Christina Lamb: How I combine being a mother and war reporter

After dropping my bags at home and drinking my first decent coffee in a month, I drive to Sainsbury's to buy ham and sliced bread. I make ham sandwiches for 20 seven-year-olds, twice as many as anyone will eat, then I take them and a cool box of drinks to nearby Palewell Park, where we are having a football party.

Some of Lourenço's classmates are pointing at me, whispering. They have seen me on the front page of The Sunday Times that morning and know that four days ago I was almost killed by the Taliban - the "baddies", I hear one of them explain. My mother is there, looking shocked, though I had phoned from Heathrow to warn her before she bought the paper. My husband, who is Portuguese, has said nothing. This, after all, is what I do.

It is a sunny afternoon and I throw myself into plying children with drinks and ice creams. I want to keep hugging the blue-eyed birthday boy who I thought I would never see again, but I know he will complain that it is "embarrassment-making". My jeans and long printed smock are covering cuts, bruises and scratches that I will still be picking weeks later. My phone beeps with text messages - a mix of horrified concern from those who have seen the newspaper and jokes about the state of my marriage after the Portugal-England match from those who haven't.

I have spent almost 20 years living on the edge. I have been pinned down by Soviet tanks in a trench in Kandahar; narrowly missed a brick that smashed through my windscreen on the West Bank; navigated through west African roadblocks manned by redeyed, drug-crazed boys with human teeth round their necks and Kalashnikovs in their hands; come under sniper fire in Iraq; and survived a car crash in a lawless gold-mining settlement in the Amazon.

All around me people have died. My life, I believe, is charmed.

But in Afghanistan, this time round, I came as close as possible to being killed. The Paras, with whom I was ambushed in Helmand, were so convinced we were about to be "rolled up" that they talked of saving their last bullets for themselves. For two and a half hours we were under fire, running through muddy fields and throwing ourselves in and out of ditches, dodging rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and Kalashnikov fire. As bullets fizzed past my ears, sending up clods of earth all around me, for the first time I really believed I would die. And I swore if I ever got out, I would never go back.

But two months later, I avoided the disapproving expressions of my husband and son, and again lugged out of the cupboard the war bag with flak jacket, helmet, sleeping bag, medical kit and satellite phone, and was back on a plane to Afghanistan. Theatre tickets and dinner party invitations were cancelled; as always, I'd accepted with the proviso "small wars permitting".

I phoned my mum, who longs for the day I will get a "proper job", ignored her sigh of "not again", and begged her to take Lourenço for the coming weekends. I'm lucky to have a supportive husband, who is also a journalist and works from home and knows how grumpy I get if there's something happening in one of my areas and I'm not there. But even he has his limits (like the time I booked us a romantic weekend in Marrakesh for his 40th, then ended up spending the first day covering nightclub bombings in Casablanca).

And so it was that on October 18 last year, when I should have been at a school parents' evening, I was instead on Benazir Bhutto's bus when it was bombed. The bus lurched like a ship and a blast of hot air threw us to the ground. Amazed to find I was unhurt, I scrambled to jump off the bus. I was lucky - three of the 15 of us on top were killed. Down below, the street was strewn with bloody body parts and the cheap plastic sandals of the poor.

I desperately wanted to call home, but we had been on the bus for nine hours and the battery on my mobile had died. I bitterly regretted the call I had made earlier to say "Hey, Mummy's on Benazir's bus!" Fortunately, a kind man took me into his house and let me use his phone.

At the Sheraton the next morning, having hardly slept, I woke to find the pillow dotted with charred black bits. To my horror I realised they were pieces of flesh. I stood under a scalding shower for what seemed like hours trying to wash them away. The memories, I knew, would not wash away so easily.

Why do it? I am not an alcoholic, or a heroin addict seeking another kind of fix, nor am I from a broken home. I care passionately about the people and the places I cover. But I am also a mother of a gorgeous, curly-haired boy, wife of a loving husband, daughter of devoted parents, part of a close circle of friends . . . I have no excuses.

For most working mums, guilt is part of life, and being away so much is hard. I hated it that I wasn't there to comfort Lourenço when the milkman was mown down by a car just outside our door. And it's awful when he says to me "you're leaving, Mummy".

You might think I'm selfish. But would you feel that about a male correspondent who was also a dad? There are female soldiers serving among the British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. If women are to do the same jobs as men, then there should not be different moral standards applied. For I love what I do.

Of course, becoming a mother did make me think about giving up. After Lourenço was born, I took a sabbatical (okay, so I took him down the Amazon), imagining I might not go back. But then 9/11 happened. When I heard the word Afghanistan, the land of my first assignment, it was as if a chill ran across my back and I knew I had to go.

Then he was just two and couldn't complain, though he did tell his nursery "my mummy lives on a plane". But it's harder now he's old enough to watch the news.

Last October, the morning after the Bhutto bus bombing, my husband told me they had been watching the procession on TV and seen the bombs and Lourenço had asked matter-of-factly, "Do you think Mummy survived?" I stared at the pile of blood-spattered clothes on the floor of my hotel room and wrote my resignation letter.

But the day I got back to London I participated in a Bar Council debate with Beatrice Mtetwa, the Zimbabwean human rights lawyer badly beaten up by Mugabe's thugs last year. She's one of the bravest women I know. She hugged me and thanked me for returning to Zimbabwe and helping keep it in the news. To quit would feel like abandoning the Beatrice Mtetwas of this world.

Perhaps the real answer lies in Dubai Terminal 2. It's where you catch planes to the bad places. The destination board lists places such as Kabul, Baghdad and Mogadishu, and the airlines have names you've never heard of like Chelyabinsk, Ossetia and Mahan. These airlines are so dodgy, their planes so old, that they are not allowed to land at the proper airport.

At Terminal 2, there is just one shop. People stuff baskets with Mars bars, batteries and tampons, for they don't know what they will get at the other end. Mostly they are Afghan drug dealers, aid workers, security guards and journalists. Instead of Samsonites on wheels, they have battered kitbags, black plastic crates of survival equipment, or, in the case of the Afghans, large cloth bundles. The ones with suits and briefcases are consultants being paid thousands of dollars for something called "capacity building", but they will board a special United Nations plane.

Some might be committed do-gooders; others are only doing it for money. "George Bush has paid off thousands of mortgages," a Scottish ex-Para says on his way to be a $1,000-a-day security consultant in Afghanistan after a long stint in Iraq.

There are a few that have a look on their face that I recognise. It's a sort of suburban restlessness. These are the people whose eyes gleam when they see the name "Kish" on the destination board. Where is that? Kish island in Iran, someone tells me. It sounds intriguing. I know one day I will try to go there.

When I came back from narrowly escaping the bombing of Benazir's bus, I went to a Fleet Street clinic to be checked out. "Have you ever been in a life-threatening situation before?" asked the nice Dr Sally when I explained what had happened.

Well yes. So I told her about the ambush. "Anything else?" She looked pale. Well, then there was the time Pakistan intelligence agents broke down the door of my hotel room in Quetta at 2am and held me for two nights. That was scary.

"Any other incidents?" I could have told her about when the compression unit failed on the plane and we crash-landed. Or in rural Sindh when I was the only foreigner in a truckers' hostel and men kept banging on my door all night. Or the time in a Zimbabwe township where I got surrounded by Mugabe's thugs, the same thugs who had raped and beaten women I had spent the day interviewing.

But Dr Sally was looking at me as though I was mad. So instead, I kept it to myself.

Christina Lamb is Foreign Correspondent of the Year. This is an extract from her new book, Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands (Harper Press £8.99). To order a copy for £8.54 (inc p&p), call The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585