J Murray £14.99 pp292
When I was researching my book about diplomatic wives, Daughters of Britannia, I spent many weeks trawling through nearly 40 years’ worth of magazines published by the British Diplomatic Spouses Association (as they were then called), the organisation for what the Foreign Office quaintly terms “trailing spouses”: that is, spouses who accompany their partners on postings abroad. In among the recipes for sherry trifle and accounts of bring-and-buy sales were articles with arcane subjects: “Shrapnel and Cake for Tea”, from a wife in Beirut, and a hair-raising account of an aeroplane hijacking, were two fairly typical contributions.
It was here that I first came across the following anecdote by Brigid Keenan, originally published in a column that she then wrote for Punch. Although I had never met her, I knew immediately that I had found a kindred spirit. When they were stationed in the Gambia, the Keenans were giving a dinner party. Halfway through the evening, however, they noticed that Ceesay, their butler, had disappeared: “The plates needed clearing away, but Ceesay was not to be seen. ‘Ceesay,’ my husband whispered louder and louder, getting a bit desperate. Suddenly Ceesay was back at his side. ‘Ceesay, where have you been?” asked my husband in an undertone. ‘Sorry Boss,’ said Ceesay loudly and totally unabashed, ‘I was just taking a piss.’ The guests looked appalled. ‘Well, I hope you washed your hands,’ said my husband, deciding there was nothing left to do but make a joke out of it. ‘Oh no boss!’ said Ceesay, indignant that anyone would think he had wasted his time.”
One of the problems of writing about diplomatic life is that there has always been a basic misapprehension about what it’s really like. “People tend to think that expat wives live in luxury compounds, drink a lot of gin and have affairs,” Keenan writes, “so it’s not surprising that we don’t get much sympathy.”
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As well as the Gambia, Keenan’s career as a diplomatic wife has taken her to Syria, India, Trinidad, Barbados, Brussels and Ethiopia. Perhaps the toughest posting of all, however, has turned out to be the current one, in Kazakhstan, where her husband is serving as the EC ambassador. “Oh, God, I don’t know if I can bear it,” she begins her opening diary entry. “This is my first morning in Kazakhstan and it is only eleven o’clock and I ’ve already run out of things to do and I have another four years to go.”
Well, “Oh, don’t be such a wimp”, might be one response to this; but it is also plainly true that resourcefulness and resilience of a particular kind are needed to cope with the peculiar demands of waking up on a Monday morning to find yourself once again in a new country in which you have no family, no friends, no job, you don’t speak the language, oh, and it’s -30 degrees outside.
The type of stories that Keenan tells in her memoir will be achingly familiar to her peers. The dinner party in Nepal at which they were served Heinz baby food (the host’s wife had gone back to England with their infant, leaving him with dozens of tiny tins of stew and pureed apple). The struggles with language (“I mean, how can you cope with a language (Kazakhstani), in which the word for ‘stop’ is ostanvlivite,” she laments. “By the time you’d got your tongue round ‘Ostanvlivite, thief!’, for example, the culprit would be safely home with the loot.” Or that hardy perennial of diplomatic life, “the servant problem”, although Keenan, I have to say, seems to have been quite lucky with hers. In Ethiopia, every time she had a row with her husband her maid would appear silently behind him with a frying pan, and make helpful shall-I-hit-him-over-the-head-now? gestures to her.
There are many qualities that might help make a good trailing spouse, but after reading this book I am even more convinced than before that there is only one that is essential: a sense of humour. Over the years, there have been numerous contemporary memoirs written by diplomatic wives. Some are dramatic, others elegiac; many, it must be said, just plain dull. Keenan, I suspect, was quite possibly put on this planet with the express purpose of writing hers. Diplomatic Baggage is a wonderfully picaresque take on the travails of expat life, and an absolutely delicious read.
There are not many books that have actually made me cry from laughing, but this is one of them. I’ll leave you with my favourite Ceesay sequel. “As I was saying goodbye to Ceesay (at the end of their two-year posting,” Keenan writes, “I was suddenly filled with such affection that I leaned forward to give him an impromptu kiss. He saw what was coming and put up his hands to protect himself — which meant that as I got close my two bosoms fitted neatly into his palms. We both screamed.”
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