British soldiers in Afghanistan.
Feature
Life under fire
by Diana Wichtel
Continued from page 1...
Lamb was an intern on the Financial Times in 1987 when she first interviewed Bhutto. This led to an invitation to Bhutto’s wedding, a stellar kick-off to a career as a foreign correspondent. The friendship wavered when Lamb wrote critically of Bhutto’s government in the 90s. “She felt that you were either with her or against her.” There was disillusionment, too, on a personal level. In Pakistan, if a woman was raped, she had to produce four male witnesses or be prosecuted for sex outside marriage. “So I met all these young women in jail in Lahore and Karachi and I couldn’t believe that Benazir wasn’t going to do anything about it. She did free some, but didn’t change the law in any way.”
The relationship thawed when Bhutto sent Lamb a wedding gift in 1999. “She could be very imperious. When I went to Pakistan for her wedding, I saw her receiving people in their gardens in her village. They were all, like, kissing her feet. I was shocked. She’d talked to me about being the democrat and everything. It didn’t look like I imagined.” But she was also brilliant, warm and very funny. “Yes, I liked her very much.”
‘I had cried when I found out that I was pregnant because it meant missing the war in Yugoslavia,” wrote Lamb, in an essay jauntily entitled “Cupcakes and Kalashnikovs”. She described how, with the premature Lourenço in intensive care and caesarean stitches straining, she went to interview Pinochet. Not everyone was impressed with this professional zeal. “All articles about ‘juggling’ career and motherhood are pretty nauseating,” sneered fellow journalist Lynn Barber, of what she called Lamb’s “self-publicising” essay.
“She made it sound like I’d gone abroad rather than gone somewhere half an hour away,” says Lamb indignantly. “I think I was out of the hospital for three hours.” She’d have got less condemnation if she’d popped out for a fag and a pint. But criticism has never stopped Lamb from being frank about the work-home dilemma. “God knows what kind of mum he thinks I am. He says ‘bye bye’ every time I walk into the room,” she wrote in her diary. When Bhutto’s bus was bombed, her son was seven, watching it all on television with his dad. “Lourenço had asked matter-of-factly, ‘Do you think Mummy survived?’”
Yes, sighs Lamb, “To a lot of people it looks … bad.” But her husband works from home and her mother is close by. “When I’m back, I work from home and I’m with my son the whole time.” People don’t raise these issues with male foreign correspondents. “We haven’t got very far in sexual equality if we’re still asking those kinds of questions.”
Some good came from the attacks. They drove Lamb’s mother, firmly a stay-at-home mum, to write a letter to the editor. “I always assumed my mother was very critical of the fact that I work full-time. And she wrote in this letter how she thought, when I gave birth, how on earth was this going to work? This woman’s always away and has this crazy life. But now she sees that Lourenço is such a happy, well-balanced child, it’s made her completely rethink. Was it right, all those years ago, to have thought that you had to give every-thing up? I was really touched.”
Lamb’s mother must have nerves of steel. Her daughter has been in some tight spots. There was the 2006 ambush in southern Afghanistan. Even the crack British paratroopers she was with thought they were going to die as they were surrounded by Taleban unimpressed with the planned “hearts and minds” exercise. “Two and half hours running with RPG [rocket-propelled grenades] and Kalashnikov fire – you thought, there’s no way we’re going to get out of this.” As they dived into a trench, Lamb dropped her notebook and almost got hit trying to retrieve it. “Which was completely mad. But in 20 years of being a journalist, I had never lost a notebook and I felt somehow naked without it.”
Then there was her flak jacket. “It was blue with ‘PRESS’ across the front in white, so I was much more visible than any army people.” They really need to do something about those, she muses. “I did think quite a lot we’re just going to die here. And I was angry. I bloody didn’t want to die in this muddy field.” Help finally arrived and they got out. She made it home in time to prepare ham sandwiches for her son’s birthday party.
As we speak, she’s fending off an editor intent on sending her back to the avenger’s tragedy that is Zimbabwe, the most heartbreaking place she’s been. “Definitely. It’s a story that really has made me wake up in the middle of the night remembering faces of people that I’ve met, who seem to have absolutely no hope and to be resigned to what’s happening to them. You think it can’t get any worse … inflation is the highest in the world, it’s got the worst life expectancy, and all these people are barely able to scrape together even a meal of a thin cup of porridge a day. It can’t go on like this, and then it does.”
