Christina Lamb, a reporter for the Sunday Times, played a role in the last post about Princess Diana’s work against land mines. When Diana traveled to Angola to see for herself the damage the mines were doing to the civilian population, Lamb was one of a number of journalists who went along.
Like the other journalists, Lamb was rather cynical about the whole enterprise, seeing it more as political grandstanding than humanitarian mission on Diana’s part. She began to change her mind when she saw how Diana interacted with and was able to comfort the most horribly mutilated victims.
Before the trip was over, in fact, Lamb had lost her cynicism entirely. In Diana: Finally, the Complete Story, Sarah Bradford describes the reporter’s change of heart, partly in Lamb’s own words:
“By [then], Christina Lamb admitted, the visit had ‘wiped out’ all her past cynicism about Diana. ‘That Lady-with-the-Lamp performance wasn’t just for the cameras,’ she wrote.
“Once, at a hospital in Huambo when the photographers had all flown back to their air-conditioned hotels to wire their pictures, I watched Diana, unaware that any journalists were still present, sit and hold the hand of Helena Ussova, a seven-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 young girl struggled through her pain to ask me if the beautiful lady was an angel. . . . At the end of the Angola trip Diana said that the lasting image she’d take away was of that terribly ill young girl.'”
Despite the horror of land mine injuries, Diana managed to keep a sense of humor. Later in the same year she visited Angola, Bradford writes, Diana went to Bosnia, another country polluted by abandoned land mines. She and her party were joined there by Jerry White and Ken Rutherford, both Americans.
White and Rutherford were the founders of the Landmine [sic] Survivors Network. The men were themselves victims of land mines. Their encounters with the explosives left White with one leg. Rutherford lost both legs.
When they met Diana, the men were wearing artificial limbs. They believed it would not be proper to appear before royalty without them. However, the prostheses made it difficult for them to climb into the back of the Landcruiser in which Diana was riding.
As they struggled, Diana turned to them and said, “You can take your legs off, boys!”
Not long after that incident, Diana would travel to a Sarajevo cemetery, where she would find a mother at the grave of her son. The two women, strangers and unable to speak because of the language barrier, would embrace silently. “When we parted,” Bradford quotes a bystander as saying, “the widow seemed restored to life.”
When to laugh, when to weep, when to be silent: Princess Diana seemed to know. It was one of the qualities that has made the world remember her.
More about Diana’s charitable work is on view at Diana, A Celebration, at Union Station Kansas City through June 12, 2011. Tickets are available through all Ticketmaster locations, the Union Station ticket office, the Sprint Center box office and www.unionstation.org.
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