Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives. Katie Hickman
wrote in a snatched moment] and a few days’ rest will, I hope, set us all up. The first thing we did was to give the children a warm bath, put them into clean clothes and get them to bed. They looked so utterly dirty and wretched when we arrived that I felt I must cry; and they were asleep as soon as they got between clean sheets … a sleep of exhaustion. Both of them have lost weight in the last few days.
It was the last entry she was to make for many weeks.
On 23 August Catherine finally resumed her journal.
Our two or three days here have lengthened into nearly a month, and a time of awful anxiety it has been. The children, instead of recovering in a few days, developed dysentery, and to add to our troubles Nurse took it too. For three weeks it was a fight for Eric’s life and several times we thought we would lose him. Sylvia, though bad enough, was not as desperately ill as Eric … My husband and I did all the nursing and during that time we neither of us had a single night’s rest, just snatching a few minutes sleep at odd times.
In spite of their rudimentary lodgings – two rooms so small that there was only space for the children’s and the nurse’s beds – they were comforted by the extraordinary kindness of the local people. The Russian doctor visited them sometimes as many as three or four times a day. And there were others, too, ‘who, simply hearing that we were strangers and in trouble, were most helpful in sending us goat’s milk, cake, fruit, and delicacies. It is when one is in such straits as we were that one discovers how many kind people there are in the world. But I never imagined that anyone could receive so much sympathy and practical help from perfect strangers as we did during that anxious month.’17
The Macartneys had been on the road for more than 800 miles before they finally arrived, exhausted, in Aris. From here they were able to pick up the Tashkent – Moscow train, and travelled onwards, first to Moscow, and then to Berlin via Warsaw. Although Eric suffered several relapses during that time, the family arrived safely in Edinburgh, three long and painful months after they had set out.
Like Mary Wortley Montagu with her traineaus, and Mary Fraser with her fleet of Chinese river boats, diplomatic women over the centuries have been obliged to take what transport they could find. Yet another Mary – Mary Waddington, who travelled to Russia to the Tsar’s coronation in 1883 – had several luxuriously appointed private railway carriages at her disposal, but a diplomatic wife was just as likely to find herself transporting her family by camel, yak, horse, palanquin, coolie’s chair, house-boat, cattle-truck, tukt,* sleigh or tarantass† as by more conventional methods.
Travelling to the most far-flung diplomatic posts has remained a logistical problem well into the present century. One diplomatic wife recalls her journey to Persia in 1930, with her husband and English nurse, her children Rachel, aged two, and Michael, aged nine months, and seventy pieces of luggage. The quickest route in those days was by train, through Russia, although it still took two weeks. There were no disposable nappies in those days, so the baby’s washed napkins had to be hung out on rails in the corridor to dry, and when it came to crossing the Caspian Sea both her husband and the nurse were so sick she had no one to help her at all. ‘I can still see my poor husband with Rachel on his lap, being sick, and she, infuriatingly cheerful, saying, “What’s Daddy doing that for?”’
In 1964 Ann Hibbert’s husband Reg was sent to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, to open the British embassy; she later flew out there on her own under very strange circumstances. It was at the height of the Cold War, and sometime in the middle of the night they came down to refuel on the Soviet – Mongolian border. Although Anne was allowed off the plane, the Russians went to some lengths to stop her from talking to the other passengers. ‘I was told that I was not to go with the others,’ she remembers. ‘I was separated from them, and taken into a room by myself and the stewardess, very kindly, said, “I have to lock you in. Would you like the key on the inside or the outside?” I said, “On the inside, if you don’t mind.” So I was locked up, while the plane was refuelled.’
Single women travelling on their own, even respectable married ones, have always been faced with special complications, as Sheila Whitney found when she went to China in 1966.
Ray said, ‘You need a rest, come out on the boat,’ which I did and it took me four and a half weeks – the slow boat to China. I didn’t particularly enjoy it because I was a woman on my own, and in 1966 if you were a woman on your own, and one man asks you to dance more than twice you were a scarlet woman. I went and sat on the Captain’s table and there was a young chap there, and he was engaged to somebody, so I said, ‘Oh well, we’re in the same boat. You’re being faithful to your fiancée, and I’m being faithful to my husband, perhaps we can, you know …’ I didn’t invite him to dance or anything. But, no, they all had to be in bed by half past ten. On the journey before they’d all been in trouble, apparently, and so they all had to be in bed by half past ten at night. All the ship’s officers. Anyway, that was that. I was sharing a cabin with a young eighteen-year-old girl, who was there with her parents, and I used to go out with her parents, because if I did anything else I was labelled. It was ghastly. I can’t tell you how ghastly it was. But it was very funny, too. So I didn’t have such a gay time as I thought I was going to have. You know, I was looking forward to it.
At the turn of the century a similar regard for propriety governed long sea voyages, although, if Lady Susan Townley is to be believed, the rules were slightly less strict then than they were in the 1960s.* On her journey to Peking from Rome in 1900 she noted the popularity of parlour games, especially musical chairs, during which a convenient lurch of the ship could always be blamed when a ‘not unwilling Fräulein’ fell into the lap of a smart officer. ‘These fortunate incidents, resulted in several engagements before the end of the journey,’ she noted wryly. ‘No wonder the game was popular.’18
A woman’s sex contributed to her difficulties on a voyage in many different ways. She was encumbered not only morally (especially if she was obliged to travel alone) by notions of ‘respectability’, but also physically, by the clothes she wore. Until the latter part of this century women’s fashions were a serious handicap on anything but the shortest and most straightforward of journeys. Even an exceptional traveller such as Ella Sykes, who relished the harshness of the road, must privately have cursed the inconvenience of her cumbersome long skirts.
Recalling her long diplomatic career, which began just after the war in 1948, Maureen Tweedy claims that she knew, even as a child, that she had been born into a man’s world. She was ‘only a girl’, and restricted, apart from her sex, by layers of underclothing. ‘Children today cannot imagine how my generation were restricted. Woollen combinations, a liberty bodice on which drawers, goffered and beribboned, were buttoned, a flannel petticoat with feather-stitched hem, and finally a white cambric one, flounced and also beribboned.’19
For grown women, matters became even worse. The extensive clothing list suggested by the highly practical Flora Annie Steel was as nothing compared to the extraordinary number of garments which went underneath:
6 calico combinations
6 silk or wool combinations
6 calico or clackingette slip bodices
6 trimmed muslin bodices
12 pairs tan stockings
12 pairs Lisle thread stockings
6 strong white petticoats
6 trimmed petticoats
2 warm petticoats
4 flannel petticoats
36 pocket handkerchiefs
4 pairs of stays
4 fine calico trimmed