LITMIR.BIZ

       Introduction

      ‘English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side, and leaving their embassies nearly drives them completely off their rockers.’ These words, from Nancy Mitford’s classic vignette of embassy life Don’t Tell Alfred, were like a mantra of my youth. As children, my brothers and I used to chant them to my mother, in those days a British ambassadress herself, in her vaguer moments. Not because she was dotty (well, only occasionally) but because we knew, beyond doubt, that all other ambassadresses were.

From an early age, we were used to the tales of former ambassadresses – mad, bad and dangerous to know, they came to form part of our family culture. In New Zealand, my father’s first posting as a young first secretary, there was the delightfully distraite Lady Cumming Bruce. She was far more interested in her painting than in her diplomatic social engagements, which often slipped her mind completely; according to legend, she could regularly be spotted crawling through the residence shrubberies, so as not to be spotted arriving late for her own parties. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy,’ my mother wrote to my grandparents just a few months after her arrival in Wellington, ‘Lady Cumming Bruce is very vague and difficult to pin down – says she’ll do something and then doesn’t. When Helen^* went onto their boat to greet them on arrival she suggested to Lady CB that she should perhaps put her hat on before meeting the press. Lady CB opened her hat box inside which instead of a hat, was a child’s chamber pot.’

      During the twenty-eight years that my mother spent as a diplomat’s wife, she wrote letters home. Today, at my parents’ house in Wiltshire, in amongst the paper rubbings from the temples at Angkor Wat, the Persian prayer mats and the bowls of shells from the beaches of Connemara – the legacy of a lifetime’s wanderings – there is a carved wooden chest which contains several thousand of them. Once a week with almost religious regularity – sometimes more frequently – these letters were written at first to my grandparents and my aunt, but then later also to myself and my two brothers when we were sent home to boarding school in England. During the last ten years of her travelling life it was not unusual for her to write half a dozen letters a week, recording all the vicissitudes of diplomatic life.

      In these days of instant communications, of faxes and e-mails and mobile telephones, it is hard to describe the extraordinarily intense pleasure of what used, in old fashioned parlance, to be called ‘a correspondence’. As a bitterly homesick ten-year-old at boarding school for the first time, I found in my mother’s letters an almost totemic significance. The main stairs of my school house wound down through the middle of the building around a central well; in the hall below was a wooden chest on which the post was always laid out. For some reason only the housemistress and the matron were permitted to use these stairs (the rest of us were confined to the more workaday stone stairs at the back of the house), so the trick was to crane over the banisters and try to spot your letters. From two storeys up it was impossible to read your name but, to a practised eye, the form of a certain handwriting, the shape of a certain envelope, its colour or its thickness, were all clues.

      Occasionally my mother would use the official embassy writing paper – thick sheaves of a creamy sky-blue colour, lavishly embossed with the royal crest – but it wasn’t really her style. For most of my school days she used the same big pads of plain white airmail paper, slightly crinkly to the touch, bordered in red and blue, which she bought in industrial quantities from an English stationer’s. Often I would carry her letters around with me in my pocket, unopened, for a whole morning, until I could escape somewhere private in which to savour them. Their fatness, their pleasing weight, their peculiar texture against my fingertips had an almost magical power to soothe. These letters carried news of my family, of course, but perhaps more importantly they described another world, and another way of life. They described another part of myself, in fact, which was as strange to my English friends as the land of the Jabberwock or the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo.

      I kept these letters, and many years later they were to be the inspiration for this book. Although I have quoted them here only occasionally, what they have given me is a strong sense not only of the value of the experiences they describe, but also of their fragility. One of my main aims in writing this book is to preserve them, and others like them, lest, like Lady Winchilsea’s, their stories should drift into oblivion.

The lives of the women described in this book represent a lacuna in history. While the experiences of their menfolk were recorded and preserved for posterity even as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,^* what these women saw or felt or did is unknown. Because, with a few rare exceptions, they were not involved in affairs of state, they were quite simply not considered important enough. Because they were women, their experience had no value, and even their presence often went unrecorded. To quote the well-worn feminist joke, the history of diplomacy is very much a ‘his-story’.

Of all the women whose experiences I have drawn upon in this book, Lady Winchilsea, who in 1661 made the long and perilous journey to Constantinople at her husband’s side, is the earliest. I am in no doubt that there were others before her, for the custom of sending resident ambassadors abroad, initiated by the Italians during the Renaissance, had begun to spread through the rest of Europe by the beginning of the sixteenth century,^† but any records for them are almost impossible to find.

      Even when we do have a fleeting glimpse of them (as in the case of the Countess of Winchilsea) their stories are tantalizingly elusive. Did Lady Winchilsea, like one of her more famous successors, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ever visit a harem or one of the imperial city’s glorious marble-domed hammams? Did she, like Mary Elgin nearly a century and a half later, go disguised in man’s clothing to watch her husband present his credentials to the Grand Seignior? What of the everyday practicalities

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