The funny truth about life as a diplomat’s wife

In the early 2000s my husband, a diplomat for the EU, was posted to Kazakhstan, a vast empty steppeland next to Siberia. It was winter and the place was covered with thick snow. My family were in England, my husband was mostly in the office; I was 61 and I didn’t know a soul.

Our previous posting had been to Damascus and I had occupied myself by writing a book about the old palaces there, but here there were no old buildings as the Kazakhs had been nomads. I had nothing to do. Everyone spoke Russian – I didn’t. As my husband was a senior diplomat we qualified for a cook, but she and I could only communicate using animal noises: chicken was cluck-cluck, beef was moo and lamb was baa. The main foods available seemed to be cabbage, onion and potatoes. The computer didn’t work. I was miserable and homesick, and our posting was for four years.

Then a sort of miracle happened. My husband took me to an official party to say goodbye to the Papal Nuncio in Almaty (at that time the capital of the country), and there I met another diplomatic wife. Cecilia, who was married to the Romanian ambassador, turned out to be even more miserable than I was. She was a doctor and couldn’t practice because she wasn’t qualified in Kazakhstan. ‘Tell me,’ she said after we had been talking for a minute or two. ‘Should I leave my husband now and go back to my job at home? You are old and have been doing this for years… is it worth it?’ I was going to laugh off her question, but suddenly I realised it was one I needed to ask of myself: is it worth it?

I had already thought of writing a book about our travels, and had got as far as sorting out a very disorganised diary I had kept over the years. Now I used it to try to answer Cecelia’s question. It took two years and the result was a book called Diplomatic Baggage: The Adventures of a Trailing Spouse (which is what we wives or partners of men – almost always men – who work abroad are called).

I meant it to be deadly serious, but somehow the funny side of everything kept inserting itself – because there always is a comic side to living as a foreigner abroad. I remembered the guests at a dinner party in Kazakhstan eating my flower arrangement – I thought they had all gone mad, but apparently they believed that a little lilac flower with an extra petal was lucky if you ate it.

In the Gambia I wondered why my husband’s rubber flip flops had been to a nailed to a tree. I asked the gardener; he shuffled about and mumbled that it was ‘good medicine’. In Damascus, at a dinner given by the charming Cypriot ambassador I was seated at a table that included the Indian ambassador. No one spoke, so I thought I’d start the ball rolling by introducing the subject of markets. I chatted about markets in the Caribbean, Africa, India etc. but no one joined in. Doggedly I continued – and then I realised that the Indian ambassador had actually fallen asleep. In desperation, I pretended that I hadn’t noticed and droned on. I had just got on to the subject of potatoes – sweet potatoes, new potatoes, big potatoes, small potatoes – when he woke up suddenly, said ‘Fascinating!’ in a loud voice, and then slumped back into sleep.

In India I used to feel guilty reading the newspapers in the morning – I had been brought up believing that it was decadent to read novels before lunch (you had to do chores first), yet here every news story was even better than fiction: ‘Man bites snake to death’; ‘Stray dog steals baby from hospital’; ‘Young girl kidnapped from her home turns up on her doorstep 12 years later as blind beggar and is recognised by old servant and saved’. With its vast population, events in India were always over the top – I once read a newspaper story about a car accident which said: ‘Of the 33 people travelling in the Jeep, 16 died immediately.’ Thirty-three people in a Jeep? How was this possible?

My book became a bestseller – I think it touched a nerve. Thousands of us give up our jobs to follow our husbands around the globe as they do theirs. (I was fashion editor of the Sunday Times before I married.) Some, like me, are wives of diplomats – the UK alone has 84 embassies and 49 consulates spread all over the world – but many more are attached to businessmen working for oil companies, airlines, IT, universities, schools and so on. I had fan letters from trailing spouses across the globe, including one from an American woman who wrote ‘Thank you for making it OK to cry’. (My book charts the 35 years I spent quietly sobbing my way from Brussels to Trinidad, India and West Africa, Syria and, of course, Kazakhstan.)

Another nerve must have been touched somewhere because a question was asked in parliament: who had given permission for me to publish the book? Margaret Beckett was acting Foreign Secretary at the time, and she replied that no one in the Foreign Office had ever heard of me or my husband and we didn’t come under its jurisdiction. (I received two letters from readers saying this proved that, just as they thought, I had made up the whole story.)

Now, almost two decades later, Diplomatic Baggage is hitting the book stands again, republished with an added epilogue, and a new generation of trailing spouses will feel able to cry – and, hopefully, laugh – when they read my story. As for ‘was it worth it?’ – well, you’ll have to read the book and come to your own conclusion.