Diplomatic Baggage: Adventures of a Trailing Spouse

By Brigid Keenan

The beloved Sunday Times bestseller - a touching, hilarious, often outrageous memoir of home-making and family adventures in the world's furthest outposts

'Hilarious, and utterly beguiling - it's a complete treat to be in Keenan's witty and open-hearted company' Esther Freud
'Deliciously effervescent' Sunday Times
'Brigid writes like a dream ... fabulous' Joanna Lumley
'Irresistible' Mail on Sunday

When Sunday Times fashion journalist Brigid Keenan married the love of her life in the late Sixties, she had little idea of the rollercoaster journey they would make around the world together.

For he was a diplomat - and Brigid found herself the smiling face of the European Union in locales ranging from Kazakhstan to Trinidad, and asking herself questions she never thought she'd have to ask. How do you throw a buffet dinner during a public mourning period in Syria? Where do you track down dog fat in Almaty? And how do you entertain guests in a Nepalese chicken shed?

Negotiating diplomatic protocol, difficult teenagers, homesickness, frustrated career aspirations, witch doctors, and giant jumping spiders, Brigid muddles determinedly through - with no shortage of mishaps on the way.

'There are not many books that have actually made me cry from laughing, but this is one of them' Sunday Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526654908

Book preview

Introduction

I never had any intention of spending the best part of my life living abroad as a trailing spouse (as we wives of men working overseas are known). Looking back, it was ridiculously careless of me not to have worked out that the man I had fallen in love with was always abroad on some project, and that this could, perhaps, continue...

And then suddenly we were married, and six weeks later he was posted to Ethiopia, and it dawned on me that I would have to give up my wonderful job (as Fashion Editor of the Sunday Times) and follow him around the world, or spend my life alone pining for rare glimpses of my beloved. Little did I know as I packed my bags that first time that it would be nearly thirty-five years before we returned to live in England permanently. How on earth did I cope? How did any of us cope? Read on to find out what happened...

I was driven to tell my story because of an encounter with an unhappy young woman at a diplomatic party in Kazakhstan eighteen years ago. She was the doctor wife of the Romanian Ambassador, had just arrived, found out that she could not practice, and was homesick and desolate. I was in my sixties, the wife of the EU Ambassador, also newly arrived and similarly homesick and desolate. We began to talk and almost immediately she said, ‘You have been doing this for many years. Tell me, is it worth it or should I leave my husband and go home and back to my job immediately?’

I was going to be flippant and laugh off her question, but I suddenly thought: No! I am unhappy too – she is right, IS IT WORTH IT? And I started this book so that I could give her an honest answer.

Long ago, when AW was first recruited by the European Union we went to live in Brussels. Unexpected things often seemed/seem to happen to me, then and now – perhaps because I am a bit disorganised, chaotic even, with a tendency to talk to/confide in strangers? Anyway, one day I was telling an English publisher friend the latest drama in my life and she said ‘Bridge, you should keep a diary, and about twenty years from now, you will send it to me and I will publish it.’ That is almost precisely what happened – when I finished this book, I sent it to her, and she sent it on to John Murray Press (part of the group for which she worked) and they published it eighteen years ago.

The diary I kept was haphazard – written on bits of paper or the backs of envelopes as well in notebooks – all kept in a plastic bag. When I came to go through it for the book, I found that some of pages had faded away to invisibility and on others I couldn’t read my writing. Most annoying of all was the fact that some stories – ones that obviously made such an impact when they happened that I thought I could never forget them – were reduced to a few cryptic words which meant nothing to me. What was the ‘hilarious wasp and jelly baby’ incident for heaven’s sake? And who on earth was the ‘small green VIP’ that I made a note of long ago and starred twice, meaning that it was a particularly funny tale? You wouldn’t think it possible for a person to forget such curiosities, but I had. Advice to all would-be diarists ... always write down the whole story.

I have worked in journalism my whole life, as a fashion editor and a feature writer and I never particularly intended Dip Bag to be comic. But once I started writing, it took on a life of its own and the funny side of the stories insisted on popping up – even, sometimes, the funny side of the bad bits. Unexpectedly, a number of readers have told me that the book got them through their own homesickness or an illness or a sad time in their lives. Perhaps, as Readers’ Digest used to say long ago, Laughter really is The Best Medicine.

Two amazing things happened soon after Dip Bag was published: the first was that the book must have upset someone, somewhere, because questions were asked in Parliament about it. Who was Alan Waddams (my husband), the diplomat whose wife had written this book? And who had given permission for it to be published? Margaret Beckett was acting Foreign Minister at the time, and she replied that Alan Waddams did not work for the British Foreign Office and so the book had never come under their jurisdiction. I got letters from two separate readers after this, both saying, in their different ways, that they knew, right from the beginning, that I had made up the whole story, and this was the proof.

The second amazing thing was that it became a bestseller. Totally unaware of this, I had stopped to buy flowers at the tube station in Wimbledon for a friend I was going to lunch with that day. For once in my life I was early, so – bouquet in hand – I wandered into Smiths next door and glanced at the bestseller shelves. To my ASTONISHMENT Dip Bag was at number twelve! You know how dogs sometimes tear around in frantic giddy circles for no reason? I had the urge to do exactly that in Smiths: to run round the shop shrieking! Apart from marriage and children perhaps it was the most joyful moment of my life.

*

In the years since Dip Bag was published, all kinds of dramatic events have happened in the world, but only one of them has really impacted the day-to-day lives of trailing spouses (though they have probably coped better than most with Covid lockdowns – isolation and separation being a part of their normal lives) and that is the internet which had barely got started when I embarked on this book.

The internet has been a boon to us trailing spouses – Facebook, WhatsApp, Facetime, Instagram, Zoom, videos calls, blogs, and all the other similar platforms have eased the pain of living away from home and family for thousands – perhaps millions – of wives or partners of diplomats, businessmen, bankers, teachers, oilmen, IT execs, and so on – though, increasingly it should be said, the diplomats and the executives themselves are women.

What hasn’t changed is that it is usually the trailing spouses themselves who have to work out how they are going to cope with their peculiar lives. They have not been idle – hundreds of them, of all nationalities around the world, have created their own groups and networks to connect with, and help, their displaced colleagues. (The ones I know personally are: Trailing-Spouse.com run by Nicola Gupta, American/Greek/Cypriot wife of the head of Boeing, India; The Global Jigsaw by Pallavi Aiyar, Indian journalist wife of a European diplomat; AlmostDiplomatic.com run by Carol R. H. Malasig, the half-Danish wife of a Filipino diplomat; Diplomatic Spouses Association:Worldwide the brainchild of Cecile Atta, the wife of a Belgian diplomat).

My book also sparked off a host of other trailing spouses’ stories. Happily, it seems that mine still holds good, even after all these years – an interviewer on a paper in the Far East recently described Diplomatic Baggage as the trailing spouses’ Bible.

Back in my day it was very different, no one had much sympathy for us – the general feeling seemed to be that ex-pat wives lived in luxury compounds, drank a lot of gin and had affairs. Which made the letter I received at that time, long ago now, particularly thrilling. ‘Dear Ms Keenan,’ it said, ‘I want to tell you how much I admire your courage and strength and resilience...’ I was glowing with satisfaction: here at last was someone who understood the sacrifices we ex-pat wives make. But then the author asked for a signed photo which seemed a touch over the top, even to me, and then he mentioned my ordeal in Beirut, and I realised that the letter had been delivered to the wrong Keenan. The praise was (quite rightly) intended for Mr. Brian Keenan, the long-suffering hostage who had had, at that time, just been released in Beirut, and not for Ms Brigid Keenan the trailing spouse. Glumly I sent it on to Mr. Keenan.

The raw truth is that no one truly understands the ex-pat wife’s life except another ex-pat wife .

Brigid Keenan, 2022

1

Homesick on the Steppe

Almaty, 11 February

Oh God, I don’t know if I can bear it. 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 (that means one thousand four hundred and sixty days) until this posting comes to an end. How on earth am I going to get through it?

Actually, it’s not quite true that this is my first morning here. I arrived in this alien world of snow and mountains and Mongol faces and incomprehensible languages and fur hats (even the street cleaners wear fur hats) at four o’clock on Saturday morning which was two and a bit days ago, but today is my first Monday, the day that every wife of a man working abroad most dreads; the day your husband goes to the office and you have to face your new life ALONE. I have a pit of misery in my stomach and I really do feel as if I am living in a bad dream and any moment I’ll wake up and find myself in good old Pimlico. I could cry at the thought. What am I saying? I am crying.

AW, my husband, introduced me to the staff on Saturday when I came down for lunch, having slept all morning: that’s Nina the cook who looks kind of tough but motherly – she could be a sergeantmajor’s wife, Ira the housekeeper who is young and pretty and as slim as a model girl, and Yuri, a huge, rather grumpy-looking man about eight foot tall who is the bodyguard/gardener/handyman. They are all Russians (nearly half the people in Kazakhstan are Russians left over from the days when the country was part of the Soviet Union) and they don’t speak a word of English. The only Russian word I know is niet.

This is a bit worrying because in the early days of these foreign postings when the telephone never rings (or if it does, it’s a wrong number), lonely ex-pat wives like me tend to lean rather heavily on our Ninas and Iras and Yuris since they are our only contact with the rest of the human race. We make them our confidantes and our soulmates – and then have to spend the rest of the time trying to put a respectable distance between us and them. For instance, in a fit of emotion in Syria, our previous post, I kissed Bing, the Filipino butler, goodbye the first time I set off home on leave, and then of course I couldn’t not kiss him every time I went anywhere . . . the only person more embarrassed than me was him.

(This wasn’t as humiliating as what happened when we left the Gambia years before. Then, as I was saying goodbye to Ceesay, our steward, 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.)

In Ethiopia, our first stint abroad as a married couple, the maid, Andreas, offered me more than moral support. Every time AW and I had a row – which was about sixteen times a day – she used to appear silently behind him with a frying pan in her hand making shall-I-hit-him-on-the-head-with-this-now? gestures to me over his shoulder.

Well, obviously there’ll be no such bonding here since we can’t actually communicate at all, but then again there can’t be any disagreements or frictions either, so perhaps that’s a plus. And at least they won’t be able to read my diary and see what I’ve written about them – as the staff did once in Damascus. That was truly mortifying because, needless to say, it was all about them. They were going to give in their notice, but we somehow forgave each other in the end and lived happily together for the rest of the posting.

When I woke up today it took me about ten minutes to work out who I was, let alone where I was. (Kazakhstan! – my stomach lurched.) I’d forgotten everyone’s names, but the motherly cookperson brought me tea in a Tajik bowl on an English saucer at nine o’clock and then I plucked up my courage to come downstairs and face them all standing in the hall, beaming. I’m sure they are all ready to hate me though, as they have been looking after AW perfectly well for four months while I was in denial about the whole prospect of this posting and busy doing up our new flat in London. The last thing they want is some Memsahib from England who will be in the house all the time bossing them around.

In the Gambia, Ceesay – who, incidentally, was the living image of the comedian Eddie Murphy – pre-empted any possibility of this by somehow finding my weak spot, which is fear of entertaining, on the very first day. I can’t have two people to tea without a panic attack, and Ceesay reduced me to a gibbering wreck of insecurity with his stories – dramatically told in pidgin English laced with French, Mandinka and Wolof – of our predecessor’s wonderful dinner parties, the marvellous food, jovial company, etc. Until one day I nervously asked another ex-pat if she’d been to any of these glittering evenings and she said, ‘Dinner parties? I don’t think he ever had anyone to his house at all.’

After breakfast I looked up ‘thank you’ in my Russian dictionary – spaseeba – and tried it out on everyone, which seemed to go down well, then I bolted up here to the attic (where I have set up my computer) to avoid looking purposeless in front of them, or worst of all, bursting into tears. My unpacking is done, my clothes put away; I have no idea how to get to the centre of Almaty town and no experience of driving in real ice and snow, and as I can’t actually speak to anyone, there is honestly nothing to do except telephone AW, my husband, in the office every hour or so (so far each conversation has ended with him getting annoyed and me crying), or look at emails. Thank goodness a nice young man from AW’s office has organized the connection with Kazakhtelecom. This is the first posting we have had since the internet came into being (it was not permitted in Syria in our time) and it will make such a difference, especially when it comes to staying in touch with our daughters, Hester and Claudia.

Claudia is twenty-three and in her first year at King’s College, London. The reason she is rather old for an undergraduate is because this is her third go at university. The first time we settled her in at her Hall of Residence and then left for Syria – at which point she ran away to live with her boyfriend in Germany. It was weeks before we discovered what she’d done – whenever we rang her number we got someone called Helga’s voice-mail and couldn’t understand why Claudia hadn’t changed it. It was all getting more and more mysterious and worrying, until our older daughter rang us and said, ‘It’s time someone told you what’s going on . . .’ The second time Claudia dropped out was in a slightly more respectable fashion, i.e. she told the university – and us – what she was doing, and went off to earn money as a teacher in an infant school.

Hester, twenty-six, is in Cairo where she is working on a refugee project. Later she plans to travel to Jerusalem to work for a Palestinian lawyer. This makes me feel uneasy because the Palestinian cause is something AW and I feel passionately about, and wittingly or not, we’ve probably encouraged her in this plan . . . I mean, she could find herself in danger because of us. She is training to be a barrister, and these jobs in the Middle East are to gain experience in human rights law before she starts her pupillage with a chambers in the autumn. Hester and Claudia are okay now, but both of them were such a nightmare when they were teenagers that, at the time, I was able to fill a monthly column in Sainsbury’s Magazine with their misdeeds.

12 February

Ignore all the above about marvels of internet. I found I couldn’t write any messages to the children this morning because I ended up sobbing into the laptop, then something happened to the computer (perhaps it got damp) or the line, or Kazakhtelecom – and it slowed down so that every message took hours to read and reply to. Gave up in despair and spent rest of day staring into space with wet eyes and feeling murderous hatred for AW, since of course I am only here because of him.

I first learned that he was to be posted as Ambassador for the European Commission to Central Asia (his countries are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) about nine months ago. Most people don’t know that there is such a thing as a European Ambassador, but there is. He is the one that all the other ambassadors hate because he is the newest addition to the Diplomatic Service (i.e. an upstart) but, since he is representing all the countries of the EU, often has more power and prestige with the host government than they do. In my experience, British ambassadors in particular find it sticks in their throats to refer to AW as an ambassador and will fall over backwards to find another less exalted job description – ‘Head of Mission’ or ‘Delegate’ or ‘EC Representative’ – anything to avoid the ‘A’ word. In the course of our lives abroad together – especially at the beginning of his career when AW was actually working for the British Government – we often unintentionally managed to get up the noses of our ambassadors. The one in Nepal barely spoke to me at all – I think it was because I was living with AW in his camp in the jungle before we were married; the one in Ethiopia ticked me off for attempting to write a story on the famine for the Sunday Times; and in the Gambia we found ourselves at odds with the British High Commissioner because we felt he had gone about investigating the brutal murder of an English friend of ours so ineffectively. To be fair though, we did love the ones we knew in Brussels, Trinidad and Barbados.

But back to how we come to be in Kazakhstan. In June last year AW rang me from a business trip to Saudi Arabia. I should have been suspicious because he never rings when he is away – ever since the early days of our marriage when he was in Addis Ababa and I was working at the Sunday Times in London, where the switchboard operators were on a go-slow. Ethiopia had a telephone connection with Europe for only two hours a day, so poor old AW used to dial my office number and then listen to it ringing until the lines went dead. It gave him an enduring telephone phobia: he can’t bear to make a long-distance call and what is worse, he can’t bear me to make one either – though that is more for financial reasons. He says he doesn’t mind so long as I have something important to say, but nonetheless, he still paces up and down sighing when I’m on an expensive call, and sometimes he puts his wrist under my nose and taps the face of his watch. This makes me so furious that I want to tap his face, preferably with a knuckleduster . . . Nearly all our most serious rows are about the telephone, mainly because his definition of what is ‘something important’ is about a million miles apart from mine.

When he rang from Saudi Arabia last June, he said, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news . . .’

‘Let me guess,’ I said, ‘the good news is that you have a posting abroad, and the bad news is that it is in . . .’ I let my mind wander over the most remote and unlikely places in the world – the places I least wanted to go – and I came up with: ‘Kazakhstan?’

‘How do you know?’ he said, amazed.

So I burst into tears and then spent most of the following months either sobbing or screaming at him.

The strangest part is that I had practically never heard of Kazakhstan, but once I knew that we were going there it cropped up all the time: I would pick up an ordinary English newspaper to find yet another weird story about the place. I read about two men who were sentenced to prison for killing and eating eight prostitutes in Kazakhstan, how a case of bubonic plague had broken out, how a new camel-milking machine was being tried out there. Then there was the first space tourist (an American billionaire) who took off and landed at the Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan – I watched it on the telly. Then the Pope went there. Then someone told me that Kazakh police had stopped a group of eccentric British hikers in the mountains and, not knowing about Lord of the Rings, held them for questioning when they said that they were looking for Mordor. Then, by chance, we met at a party the man who created Ali G and Borat, the hilarious Kazakh character, for television. He was thrilled when he heard we were going to Kazakhstan. Could we help sort out a problem? They had made an episode of Borat returning home to his family, but they had filmed it in Rumania pretending that it was Kazakhstan and the President of Kazakhstan was hopping mad and threatening lawsuits. I noticed AW slipping off into the crowd . . .

Then I heard of a plant historian with the wonderfully appropriate name of Barrie Juniper (what a pity his parents didn’t go that extra mile and make it Berry) who had traced the origins of our ordinary English apple to Kazakhstan. He told me about the remnants of fruit forests in the Tien Shen mountains, and how the Silk Route should really be called the Apple Route and how the Mongol Hordes carried dried apple, full of vitamins, in their pockets as they galloped down from Central Asia and ravaged the Middle East, and how apple cultivation slowly moved west, and that grafting was mentioned on clay tablets written in 2500 B.C. discovered in Syria and, later, illustrated on a Roman mosaic.

Then I went to say goodbye to the butcher. ‘I am off to Kazakhstan,’ I told him, whereupon there was a little yelp from the rather good-looking Chinese woman behind me in the queue – who turned out not to be Chinese at all, but Kazakh. Then after lunch one day with a friend in a little restaurant in Pimlico, I picked up my bag and said,‘Well, I suppose I’ll see you next when you come to Kazakhstan’; to our amazement the man at the next table leaned over and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing you mention Kazakhstan and I just want to say, I live there.’ He turned out to be based in the oil fields about 3,000 kilometres away from Almaty, but we exchanged numbers anyway.

All this was most encouraging, in fact I was quite dazzled that so much seemed to be happening in my new homeland. So when I discovered that a writer acquaintance had researched part of the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia I rang him, all bubbly with enthusiasm. At first I don’t think he quite understood that I was actually going to live in Central Asia for four years, because he told me that possibly the happiest day of his life was the one when he caught a plane out of the region and went back to London. But then, valiantly trying to be more upbeat, he kept insisting that he was there in the very early days of the Central Asian countries’ independence from Russia, and he was sure it would be better now.

After that I read Colin Thubron’s book The Lost Heart of Asia and, well . . . began to lose heart. This wasn’t made any better by cheery friends who kept saying ‘You’ll be okay Bridge, look how you’ve made a success of all your past postings . . .’, when all I know is that I’ve been utterly miserable in every one of the six countries across four continents that we’ve been sent to in the last twenty years. But then again, I cling to the thought that – up until now – I’ve cried almost as much when the time came to leave as I did when I arrived. AW says I’d be grumbling in Paradise, and William Dalrymple (who has been a pal since he came to spend one night with us in Damascus when he was writing From the Holy Mountain and stayed for six weeks) said I was an utter wimp and that Robert Byron, the great travel writer of the 1930s, would have given his right arm to have been allowed to roam Central Asia.

This is all very well, but people with normal lives can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be sent from England to Brussels to Trinidad to Barbados to India to West Africa and then to Syria without a break in between. We did have three years in Europe after Syria and before we were posted here, but that has only made it harder to tear myself away again. I know exactly what it feels like to be an autumn leaf – detached, insecure, tossed helplessly around in AW’s slipstream.

Nothing links these postings of ours, there is no continuity; it’s like being reincarnated eight times in one life (that’s if you count Europe and now Kazakhstan). You arrive in each new place all naked (as it were) and friendless and vulnerable, you gradually build up a little world around yourself and then, bingo, you are suddenly sent off to the other side of the world to start all over again. No wonder I can hardly tell the difference between dreams and memories any more. Speaking of which, I have the most horribly vivid dreams here. They seem either to feature my mother – in which case I am letting her down in some frightful way, i.e. she is having Prince Charles to lunch and is in a total panic as I have not turned up, as promised, to help her, because my alarm hasn’t gone off and I am still asleep in my flat sixty miles away. Or they are about my good friend Sandy (whose journalistic career is similar to what mine might have been, had I not been wrenched away by AW) in which case they are all about my failure, i.e. Sandy and I are both working on a big newspaper and she keeps writing front-page stories and being congratulated by the editor, while I try and try but never manage to write anything at all, and even fellow journalists are beginning to wonder out loud what I am paid for . . .

(Paranoia about my career – or rather about the lack it – is never very far away. In the Sixties I was a fashion editor on the Sunday Times and was once described as a Young Meteor, but now I’m more of a fallen star, or AW’s satellite perhaps, or even, on bad days,a black hole. When we were posted to Barbados I can remember almost crying on the beach because I heard that Sandy had been offered the editorship of Good Housekeeping magazine. A friend who was with us was astonished:‘Be honest,’ he said,‘wouldn’t you rather be sitting in the sun on Sandy Lane beach with your children than in an office in London, for heaven’s sake?’ Of course, he was right, but since he was working full-time in a proper job he couldn’t understand my feelings of inadequacy and failure.)

My most easily decipherable dream was two nights after I arrived here. I dreamed that I had created a really beautiful garden and invited Sandy and my mother to come and see it, but when we arrived we found that AW had got there ahead of us and dug up all the plants and put them in the earth upside down so all you could see was muddy roots. Hmmmmm.

Before AW left England to come here four months ago, he consulted – as he always does – the I Ching. If you don’t know about this I should explain. It’s a Chinese book that supposedly tells the future – you have to throw some coins and depending on how they land, you look up your destiny in the book. Well that’s the theory, but the I Ching says such obscure things – ‘The wild goose gradually draws near the cliff ’, or ‘Within the earth, wood grows’, or ‘Progress like a hamster’ – that I’ve always been pretty baffled about what’s supposed to be going on myself. In the case of Kazakhstan however, it was suddenly rather disconcertingly blunt – the heading for AW’s future in Kazakhstan read ‘PIT OF BLOOD’. I am doing my best not to think about this.

13 February

Today I have decided to be more positive, but it is really hard. Put it like this: I am an age at which, if I saw my own obituary in the newspaper, I wouldn’t feel that sad, and I don’t want to spend my remaining years of energy and health wishing away time, here in Kazakhstan, when I could be doing . . . well, what exactly?

In my new positive-thinking mode I keep asking myself: what am I not doing here that I would be doing in London, except shopping at Marks & Spencer? So why am I miserable? First, of course, it is simple homesickness. I feel just like I did at boarding school: desperately lonely, missing family and friends and familiar things. This is childish I know, but I have discovered that I’m not alone:William Fiennes, the author of a new book, The Snow Geese, writes a lot about the misery of homesickness, or ‘nostalgia’ as it used to be called, and how it is ‘more apt to affect persons whose absence from home is forced rather than voluntary’.

My own is a bit of both. AW and I discovered long ago that three months is the longest time we can be apart without endangering our marriage (I was pushing it, postponing my arrival in Kazakhstan for four months). In our experience, after three months we each become so used to being independent that no matter how much we have longed for each other in the meantime,being together again is really difficult – we find ourselves resenting our loss of freedom and the demands and interference of the other person. (Having to turn out the light before one o’clock in the morning, for instance.)

Secondly, my misery is to do with the fact that an ex-patriate wife is just an appendage. Indeed, we are officially known by the people who employ our husbands as ‘trailing spouses’. We trail along behind, we have no identities of our own – we are only in Central Asia, India, Africa or wherever, because of our husbands. We may be engineers, pharmacists, journalists, business women, experts in antiques, geneticists, but when we meet each other we don’t say ‘What do you do?’ – we ask what each other’s husband’s job is. We are only connected to the outside world through the umbilical cord of the Office – where newspapers and letters are delivered, and where the secretary keeps the engagement diary. Since usually we can’t earn our own money, we have to ask our husbands every time we want to spend some. (AW is extremely generous and on the whole hands it over without asking too many questions, but there is still the matter of having to ask.)

Sometimes I feel like a large dog waiting all day for its owner to come home and take it out for a walk. When I hear AW’s key in the lock I have an urge to rush downstairs barking and jumping up and down to lick his face.

I am not surprised that it is becoming more and more difficult for foreign ministries and international businesses to recruit men with wives who are prepared to sacrifice themselves on the altars of their husbands’ ambitions (as I like to put it). It’s okay for the husbands – they go to their offices and work at more or less the same sort of thing whether they are in Jakarta or Japan. But we women are left on our own, wildly casting around for some sort of role for ourselves which isn’t just playing bridge or golf, and having to fall back on our own inner resources – which in my case is rather painful as I feel they are a bit sparse.

From what I’ve seen during my travels, the women who slot in abroad most easily are the teachers and nurses – they can normally find proper jobs in any country. Here in Kazakhstan, I’ve come across another brilliant portable profession: our Admin Officer’s wife is a hairdresser. She has set up a small professional salon in her house, through which she has made lots of friends among her clients, and earns her own money – and there’s no reason she shouldn’t go on doing this wherever her husband is posted. The nice wife of the Goethe Institute man here is a photographer, though that’s a bit like writing – solitary, and entirely dependent on your own willpower and drive – but at least you get out of the house, which you don’t if you are bashing away at a typewriter or computer.

In our own postings I have grasped at anything I could find to do – from making dressing-gowns to writing books to trying to save historic buildings to fund-raising (which is what we all do when everything else fails). Looking back, I loved every project, however random or peculiar, and was bitterly disappointed when AW was ordered on to the next place and I had to stop whatever I was doing.

Our house here – the ninth I have lived in over