The villagers had fled, but elders were called to a meeting the next day with the troops, and relatives were told they would be given compensation for the dead – an accepted practice locally. Jill spotted a lone young woman sitting at a distance, rocking a crying baby. Someone said she was the mother of the dead children. McGivering approached and offered her a word of sympathy before men appeared and shooed the journalist away.

Not long after this incident, McGivering filed her reports and travelled home to London. But the dead children and their grief-stricken mother were still on her mind, and she wanted the woman to know, somehow, that they were not forgotten. Returning to Afghanistan the following year, though, she was told it would be impossible to go back to that part of Helmand Province, as the area was now too unsafe.

Having ruminated on this experience for three years, an altered version of the bombing of the village has found its way into McGivering's first novel, The Last Kestrel.

As an award-winning journalist with an impeccable BBC pedigree, Jill McGivering is better placed than most other writers to give difficult stories about the realities of war-torn Afghanistan authenticity and immediacy. In her case, the advice to first time novelists to "write what you know" was always likely to steer her towards war, clashing cultures and the stories of ordinary people caught up in politics and bloodshed they might not always understand.

The story follows the parallel experiences of Ellen, a magazine journalist embedded with British forces, who is also determined to investigate the unexplained killing of her interpreter and friend Jalil; Hasina, an Afghani wife and mother set on saving the life of her son Aref, who has been drawn into a network of underground fighters; Karam, a local big shot with dubious motives, and Mack, head of the British forces in the province. Each character is well-drawn, a mixture of strength and frailty, and the plot – given a dash of artistic licence which allows Ellen more freedom to roam than any journalist might realistically be allowed – has the smack of authority on everyday Afghan life, customs and beliefs that come from the author knowing her terrain.

Ellen Thomas is an entirely fictional character, insists McGivering, who was born in Otley and won a scholarship to grammar school in Bradford before studying English Literature at King's College, London. Now 46, she worked in print journalism here and in Hong Kong before starting a BBC trainee scheme in her late 20s.

Since covering the 2001 invasion, the journalist has been back to Afghanistan five times for around a fortnight each, and has twice been embedded in Helmand. The main point of her novel – the effects of war on innocent people – is a reflection of her reportage for the BBC.

"Most correspondents are military experts, but I have never been interested in the machinery of war, the guns and all of that.

"I'm interested in how we tell the stories of the Afghan people,

who are often left out of the debate on how their country can be helped. At the end of the day, it's their country.

"I want to talk to ordinary people, see how society is changing, meet the elders and the women, and hear how they feel about promises made to help rebuild their country and about their losses. Society is much more multi-layered there, and you have to understand that. You can't learn about it by just running in and out and sort of 'mugging' people for information. It takes time and you must be courteous and respectful. After all, these people have been through a lot and they don't have to speak to you."

There's been much discussion of how reporters can retain journalistic independence when their reports come out of war zones where they are embedded with the military, meaning they can go only where the top brass allow them to go and always under guard.

McGivering says she has never felt unnecessarily restricted. "I've been allowed to visit prisons and women's centres and many other places when I've asked. I've found the military very helpful and can't think of one request that's been turned down without a very good reason, or of one occasion when someone has started to tell me something the military might not like and the conversation has been stopped. When a request has been turned down, it has been because of a safety risk or logistical reason. I don't see the military as an obstacle."

Another of the journalists in the novel is very much a "war junkie", who sees himself almost as one of the soldiers. Jill says she has known the odd male correspondent of that ilk. "You do sometimes get that 'Boy's Own' type, who is excited by war, who will take photographs of things they see over there on their mobile phone.

"There's no doubt that being in a place where you are in danger makes reality heightened, and everything else can seem a bit monochrome. "

Jill has gone out on operations with soldiers and slept rough in villages away from base camp, but in the novel Ellen is given much more freedom than a journalist would normally enjoy. She agrees to accompany Hasina out into the countryside to look for the son the Afghan mother believes may be wounded and hiding out there. The two women cannot speak each other's language, but they reach some mutual understanding and respect during a frightening adventure.

The fictional military commander Mack is potentially mixed up in a conspiracy, creating a dodgy moral order he convinces himself is acceptable to keep his men safe. For McGivering, one of the most rewarding aspects of writing the novel was the ability to impose a moral order on both plot and characters. "I have seen some terrible things in war, and when you're in a terrible place it's hard to believe human beings can do such things to each other. But in creating the story and resolving certain conflicts, I was able to show how good people can do bad things they believe to be right at the time, and bad people can have moments of goodness. Each one of us has many layers, good and bad."

McGivering, who is currently reporting on the floods in Pakistan, hopes to return to investigative reporting on Afghanistan, with some of the spadework done from this end using a chain of contacts.

"Afghanistan is an immensely complicated story you can't fully explain, but I feel committed to continue trying to understand it and tell the story to others. Any assessment of Afghanistan that's black-and-white or short and simple is going to be inadequate. Whatever solutions it finds for itself, they are going to take a long time to achieve.

"There's so much to be done – building a proper police force, justice system, health care and education for a start. It's hard to bring development without proper security, and it's very easy for people to say that certain things should have been done differently nine years ago. But after 30 years of war this brutalised and very poor society deserves better than it's got. I really hope civilians become part of the debate.

"The novel is not my coded way of saying what I think of the situation in Afghanistan, but I did want to have a strong, determined, brave, resilient Afghan female at the centre of it. I've met so many women like Hasina."

The Last Kestrel by Jill McGivering is published by Blue Door, 12.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call 0800 0153232

or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage costs 2.75.