British soldiers in Afghanistan.
Feature
Life under fire
by Diana Wichtel
Christina Lamb has a hell of a day job that takes her to some of the world’s most dangerous places.
Christina Lamb has a born story-teller’s gift for transmuting the stuff of everyday life into a ripping yarn. It helps that, for Lamb, everyday life can include a potentially lethal cocktail of exotic locations and high explosives.
Plenty of material, then, for her latest book, Small Wars Permitting. It’s part memoir, part dispatches from the frontlines of life as a foreign correspondent, adventurer and mum. The title comes from the proviso she adds when accepting invitations. During 20 years of reporting for such papers as the Financial Times and the Sunday Times, Lamb has been ambushed by the Taleban, survived bombings in Pakistan and been arrested in, or banished from, some of the world’s more appalling destinations. She was sent a wedding gift by Benazir Bhutto. Her son, as a baby, received a hand-inscribed book on Chile from General Augusto Pinochet. “My life, I believe, is charmed,” she writes.
Lamb is in France when we speak, on a skiing holiday with her Portuguese husband and their eight-year-old son, Lourenço. “It’s the first holiday we’ve had in ages. I’d be divorced if I didn’t …”
Fair enough. Hell of a day job. “Obviously, I’ve had to see a lot of horrible things I wish hadn’t seen,” she says evenly. And yet … Small Wars is also about the fatalistic allure of waiting to board a “flying coffin” at Dubai Terminal 2: “That’s where you go to catch planes to the bad places.”
In other words, although she wouldn’t mind changing the world along the way, she does it for fun. “I love the travel, I love the adventure … That’s why I wanted to include a big mixture in there, including crazy things in Brazil and Africa,” she says of the book.
There’s the time she was sent to Lagos for the day – yes, really – to background the story of Damilola Taylor, the 10-year-old Nigerian boy who escaped Third World deprivation to be stabbed and left to die in a council estate stairwell in Peckham. Lamb has to be back for a wedding. The clock ticks. She gets hopelessly lost. She walks into a pothole and injures her ankle. The wheelchair that someone finds gets a flat tyre as she makes a kamikaze dash for the closing door of her plane home. “I got out and started hopping manically,” she writes.
Her account is two parts tragedy, one part Bridget Jones. Thanks to extraordinary coincidences – a woman at the clinic where she gets her ankle seen to is from Damilola’s town – Lamb gets her story. “Serendipity and luck play an awfully big part in being a foreign correspondent. I think maybe you need to learn to trust that luck and to be open to things,” she says. “I’ve been very lucky, even in terms of being in countries when things have happened.”
It’s an odd definition of “lucky” that encompasses being on board the bus in Karachi with Bhutto when it was bombed last year. Bhutto was celebrating her return to Pakistan after eight years in exile and survived – that time. She had personally invited Lamb. “Benazir said, ‘You’ll be the only journalist on the bus with us.’” Great. “Then I thought, ‘Do I really want to be on this bus?’ She’d gone on about assassination threats. I thought, ‘This is a really bad idea.’”
But Lamb has little patience for waving safely from the sidelines. “I saw the bus starting to drive away and I just suddenly had to be there. I persuaded the police to let me through the gates, went running after the bus and got them to pull me up.” The scene was not without its less-than-epic elements. “I got massively groped going through, which happens sometimes in large crowds in Pakistan.”
She was on the top of the bus. “I thought, ‘This is very exposed.’ But everybody seemed to be dancing and singing, [and there were] a lot of people with children. After a while, you forgot about danger.” Then the bomb went off. Among the many casualties were three from the top of the bus. “Trying not to look at a severed arm with its palm facing upward, I ran down a side street, just wanting to be away from the carnage,” she writes. “Not until later would I realise there were bits of burnt flesh in my hair.”
Then Bhutto was assassinated just after Christmas. Lamb was on a family outing in Portugal. “All these people dressed up as elves, and Santas were coming up and wanting to be jolly. I was trying to get out and conscious at the same time that I was there with my parents and my son. We were supposed to be having a fun day out. I didn’t want to spoil everything.”
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