Small Wars Permitting

by Christina Lamb

  ‘It’s not easy,’ he said, ‘to put the whole history of a street in four lines.’ Secretly he worked with Geraldo, the local tilemaker, to paint the verses on tiles ready to place on the streets.

  But they had overlooked one thing. ‘The roads had no walls,’ laughs José. ‘There was nowhere to hang the tiles.’ Undeterred, he led a campaign to build street walls of local stone. Finally he and Geraldo crept out late one night and put up the tiled verses.

  The first most people in Gouveia knew of all this was waking up one Saturday morning to find that every street had its own plaque painted with a name and verse. That day was spent walking around, staring in wonder at each plaque and reading the verses to themselves and each other.

  Not everyone approved. José recalls: ‘Some people felt the poems on their streets were not as good as on others. One complained that there were too many verses. Maybe I did go a bit too far giving poems to all the wells, the chapel and the public water fountains.’

  That night, it was decided that being the Village of Verse was a real coup for Gouveia. So it has proved. Portuguese villages like to be individual, each with its own yearly festival. By becoming the Village of Verse, Gouveia put tremendous pressure on the surrounding villages.

  Emergency meetings were held at village halls all over the area. Fontanelas, next door to Gouveia, even commissioned José to pen some poetry. But, as José admits: ‘My heart just wasn’t in it. There can only be one village of verse.’

  Yes, I Was a Cynic until I Met Her – Diana

  Sunday Times, 7 September 1997

  LIKE MOST thirty-something women, I grew up with Princess Diana. We were just 16 and discovering the other sex when she glided up the aisle in that Emanuel dress and, though my friends and I shrieked with laughter at the creases when she stepped out of the carriage, in those days we, too, dreamt of finding our fairytale prince as we clutched our commemorative wedding mugs.

  Some of us went to the hairdresser afterwards clutching magazine pictures and asking shyly for a ‘Lady Di’ and our first highlights; others with less pocket money experimented at home with Sun-In. Following in Diana’s footsteps, we bought the pedal-pushers and the woolly jumpers patterned with sheep. Like Diana – and quite unlike what our mothers had told us – we gradually discovered that there was more to life than gilded carriages and bridal gowns, and that the best place to feel good might be the local gym.

  As we got older, went to university, took jobs and even got married ourselves, most of us formed a love-hate relationship towards Diana, detesting what we saw of her as a control freak, but impressed with her ever-changing image and the way she embraced those with Aids or leprosy.

  She made it all right to have eating disorders or need therapy – if someone that beautiful could have an image problem then we had every right to be screwed up. The stick-thin girl in our class whose mysterious absences we were never allowed to talk about, we all remembered with guilt. I was living abroad when the famous ‘alone in front of the Taj Mahal’ photo appeared of Diana, and a friend who had just broken up with her fiancé faxed it to me with the message: ‘And I thought I had problems!’

  But in an era when we were striving to become career women as can-do as any male, Diana was just too feminine and emotional. So in January, when the editor of the Sunday Times asked me to cover her trip to Angola, I had very mixed feelings.

  When I told my friends where I was off to, they laughed, knowing me as someone more used to reporting on wars, with little patience for the media obsession with Di’s latest look. Having seen first hand the terrible effect of landmines in Afghanistan and Mozambique, I cared deeply about the issue her trip was intended to publicise, although I feared it would be a vast publicity stunt. At the same time I was intrigued to have a closer look at this woman with just one CSE whose fans were so diverse that they even included my hippie friend Sarina who knits jumpers in Bolivia and always asked me to send pictures, and Tanya, who is so ambitious that when we were students she had written a list of ten things to achieve by the age of 30, including becoming a company director and making her first million.

  Standing in the baking sun at Luanda airport waiting for the

  Princess to arrive, I remembered the footage of Diana assisting in the heart operation at Harefield in full make-up. I scowled, fearing this was going to be more of the same. I was pleasantly surprised then when she turned up in jeans, white shirt and no make-up, and consoled myself over how good she looked by snidely spotting the Armani label. As she sped off in a Red Cross jeep, forty cameras in hot pursuit, a bemused Angolan selling chewing gum tugged my sleeve and asked who she was. It took me a while to understand that after thirty-five years of armed conflict and civil war which had torn the nation apart, this was one of the few countries in the world where Princess Diana was not an instantly recognisable figure.

  It was all the more remarkable then to see her effect on the hundreds of mutilated mine victims we were to come into contact with that week. She’d come, she said, determined to work, and work she did. The Red Cross whisked us from one hospital to the next, each with ever more horrific scenes of skeletal figures with missing arms, missing legs and half-blown-off heads – victims of some of the 16 million landmines scattered around the country. Many of the injuries were so gruesome that I could not look, despite years of Third World reporting. But Diana never turned her head away. Instead, she had something I’d only ever seen before in Nelson Mandela – a kind of aura that made people want to be with her, and a completely natural, straight-from-the-heart sense of how to bring hope to those who seemed to us to have little to live for. As I speak Portuguese, I interpreted for her a few times and felt absurdly pleased to have those familiar blue eyes turned on me, knowing I’d tell my friends they were even bluer than they appeared on television.

  It was not an easy trip. Decades of civil war had turned much of Angola into bombed-out ghost towns and its people seemed hard and unforgiving. In summer it is infernally hot and dusty; the streets of Luanda were piled high with stinking rubbish and flies buzzed around us non-stop; every other person seemed to be an amputee, and yet I never once saw Diana express fatigue or ask for a drink. OK, so she had brought her own butler, but I was jealous as hell of her ability to stay cool and neatly pressed – a stark contrast to my own sweaty and dishevelled appearance. Just how remarkable was her adaptation

  became evident talking to the royal hacks who sat in the bar of the Hotel Presidente every night, wistfully recalling previous jaunts to Klosters and Barbuda, and longing for the Diana of old who went to balls and banquets and wore Versace instead of flak jackets.

  That trip wiped out all my past cynicism about Diana, to my own astonishment as well as that of friends familiar with my views. That Lady-with-the-Lamp performance wasn’t just for the benefit of the cameras. Of course, she knew all right when there was a good shot to be had, always gravitated to the woman with twin babies and no legs, or the cute young girl. But I wasn’t sure it mattered, if these pictures made people back home aware of the reality of life in this forgotten nation.

  Once, at a hospital in Huambo when the photographers had all flown back to their air-conditioned hotel to wire their pictures, I watched Diana, unaware that any journalists were still present, sit and hold the hand of Helena Ussova, a 7-year-old who’d had her intestines blown to pieces by a mine. For what seemed an age the pair just sat, no words needed. When Diana finally left, the small girl struggled through her pain to ask me if the beautiful lady was an angel.

  I thought of Helena when I woke up last Sunday to the incomprehensible news that Diana had been killed. At the end of the Angola trip Diana said that the lasting image she’d take away was of that terribly ill young girl. Both of them are dead now and my lasting image will be the two of them just sitting together hand in hand, finding peace. Diana wasn’t my friend – I’d only met her that one week – yet I, like so many women, somehow feel that she could have been. At one lunch in Huambo that I’d sneaked into
because I had a Red Cross watch, Diana poured me coffee and insisted that I fill my plate from the buffet, saying, ‘You’re too thin.’

  It has been odd this week to be abroad and watch on television my country transformed from the land of stiff upper lip to one where it’s more than OK to cry in public. If I lived in England, I don’t know if I would have gone to lay flowers among the fields of bouquets outside Kensington Palace and sign the book of condolence at St James’s. Most of my friends went and told me how moved they were by the peace of the place and how, instead of just biting their lips, they shed tears – in some cases the first time publicly in their lives, a fact which by itself shows me how much one woman changed a nation. My friend Tanya has blacked out her website on the Internet, turning it into a tribute to Diana; Julie has cancelled her holiday to watch the funeral; Jane is to run the marathon for charity in her name; and Emma has named her newborn daughter Diana.

  We don’t feel ambiguous about Diana any more – she was a modern woman, always reinventing herself, balancing the demands of being a single mother and having her own life, and looking beautiful at the same time. We grew up with her and now we must grow old alone.

  A Zanzibari Wedding

  Sunday Telegraph, 13 June 1999

  When my husband of all of two minutes was asked to tick on our marriage certificate whether he was monogamous, polygamous, or potentially polygamous, he hesitated and I feared this could be a very short alliance. But he picked the right box, and we emerged into the sweltering Zanzibari heat at the outbreak of the monsoon somewhat sticky, but husband and wife.

  Unlike this season’s more high-profile wedding couples, we did not commission a coat of arms, nor did we run a marathon en route, and decided against inviting 6,000 members of the public. Our only witnesses were the priest’s wife, our taxi driver and a man at the back of the church dusting palm leaves in preparation for Palm Sunday.

  Both in our thirties, we had watched friends dedicate more time to

  organising weddings than NATO appeared to have put into its plans for bombing Serbia. This, we decided, was our day: rather than fret over table linen, seating plans and drunken uncles with radical political views, we would do as we pleased.

  The idea of being married in Zanzibar came about last summer when Paulo and I holidayed there, captivated by its silver sands, and air redolent with cinnamon, clove and vanilla. Long fascinated by Livingstone, I had been eager to visit the house where he stayed before setting off on expeditions – and dismayed to find it in a state of decay, the garden an evil-smelling sanctuary for giant tortoises. But the Cathedral Church of Christ where he preached against slavery was a different matter. Its crucifix is carved from the tree under which the great explorer was buried in Zambia after his ill-fated last journey in search of the Nile, and we decided it would be perfect for a wedding.

  The first problem was finding the priest. Christians keep a low profile on the strongly Islamic island, and Canon Godda turned out to be in hospital in Dar es Salaam, recovering from malaria. By the time he returned, our holiday was ending. He was taken aback by our request, saying, ‘This is not Las Vegas,’ and pointed out that he would need three weeks for the calling of the banns. But he agreed that if we could provide ‘Christian references’ he could do the service at some future date.

  We returned to England and the distraction of new jobs and house-buying. Only occasionally, when I caught a whiff of clove from the basket of Zanzibari spices in the kitchen cupboard or saw a picture of a coconut palm, did I think wistfully of the far-away island in the Indian Ocean.

  Then winter came. After eleven years living in hot countries, January and February seemed months without light or sky, and we found ourselves drawn to windows of travel agents with posters of white beaches and lists of exotic destinations.

  Consulting the Zanzibar guidebook, we realised the monsoon was due to start at the end of March, so we would have to act soon. We attended Sunday service at our local church in north London, charmed the vicar into giving us references, finally managed to get through to Canon Godda in Zanzibar, and booked our flights.

  To give time for the banns meant having our honeymoon before the wedding, but at least we would be tanned for the wedding photographs. We spent the first few days on safari among Masai who told us when they wish to marry they must kill a lion and present its head to the father of their intended.

  Arriving in the Zanzibari capital of Stone Town after a week in a hut on a remote beach, we began wedding preparations. In the narrow lanes of the jewellery bazaar, amid tiny Omani shops selling yellow-gold bangles, we found Mr Suriya to make us rings and inscribe them with the word ‘Zanzibar’ and the date. Through a wooden doorway I saw a woman having her hair straightened in a room plastered with magazine pages. I wandered in. Communication was problematic as the owner spoke no English, and my Swahili was limited to ordering two beers (mbili biri) or asking small children their names. But somehow I emerged with hands and wrists painted in swirling flower designs with black henna and red mehndi traditional for a Zanzibari wedding. That night, drinking gin and tonics in the Livingstone Bar, the only real drink for the tropics, we heard a large crack. We ran to the shutters to see the heavens opening with a force that turned stone alleys into rushing rivers. The monsoon had come early and we feared our day would be spoilt.

  Wading back to the hotel, I found an urgent message from my news desk at the Sunday Telegraph. Having been cut off from news all week, I wondered if something had happened. It had – my foreign editor, Con Coughlin, told me NATO had started bombing Yugoslavia and that the verdict had been given on General Pinochet, both stories I had been covering. Could I make a few calls? ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit busy tomorrow,’ I replied to his evident shock. ‘We’re getting married.’ Even he thought that was a good excuse.

  The wedding day dawned fine and cloudless. Breakfasting on papaya, I watched the dhows sail past and small children shrieking as they washed in the sea. It was hard to imagine that I would soon be a wife. I had always been a free spirit, moving country – and relationships – as the mood took me, priding myself that all my possessions could fit into one suitcase.

  Had there been relatives and friends fussing, I might have panicked. Instead I returned to the beauty salon where, despite our lack of a common language, a garland of white jasmine was waiting for my hair. The owner of the salon abandoned her customer and began weaving my hair into tiny plaits, fixing them with coloured beads. Soon the customer had been enlisted to help, and friends of the owner dropped in to see the mzungu – white person – who was marrying in Zanzibar. My hennaed hands were examined critically and my fair hair pulled and twisted. Finally, the garland was placed on top and I was ready. My new friends wanted to make me up as well, but seeing the box of scarlet lipsticks, strawberry pink blusher and thick black kohl, I escaped.

  Back at the hotel, I pulled on my ivory linen dress and high-heeled shoes, and jumped into a taxi. Entering the church five minutes late, I was disturbed to find it empty, apart from the man polishing the palm leaves. Then I heard voices. I hid behind the palms as Paulo, the priest and the witness passed by. But there was a problem – the photographer hadn’t arrived. Eventually, the taxi driver was dispatched to find another, and both came at once. A friend of the priest appeared with his Instamatic, and we suddenly had more photographers than guests.

  With everything finally ready, I strode up the aisle, noticing Canon Godda signalling frantically. His wife, my bridesmaid and witness, was having difficulty keeping up. I slowed down and made my way more serenely to the altar. We exchanged vows and rings engraved with ZBR, which hadn’t quite been the idea, and to my surprise tears pricked my eyes. I did not even protest when the priest’s sermon included the exhortations, ‘Paulo, you have had many women in your life. But now it is over. Christina, Paulo is the head of your household and must be obeyed.’

  Clutching the certificate proclaiming us man and wife (and committing Paulo to monogamy), we wandered back
through Stone Town. Local men broke off from card games and bottle-top backgammon to congratulate us, asking Paulo, ‘How many wives do you have?’

  That night we dined on a rooftop overlooking the harbour, lying on cushions like sultans while waiters brought us titbits and Swahili musicians serenaded us. Listening to the muezzin’s call, and watching swallows swoop and dive in the setting sun, it seemed the most romantic place in the world.

  There was only one cloud on the horizon. How would my mother react when she learnt that she had missed watching her only child walk up the aisle? She wasn’t amused. But surprisingly, friends were also miffed. ‘You eloped!’ they said accusingly. Looking at the bottle of Zanzibari sand on the mantelpiece, I wouldn’t have done it any other way.

  Tea with Pinochet

  New Statesman, 26 July 1999

  WHEN I CALLED a cab to take me to Wentworth Golf Estate, the driver expressed surprise that I was carrying no golf clubs, but seemed satisfied with my explanation that I was visiting someone for tea. I told him that I was a journalist from the Sunday Telegraph, but it was only when I directed him past one of the estate’s dancing fountains to a leafy cul-de-sac guarded by two Scotland Yard officers in a white Portakabin that it dawned on him exactly who I was going to see.

  ‘S’pose you’ll be going to interview Milosevic next week,’ he growled, as we pulled up at the tall iron gates of 28 Lindale Close, residence of one Mr A. Pinochet since last November. Feeling guilty, I gave him a large tip and was shepherded by another Scotland Yard officer to join my editor, Dominic Lawson, on the general’s patio.