Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives. Katie Hickman
of the champion’s sword”,’ lamented Vita Sackville-West, ‘when what one wants to say is “Bring another lamp”?’2 Jane Ewart-Biggs was able to learn quite fluent Flemish in Brussels, but even she was stumped when she had to introduce Baron Regnier de Wykerslooth de Rooyesteyn to the Comte de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele.
The very first impressions of a new posting are the most vivid. These fleeting insights can set the tone, all too brutally sometimes, for the next two or three years to come. Jane Ewart-Biggs arrived in Algeria with her two-month-old baby, Henrietta, in her arms, in 1961, at the height of the country’s savage war of independence against the French. The first thing she saw on her journey from the airport was a man leaning out of a stationary car. It was only when she was past the car that she realized that the man’s strange position, spreadeagled out of the window, could only have meant one thing: he was dead. ‘I had never seen anyone dead before,’ she commented faintly.3
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was both refreshed and exhilarated by her first impressions: ‘Hitherto all I see is so new to me it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day,’ she wrote enthusiastically on first arriving in Turkey.4 For others, such as Ella Sykes out in the wilds of Turkistan, part of the lure of the ‘Back of Beyond’ was simply the physical freedom from starchy drawing-room conventions.
There were other wives, however, for whom first impressions were not quite so liberating. When my mother finally arrived in Wellington, after six weeks on the high seas, she vividly expressed in her first letters home her own sense of dislocation at the strangeness of it all, tinged with a faint disappointment.
Dear Mummy and Daddy [she wrote a few days after her arrival in July], We arrived in Cooks Strait in lovely weather and docked at Wellington in bright sunshine and no wind. It was both exciting and sad. Firstly it was horrid having no family among the cheering crowds at the quayside, and secondly it was exciting to see this wonderful harbour. The Second Secretary and Chief Clerk were on the quayside, looking most English and conspicuous by the very fact that they didn’t look excited and weren’t waving to anyone … The town of Wellington has little to offer. It seems rather provincial, unfinished, and a cross between Montreal and some deep southern hick town. All the shopping streets have covered-in ways, with their signs flapping horizontally at you as you walk along, and it would never surprise me to see a posse come riding into town. One feels it should have saloon bars with swing doors.
When her husband was posted to Benghazi, in Libya, Felicity Wakefield was daunted not only by the conditions under which she was expected to live, but also by an acute sense of the life she was leaving behind.
I had just had two years living in our beautiful house in South Kensington. It was like a railway station because there were people in and out all the time, and we were having rather a good time living there. And the children were all there, and all one’s friends were readily available. Life was very easy and very pleasant, and then suddenly one’s taken out of that and put in a new place where you know nobody. And the physical things were very difficult. The lights were on sometimes, and often not on. The climate in some ways was idyllic, but then you got these terrible winds off the desert. The water in the tap tasted brackish. It was very salt. You could drink it, there wasn’t anything else to drink at that stage. Eventually we got organised, and used to fetch water in an enormous tank down from the mountains, but everything tasted revolting because it was cooked with salty water – including the coffee for breakfast. The Libyans were unfriendly; if you invited them, they wouldn’t come. In the end we learnt how they did things, and learned to love them. But my initial impressions were … I was horrified.
Many women, especially those with young families, found, like Felicity Wakefield, that their first impressions were dominated by purely practical considerations. In the harsher and more remote postings, shortages of light and water, and weird, if not downright dangerous electrical systems were commonplace. For Catherine Young, who arrived in Syria for the first time in 1983, it was the even more basic expedient of buying food for her family’s breakfast the next day.
I thought, oh my goodness, the children are going to school, I must go and get a few things. I went in to one of the shops and it looked like a grocer’s shop and there I got some sugar. As for tea? No, no tea. Coffee? No; no coffee. Jam? No jam. Butter? The same. I had to go into four different shops to get enough for breakfast. And I came back and I was absolutely desperate. I thought, I’m going to spend my life doing this – how am I going to manage?
The first few glimpses of a new and unknown country could evoke powerful feelings. Loneliness and homesickness were commonplace, but these were often mingled with other, darker emotions. Angela Caccia struggled to come to terms with the effects of the physical landscape itself. Bolivia was a beautiful country, but its beauty had a disturbing quality to it. Nature, she observed, ‘was prodigal here, contemptuous, aloof’. At midday the sun was so strong that even half an hour in it would burn the baby’s cheeks to blisters, and yet at night they ‘would huddle by the fire while frost fell outside’. Strangest of all, though, was the effect of altitude (La Paz is 11,000 feet above sea level) and the extraordinary mountain light. ‘The air was so clear, the light so pure, it seemed almost to have sparks in it, like fluorescence in sea water. On some days the blueness of the sky had a dazzling intensity; on others it was white, as though the colour had gone into a range of radiance beyond human sight.’ Despite this beauty, or perhaps because of it, during her first few weeks Angela felt miserable and isolated, surrounded by people ‘whose languages and ways of thought we saw no hope of understanding’. And at first she was afraid, too: ‘afraid … of these strange, different people, of the stories of violence, death, and brutality … I was afraid of the Indians, the men in the buses who smelt so strongly of dirty clothes, drink and excrement.’5
Her experience is echoed by that of Masha Williams, whose first impressions of Baghdad in 1947 were of a ‘violent, cruel world’. Although she was fascinated by it strangeness and its mystery, she was a little frightened too. ‘I was afraid of the Arabs,’ she confessed. ‘Socially we met them rarely, our time being taken up by the British, but it was a frightening world outside our British circle. In the streets – anonymous, faceless, shapeless women draped in black and the thin-lipped men who stared brazenly from under their head cloths at my bare arms and swollen figure.’6
It came as a shock to realize that these feelings were sometimes reciprocated. In Peking during the Cultural Revolution Sheila Whitney remembers the ‘anti-imperialist’ marches, specifically directed against foreigners, which took place every few months or so, during which the Red Guards would throw paint on cars in the British mission compound and smash their flower pots. ‘We used to watch it, fascinated, really. I felt sorry for the Chinese, because they all had to do what the Red Guards told them.’
Other less drastic forms of culture shock could work both ways as well. When Mary Sheil visited the Shah’s harem she was amused to find that not one of his ladies could be convinced that European women undressed at night before they went to sleep. ‘Was it true,’ she was asked, ‘we put on a long white dress to pass the night in?’ When Maureen Tweedy arrived in Seoul she, too, found the people friendly, but puzzled by Europeans and their ways. ‘We had to learn many things in our new post; to say Western and not European in deference to the Americans; to say Asian and not Asiatic; to remember that when a servant giggled on being reprimanded it was a sign of embarrassment and not of impertinence.’7 While blowing one’s nose in public was frowned upon, spitting was perfectly acceptable, and to be thought old was a compliment. On her arrival Maureen was met by a group of journalists, and their questions brought home to her how unknown and far away Britain was to Koreans. Why do English girls wear dark clothes? Why does the sun not shine in Britain? What do English boys say to English girls? What is a deb (this was in the late 1950s)? Why do the English not have a national costume like the Scots? How well did she know the Queen and how often did she go and see her? Was it true that the English