Daughters of Britannia
Oh so familiar to FSCA members are the experiences portrayed in this graphic and sometimes lyrical account of the lives of British diplomatic spouses from the mid-sixteen hundreds to the present. Journals and letters written by women far from home describing their new lives to their family and friends, and interviews conducted where possible form the core of her account in which the author, the daughter in a diplomat's family, portrays the circumstances and feelings that were then and are still inherent in such a peripatetic life.
Gasps of recognition of shared experience accompanied my reading of this book, and, I have to say, relief that I have not been forced to become intimately involved in others. Present dangers are vividly described through the accounts of wives of diplomats who have been kidnapped or who have been murdered: their panic and fear, their apprehension, and their efforts to support their children emotionally when they were receiving little support themselves. Policies in that regard have changed in the Foreign Office, and those changes too are described.
Also described is the evolution of duties attributed to spouses, both the written policies and the traditions that make change difficult when it is being lived through. The transition from "two for one" to lack of support, one for another, among spouses at the mission is explored in a somewhat rueful tone by the author and her contributing interviewers.
A chapter entitled "Children" concentrates on the emotional cost of the isolation experienced by children and their parents who are separated by boarding at school from an early age, and the impact of repeated moves on relationships within and outside the family. Throughout, present experiences are interwoven with accounts from other times, an extremely effective method of highlighting the continuity in the lives of diplomatic wives then and now. Chapter titles that include "Rebel Wives" and "Contemporary Wives" as well as the more to be expected "Getting There" and "Social Life" are examples of the range of this book. Daughters of Britannia deserves to rank high on the 1999 Christmas lists of spouses attached to any foreign service on post or at headquarters. It will brighten a lot of January evenings, whether they're spent on the sand of a tropical beach or curled up on a snowy evening at the end of a frigid Ottawa day.
Nancy Fraser