LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

with them an enormous supply of consumer goods, from tomato ketchup to soap powder. This luggage came with them as far as Barcelona, where it was lost, leaving them to face the six-week ocean voyage with little more than the clothes they were wearing. For the baby they did have clothes, but no food; ‘David had 75 ties; I had 9 hats, and between us we had 240 stiff white paper envelopes.’

      However, the journey itself was so entrancing that the Caccias soon forgot these inconveniences. Their route took them through the Panama Canal and then down the Pacific coast of South America to the Chilean port of Antofagasta, from where they took a train across the Atacama and up into the Andes. Angela was spellbound by the beauty of the desert, despite the fact that the air was so thin and dry that their lips cracked and their hands hissed if they rubbed them together as if they would ignite. The light was so intense, she recorded, that they wore dark glasses even inside their carriage with the curtains drawn.¹²

      Very few diplomatic women were as experienced, or as naturally adept at travelling as Ella Sykes – or certainly not at first. The journey to a posting was often a woman’s first taste of travelling abroad, and it left an indelible impression on her – although not always the same sense of wonderment experienced by Angela Caccia. Reading back over my mother’s very first letters, written during the six-week sea voyage out to New Zealand in 1959, I find, to my surprise (for I have always known her as the most practised of travellers), a note of apprehension in her tone.

      I suppose quite shortly we shall really be at sea [she writes from her cabin aboard the S.S. Athenic]. Atlantic rollers may begin, instead of the millpond the Channel has been up to now. We have been sailing in dense fog all day. It is a queer sensation to have thick mist swirling around with visibility about the length of the boat, the foghorn sounding every few minutes and bright sun shining down from above. We seem to be travelling at a snail’s pace.

      It is also a surprise to be reminded that even then such a voyage was still considered a special undertaking. My parents arrived at the London docks to find themselves inundated with well-wishers.

      We were taken straight to our cabin and found a large box of flowers from Auntie Olive, also from Betty and Riki, and telegrams from Hilary and Tony, J’s mother, Auntie Jo and Jack, Sylvia Gardener, and Richard Hickman. After the ship sailed at eight o’clock last night I found Mummy’s wonderful boxes of Harrod’s fudge and chocolates, and Hilary’s [my mother’s sister] stockings. Thank you so much both of you. It was all the nicer getting them then, after we had left the dock and were feeling a bit deflated. Thank you Mummy and Daddy also for the beautiful earrings, which J produced after dinner … I wonder if you realised how much I wanted something just like them?

      There was no such send off for Isabel Burton when she took to the seas on her first posting in 1865. In her hotel room in Lisbon, where she stayed en route to Brazil, she was greeted by three-inch cockroaches. Although she could not know it then, it was only a taste of what was to come. ‘I suppose you think you look very pretty standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures,’ was Richard’s characteristically caustic response. Isabel reflected for a while, realized that he was right, and started bashing them instead with her shoe. In two hours, she recorded, she had a bag of ninety-seven.

      For some women, the journey was the only enjoyable part of diplomatic life. The writer Vita Sackville-West loathed almost every aspect of it (the word ‘hostess’, she used to say, made her shiver), but her first impressions of Persia, recorded when she travelled there to join her husband, Harold Nicolson, in 1926, echoes the experience of many of these peripatetic wives. On crossing the border she wrote:

      I discovered then that not one of the various intelligent people I had spoken with in England had been able to tell me anything about Persia at all, the truth being, I suppose, that different persons observe different things, and attribute to them a different degree of importance. Such a diversity of information I should not have resented; but here I was obliged to recognise that they had told me simply nothing. No one, for instance, had mentioned the beauty of the country, though they had dwelt at length, and with much exaggeration, on the discomforts of the way.

      The land once roamed by the armies of Alexander and Darius had, to Vita’s romantic imagination, a kind of historical glamour that its contemporary inhabitants never quite equalled. It was ‘a savage, desolating country’, but one that filled her with extraordinary elation. ‘I had never seen anything that pleased me so well as these Persian uplands, with their enormous views, clear light, and rocky grandeur. This was, in detail, in actuality, the region labelled “Persia” on the maps.’ With the warm body of her dog pressed against her, and the pungent smell of sheepskin in her nostrils, Vita sat beside her chauffeur in the front seat of the motor car with her eyes fixed in rapt attention on the unfolding horizon. ‘This question of horizon,’ she wrote musingly later, ‘how important it is; how it alters the shape of the mind; how it expresses, essentially, one’s ultimate sense of a country! That is what can never be told in words: the exact size, proportion, contour; the new standard to which the mind must adjust itself.’¹³

      On that journey, she believed, Persia had in some way entered her very soul. ‘Now I shall not tell you about Persia, and nothing of its space, colour and beauty, which you must take for granted – ’ she wrote to Virginia Woolf on her arrival in Tehran in March 1926, ‘but please do take it for granted, because it has become part of me, – grafted on to me, leaving me permanently enriched.’ But the exact quality of this enrichment even she found hard to put her finger on. ‘But all this, as you say, gives no idea at all. How is it that one can never communicate? Only imaginary things can be communicated, like ideas, or the world of a novel; but not real experience … I should like to see you faced with the task of communicating Persia.’¹⁴

      Such difficulties, however, were as nothing compared to the difficulties and hardships often involved in the actual travelling itself. When Mary Fraser set off from Venice to make the journey to Peking in 1874 she was unprepared for the rigours of her first diplomatic journey, even though, having lived in Italy and America, she was relatively well travelled for a young woman. At first all was well, even though she could not help noticing the strange smell on board their boat: ‘the abominable, acrid, all-pervading smell of the opium cargo it was carrying’. By the time they reached Hong Kong, however, they had other worries: the worst typhoon in fifty years had all but destroyed the little island.

      The P & O agent who came to meet their boat, ‘ashy pale and still trembling in every limb’, described how the storm had literally ripped apart the island in less than two hours. All shipping vessels had been wrecked, half the buildings ruined and not a single tree had been left standing in the Botanical Gardens. Worse than all this, though, was the fate of Hong Kong’s coolies and their families who had been living in sampans in the harbour – an estimated 10,000 had been drowned. By the time the Frasers arrived the water in the harbour was awash with the floating bodies of men, women and children. As she disembarked, Mary accidentally stepped on one of them and thereafter, ‘I could not be left alone for a moment without feeling faint and sick.’ In the tropical heat the corpses were already beginning to putrefy. Pestilence was all around and the atmosphere, she recalled with horror, ‘was that of a vast charnel house’.

      The Frasers then travelled on to Shanghai without incident, and Mary recovered her composure enough to enjoy the rest of the journey, even the final stretch up the Pei-Ho river, although at first she surveyed the preparations with dismay. For the five-day river journey they had a fleet of five boats, each with five boatmen. Three of these carried their luggage; one was a kitchen and store room; while the fifth was fitted up snugly as a sleeping room and dining room. At night the boatmen pulled up the boards on the deck of their boat and, packed ‘like sardines in a tin’, they fitted the boards back tightly over themselves and slept peacefully. On the Frasers’ boat there was a little deck at the front with two chairs and ‘a tiny caboose sunk aft’, where a mattress could be laid on the floor at night. By day it was replaced by a table. ‘In the morning,’ Mary recalled, ‘poor Hugh used to hurry into his clothes, and go on shore for a walk, while I attempted to make my toilet,

Скачать книгу