Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives. Katie Hickman

       2 The Posting

      To Mary Sheil, nervous and exhausted from nearly four months’ travelling, the British residence in Tehran must have seemed like a haven from the horrors of the barbarous and teeming streets outside. ‘I passed through a pretty English garden, and then entered an excellent, and even stately-looking English, or rather Italian dwelling of considerable size,’ she wrote. But the house itself was not the only wonder in store for her. ‘I was still more surprised when an extremely well-dressed Persian entered the room and said to me, in an accent savouring most intensely of the “Cowgate”, “Wi’ ye tak ony breakfast?” This was Ali Mohammed Beg, the mission housekeeper, who had acquired a fair knowledge of English from a Scotch woman-servant.’

Despite this auspicious beginning, it was not long before Mary came to realize that the house, beautiful as it was, was not so much a haven as a prison. As she had so forlornly discovered on her journey, in Persia a woman was no one. The journal which she wrote to alleviate the loneliness and almost total isolation of her four years in Persia records all too clearly the monotony of her life: ‘To a man the existence is tiresome enough, but to a woman it is still more dreary.’ As was so often the case in these diplomatic partnerships, her husband was occupied with his job, with sports, visits, and ‘the gossip and scandal of the town, in which he must join whether he likes it or not’. The conditions under which a woman found herself obliged to live were very different: ‘She cannot move abroad without being thickly veiled; she cannot amuse herself by shopping in the bazaars, owing to the attention she could attract unless attired in Persian garments.’ But any European woman who managed to escape suffocation beneath the roobend,^* would surely have been half-crippled by the tiny shoes, barely covering half the foot, with a small heel three inches high in the middle of the sole.

      Unlike so many of her successors – and predecessors – in postings in which the seclusion of women was practised, Mary was as much a victim of her own prejudices as the local customs. In her view the acquaintance of only a very few of the Tehran ladies was considered desirable at all; none of them were Persians. The Russian mission, she complained, was too far away for her to be able to cultivate the friendship of ‘Princess D’ and her ‘aimiable daughter’, while the remaining female society was limited to just one or two other ladies, the wives of foreign officers in the Shah’s service. Tehran, she wrote rather plaintively, was ‘one of the most frightful places in the world’ and her life there resembled that of a nun. Although on several occasions she did go to visit the Shah’s mother in the palace harem, it does not seem to have occurred to her that such women might have been seen as equals rather than as exotic curiosities.

      Later on, when Mary had learnt Persian and was in a better position to form an opinion, she conceded that the Persian women were both lively and intelligent. ‘They are restless and intriguing, and may be said to manage their husband’s and son’s affairs. Persian men are made to yield to their wishes by force of incessant talking and teazing,’ she noted, a frisson of disapproval in her voice. The Shah’s mother in particular – ‘very handsome, and did not look above 30 but must be 40’ – was very clever: not only was she in complete charge of the harem itself; it was also said that she played a large part in the affairs of government.

      The Khanum (the Lady), as she was known, received Mary kindly. She said ‘a great many aimiable things to me and went through all the usual Persian compliments, hoping that my heart had not grown narrow and that my nose was fat.’ Mary was entertained lavishly, and the Khanum asked her many questions about Queen Victoria: how she dressed and how many sons she had. She even made her describe the ceremonial of a Drawing Room, and a visit to the theatre. And yet despite these overtures, ‘various circumstances render it undesirable to form an intimacy with the inmates of any Persian anderoon,’ Mary wrote primly. ‘If it were only on account of the language they are said to be in the habit of using in familiar intercourse among themselves, no European woman would find any enjoyment in their society.’

      This memsahib-like prudery condemned Mary to a life of splendid isolation. At first she was amused by the way in which her escort seized any men who came too close to her and pushed their faces up against the wall until she had passed lest she should be ‘profaned’ by their glance. But once established at the mission Mary was allowed nowhere, not even for a drive, without an escort of fifteen or twenty armed horsemen. This was not so much for security, for Persia was a safe country, ‘but that dignity so required’.

      Since she could take no part in her husband’s public life, almost her only pleasures were her pets, letters from home, which arrived just once a month, and her garden. At first she found the garden a melancholy place, full of lugubrious cypresses, in which ‘the deserted, neglected little tombs of some of the children of former ministers occupied a prominent place’, filling her with gloomy forebodings. But with the help of a Mr Burton, a first-rate English gardener who at that time was in the service of the Shah, she was soon astonishing everyone with the beauty of her celery and her cauliflowers, ‘for these useful edibles occupied my mind more than flowers.’¹ To be thrown back on her own resources in this way, albeit in the humble cultivation of a vegetable patch, was to prove an invaluable training for the real hardships that she was later to face.

      In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing, and no one, to tell Mary Sheil what living in Persia was going to be like. While various forms of military and diplomatic intelligence existed for the use of Colonel Sheil and his colleagues, the female, domestic sphere was never considered important enough to merit attention. As a woman, and as a European, Mary was doubly isolated.

      Present-day Foreign Office wives (and now of course Foreign Office husbands as well) may consult a well-developed system of post reports to tell them exactly what to expect when they arrive in a new country, from schools for their children to whether or not Marmite can be bought in Azerbaijan (it can’t). But knowing the theory, of course, does not necessarily make the practice any easier.

      Sometimes even the most basic physical conditions, such as the weather, can be the most daunting. Extremes of heat and cold (-45°C in the harshest Mongolian winters; +45°C in the hottest central Asian summers), of humidity or altitude, are only partly alleviated by modern central heating and air-conditioning. Although most diplomatic women are willing to adapt to a different geography, a different culture, even a different political system, they are often ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Learning the language, as Mary Sheil did in Persia, is vital, but sometimes even the most