From our diplomatic distaff

DAUGHTERS OF BRITANNIA The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives by Katie Hickman (HarperCollins, GBP 19.99)

"ALL Britons know that diplomatic life is one long whirl of gaiety," wrote one diplomatic wife with heavy irony, "they have seen the films and read the books."

But the reality is more True Grit than High Society, according to the generations of British women who have married not only diplomatic husbands but also their jobs and the countries they are posted to. The daughter of a diplomat herself, Katie Hickman has delved into letters and biographies from the 17th to the 20th centuries for this history of diplomatic spouses. Individual voices stand out in the sometimes muddled framework. Instead of the predictable chronological approach, she organises her material by topic, from "Getting There" through "Private Life" and "Social Life" to "Hardships", "Children" and "Dangers". Perhaps the most fascinating chapters, "Rebel Wives" and "Contemporary Wives", are left till last and are disappointingly short. Tales of surviving plague in Tripoli or dodging bullets in the Romanian revolution make dramatic reading but the practical difficulties of tracking down Ribena, Marmite and marmalade loom larger for most embassy wives. Sometimes just finding enough to feed the family, let alone entertain guests on a suitably grand scale, was an all-consuming task involving ordering from the Army and Navy Stores months in advance or trawling local markets with unpredictable results. Local advice was invaluable to be able to identify what was on sale: "I learnt that you had to ask to see the head of the animal. If it was a sheep, that was all right, but people who didn't know the ropes would often be sold dog instead." That was in Bolivia in the early Eighties. In Kashgar in Chinese Turkistan at the turn of the century, Catherine Macartney grew vegetables, milked cows, churned butter and butchered her own animals. Just as well she had little time for socialising: she saw only three Englishwomen during her 17 years there. But despite such physical rigours, the pioneering diplomatic women had some advantages over their successors. They were perfectly at ease in their own class and had no need of lessons in etiquette. Changes in the Foreign Office in this century, and especially since the Second World War, made the Diplomatic Service more meritocratic and middle class, but brought the danger that wives might lack social know-how. So advice was delivered by the bucket-load. Ideally diplomatic wives were to be thought "stupid and amiable (above all amiable)", and at parties to "eat or drink anything and appear to like it" and "be affable to bores". I have been on the receiving end of such diplomatic affability myself (no, of course I wasn't one of the bores!) over two decades as a corporate wife in four continents. Trays of limp canaps at QBPs, as the Queen's Birthday Party is affectionately known, even washed down with warm white wine and lots of affability, are not the stuff of dreams. Diplomats might just have to woo potential spouses harder after reading this book. Part history, part anecdotal anthology, it makes unputdownable reading as famous names in diplomatic spouse lore like Emma Hamilton and Vita Sackville-West are upstaged by ordinary women faced with extraordinary situations. A cavil I know given the book's subtitle, but I would have loved to hear more about the new generation of male "trailing spouses", who by 1998 numbered 13 per cent. Presumably they can safely ignore at least one of the old school adages: "never, never, leave your bedroom in the morning without makeup and earrings".

Copyright 1999
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