WAR PANTS

Posted by Lianne Gutcher at 13:52 on 22 Mar 2010

• Print
• Share
• Comment

Winter is drawing to a close in Kabul and thank goodness for that; my underwear trousseau lies in tatters.

The first casualty was a bra I washed by hand -  like you're supposed to -  flung across the stove to benefit from the residual heat and, of course, forgot. It was quite remarkable, when I lit the stove next, to see how the material bubbled, and how some bits melted and dripped onto the floor, while other bits sort of caramelised and stuck to the stove forever more. Burnt bra smells... not so nice.

Then, with increasing regularly I noticed holes appearing in my knickers - holes where there shouldn't be holes.  It was only by having a discussion with a friend - briefs also in tatters - that I realised my cleaning lady had taken to ironing my clothes dry. Kabul houses are just too cold during the winter for clothes to dry quickly enough for assiduous cleaning ladies. So they speed up the process by ironing them dry - a sort of scorched pants policy.

One chilly morning, pulling on a pair of quite nice blue knickers, I discovered yet another vent that wasn't part of the original design.  Admittedly this pair was more than 10 years old and the matching bra had long since been chucked but I felt they could have been good for quite a few more wears.
 
I found myself thinking of a piece I had read in Vogue years ago in which war correspondent Marie Colvin wrote about how she always wears exquisite lingerie - we're talking La Perla and Myla - even in the most filthy and inhospitable of environments.

"I wish I could be a bit more like Marie," I sighed to myself, fiddling distractedly with the singed elastic.

I tried to google Marie's piece to reread it, to no avail.

Then on Burns Supper evening one of my guests phoned and asked if he could bring his colleagues William and Marie.

"Bring whoever you want," I snapped. "The cat's eating the haggis. Gotta go. Bye." Or words to that effect.

'Marie' turned out to be Ms Colvin.

After a few glasses of whisky, I sidled up to her. "Marie, can I ask you about your underwear?" I told her I had read her Vogue piece. I had slightly misremembered the story of the East Timorese militias who stole all her La Perla knickers and bras (leaving behind a radio, tape recorder and flak jacket), and how she put in expenses to The Sunday Times for loss of underwear. To my delight she recounted it first hand. Even better, she said she'd ask Alexandra Shulman of Vogue, her friend, to email a copy of the piece to me. Marie was a good as her word. The piece arrived in my inbox shortly after.

This is the passage that had lodged in my memory. Marie wrote of her Dili experience in Vogue: "You are thinking, 'Okay, but what were you doing in a war zone with La Perla underwear?' That's certainly the question that was raised when I put in my expenses to The Sunday Times for loss of .... underwear. The query came back: can underwear really cost that much? The foreign-desk manager is... ferocious in defence of her correspondents: a brisk, 'Marie's can', shut them up."

Marie continues: "I blush only slightly in trying to explain.... Simply it makes me feel good. It is easy to lose yourself in my job. I am passionate about trying to write a story that will somehow communicate to the world the toll war takes on people, but I end up dirty, tired, despairing... If I have lacy, beautiful lingerie under all the muck and tiredness, I, and I alone, know it's there and somehow it cheers me. Weirdly, its defiant - I'm not, to myself anyway, this smelly, exhausted pseudo man."

I think I am going to take a leaf out of Marie's book and pop into Agent Provocateur the next time I am somewhere civilised - and keep my purchases away from the stove and Lalima, my cleaning lady.  

And by the way, if pants go missing in Afghanistan - be they mine, Marie's or yours - I know who's got them.

It's the PRT underwear gnomes. They're out in force.

• Next entry
• Previous entry