Diplomatic Baggage

The (very funny) adventures of a trailing spouse

Hello, hello, dear Global Jigsaw friends,

In 2008, a few months before I was about to move from Beijing - which had been my home for seven years - to Brussels, where my husband had recently joined the European Union civil service, a friend from Delhi gave me a book. It was titled, Diplomatic Baggage: Adventures of a Trailing Spouse.  

Written by one Brigid Keenan, the trailing spouse of an EU diplomat, it was one of the funniest books I had ever read. Julio and I took turns with it, keeping each other up at night in bed, with our guffawing and snorting. Brigid had the sharpest, yet most sympathetic way of bringing out the absurdities and adventures of a peripatetic life.

It was because of her book that I realized, as I was setting off on my own journey as a diplomatic spouse, that there is drama and comedy in the most banal-seeming situations. You just need the right eyes with which to look at your life.

Then many years later, I flew to Bombay from Tokyo (where I lived by then) to speak at a literature festival. At the airport I was bundled into a taxi headed to the hotel by the festival organisers. I had to share the car with two other speakers who had just arrived from abroad as well. And yes, dear reader, serendipity was at its sparkling best when one of them turned out to be none other than my great, life-and-literature-heroine, Brigid Keenan.

Today’s guest post, by Brigid, is in honour of the republication of Diplomatic Baggage, almost two decades after its debut. A shiny new version is now available on Amazon for £9.99, published by Bloomsbury. Can I please urge everyone to buy a copy?

I promise, you will not regret it even a teeny bit

Brigid Keenan with her republished book, Diplomatic Baggage, a few days ago

And while you have your wallets out, don’t forget to become a paid subscriber of the Global Jigsaw, please. We are an independent publication with no advertising revenue and subscriptions are on a purely voluntary basis. Just click on the button below. Thank you, gracias, xie xie, arigatou, merci, terima kasih.

Below, Brigid’s post for the Global Jigsaw, and below that, a short extract from the book.

***

Some people are born to travel, some, like me, have travel thrust upon them by others.  I am a timorous person by nature, scared of flying, of cars and trains crashing and ships sinking – I couldn’t even make it to the first floor of the Eiffel Tower when I went there as a young tourist, overcome with vertigo, I had to be helped down by an official.  

I might never have adventured far from home, but as luck – or rather, my parents – had it, I was born in India, an army child whose family moved every couple of years; and then I married a diplomat and so the moving began again, but now every four years. 

 In the meantime, I left school at 16 - girls of my generation didn’t often go to university, they did secretarial courses – and at 17 I found a job (as a typist), after which, with a great deal of luck, I rose to be fashion editor of The Sunday Times – the best job in the world.  And then I met my husband.

 Soon I had to give up the glamorous job and follow him, with our new baby, to Brussels where he was embarking on what became a lifetime career, working for the EU.    

As we sailed away from the UK on the ferry to Dunkirk, I remember holding up tiny Hester to show her the famous white cliffs receding into the distance, never imagining for a single second that it would be 35 years before we went back to live in England permanently.

My first problem with my new life was about what I was supposed to do all day.  I had never not worked (except three months maternity leave when the baby took up all the time), but now what was I?  A wife?  A mother? A housewife? I remember a man moving his chair slightly away from me at a dinner party in Brussels when ‘housewife’ was my response to his ‘What do you Do?’ question.  In those days there was no internet – no easy way to pour out your frustration and homesickness to friends and family.  I cried and thought of my mother, an Indian army wife whose letters home to England took months whereas mine were taking only days. 

Then another precious baby came along, and I settled down, happy with my young family.  But children grow up and our girls had to be sent to boarding school which made us all miserable. In the years of their English schooling my happiness graph must have looked like the Covid charts at the beginning of the pandemic – dizzying heights and gloomy depths.

In the glum moments I used to remind myself that Julia Child, the famous author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a trailing spouse (she learned to cook when her husband was posted to Paris). But she had no children, so she didn’t know this particular pain.  

I went back to searching for my role in life.  As an observer of other diplomatic families, I had once noted that hairdressing was a brilliant profession for a trailing spouse:  you work from home, see lots of people - and earn cash. But I was not a hairdresser, so I tried my hand at anything that came along. In the Caribbean I raised money to help disabled children, in India I wrote a column for Punch magazine; in Africa I made dressing gowns in a Chinese factory, in Syria I restored an old house and wrote a book about the old city of Damascus.  

In between, our children were expelled from school and my elderly parents had problems, so a great deal of time was spent on planes to and from the UK.

 Sometimes I still cried, but not often – until we were sent to Kazakhstan, our 8th posting, when I was 62.  It was so remote, so cold, so incomprehensibly Russian-speaking. Fur hats and boots with spikes were our new kit; cabbages, onions, and potatoes our foods – it was a world away from the warmth, the history, and the delicate, cultured cuisine of the Middle East. I didn’t know how I was going to bear it.  And then a sort-of miracle happened. At a diplomatic party I was introduced to the young doctor wife of the Romanian ambassador. She was as unhappy as me and asked my advice. “You are old and have done this for many years.  Tell me, should I leave my husband now and go back to my own country and my job, or should I stay with him - is it worth it?”

Her question suddenly became my own.  Had it been worth it?  It took a year and the writing of a whole book to reply.  

The book was called Diplomatic Baggage.  It was published in 2005 and became a best-seller. What was my reply?  What did I tell her?  Well, the book is being re-published by Bloomsbury, this summer. You will have to read it to find out!  

****

And here, dear GJ friends, an extract from Brigid’s stay in India in the mid 1980s, to whet your appetites:

“I was brought up to believe that reading novels before lunch was decadent (chores had to be done first). For this reason, I always felt slightly guilty reading the Indian newspapers at breakfast – the stories were better than any book. MAN BITES SNAKE TO DEATH. STRAY DOG STEALS NEWBORN BABY FROM HOSPITAL. YOUNG GIRL KIDNAPPED FROM HER HOME TWELVE YEARS BEFORE TURNS UP ON DOORSTEP AS A BLIND BEGGAR AND IS RECOGNIZED BY AN OLD SERVANT AND SAVED.

The story that gripped us most in all the time we were there was the one headlined, “NOTED NAD EXPONENT BEHEADED.” The murder victim was, apparently, in the Guinness Book of World Records because of his moustache, which was six foot long and worn coiled up on his cheeks like two giant Catherine wheels. At the time we read the story in the paper, the police had not yet found his killer, and AW suggested that perhaps they should be looking for the man with the 5 foot 11 ½ inch moustache who wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records. As for being a “nad” exponent, the paper did not reveal what a nad was, but we discovered later that it was a musical instrument, which solved the arguments we’d been having about whether or not you could use the word “nad” in Scrabble.

With its vast population, events in India were always over the top….When you saw the word “mishap” in an Indian newspaper you had to brace yourself for something terrible. A mishap in Britain might mean knocking over a cup of tea at the vicar’s party, but in India it meant disaster, as in FERRY MISHAP KILLS 250.

There was also a tendency to describe organizations as ‘bodies,’ which lead to some gruesome headlines: NEW HEAD FOR BODY, FARMERS TO OPEN BODY. Once we saw a headline that said BODY TO HELP MEDICAL VICTIMS…..”

****

Hope you enjoyed Brigid’s guest post enough to be inspired to get her book.

At the Global Jigsaw, I’m signing off until next week.

Stay well (and subscribe, obvs),

A big hug,

Hasta pronto,

Pallavi