Intrepid sisters of the Service
Patricia Daunt
DIPLOMATIC BAGGAGE: THE ADVENTURES OF A TRAILING SPOUSE by Brigid Keenan John Murray, £14.99, pp. 292, ISBN 0719567254 ✆ £12.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 TRAVELS FOR MY COUNTRY by Molly Breene The Book Guild, £15.95, pp. 104, ISBN 1857769503 ✆ £13.95 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Diplomatic memoirs were once a staple of serious publishers; nowadays they are privately printed, if published at all. But the appetite for memoirs of the ‘trailing spouse’, the plucky ‘diplomatic baggage’, seems insatiable. A phalanx of distinguished critics rolled out on the dustjacket has greeted Brigid Keenan’s contribution, the latest to this popular genre, as a masterpiece. It’s not; but it’s fun and I suspect it of being quite a spoof too.
The gifted wife of the current EU ambassador to Kazakhstan, a professional journalist, has whiled away time in Almaty, capital of the land of the Soviet gulags, in lacing a highly coloured account of her 30-year marriage to her steady eurocrat husband with every funny story to come her way in Nepal, Ethiopia, West Africa, India, the West Indies, Syria and Kazakhstan, not to mention London and Brussels. It succeeds and must as surely strike a chord in the hearts of those of her ‘brave sisters in postings overseas’ with any sense of humour as with the general reader who wants to get no nearer the realities of ‘ex-pat’ life than going on a package tour.
Keenan is not, she would have us believe, the stuff of a Victorian lady traveller; there is nothing doughty about her and certainly no stiff upper lip. Nor does she heed Salad Days’ advice and remember not to look back. With a glorious sense of the ridiculous, she depicts herself as a hyperventilating hysteric, who sobs her doom-ridden fantasies into reality and claims to have been ‘utterly miserable in every one of the six countries across the four continents’ to which she followed a longsuffering spouse during the last three decades. Had she really been that silly, he would surely have taken stern measures long before she idiotically got them locked into their bedroom in Port of Spain and he smashed both ankles jumping out of the window in order to free them.
Keenan maintains that she is frustrated and bored but she is very evidently incapable of boredom. Her brave buying and restoration of a house in old Damascus, which gave us her fine Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City, demonstrated her resourcefulness and good sense. So too her concern for the predicament of the talented young Romanian doctor married to a diplomat in Almaty. Should the spouse sacrifice her career to support her man? It is her own story all over again: a moving one all too familiar to generations of Service wives. Husbands too have started to come into the equation and spouses of both sexes are increasingly resistant to constituting mere baggage. Bridgid Keenan ends up advising the Romanian doctor to stick to her man. As for herself, for all her whingeing and weeping, she succeeded in making real friends of all sorts and conditions of people in four continents and producing a funny book too.
Miss Molly Breene, who travelled for her country, was a very different sort of trailing spouse, one of a platoon of intrepid ladies who marry the Foreign Office and serve it faithfully. They make things work and fill the gaps. There is something very stalwart and British about this ex-Wren who, in her eighties, keeps rose-tinted spectacles firmly in place. The far-away places these FCO ladies serve in are exciting; usually not so their lives, one of which is touchingly, if a trifle breathlessly, recounted in this slim volume.
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