Читать книгу Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives - Katie Hickman - Страница 9

To Mary Sheil, nervous and exhausted from nearly four months’ travelling, the British residence in Tehran must have seemed like a haven from the horrors of the barbarous and teeming streets outside. ‘I passed through a pretty English garden, and then entered an excellent, and even stately-looking English, or rather Italian dwelling of considerable size,’ she wrote. But the house itself was not the only wonder in store for her. ‘I was still more surprised when an extremely well-dressed Persian entered the room and said to me, in an accent savouring most intensely of the “Cowgate”, “Wi’ ye tak ony breakfast?” This was Ali Mohammed Beg, the mission housekeeper, who had acquired a fair knowledge of English from a Scotch woman-servant.’

Despite this auspicious beginning, it was not long before Mary came to realize that the house, beautiful as it was, was not so much a haven as a prison. As she had so forlornly discovered on her journey, in Persia a woman was no one. The journal which she wrote to alleviate the loneliness and almost total isolation of her four years in Persia records all too clearly the monotony of her life: ‘To a man the existence is tiresome enough, but to a woman it is still more dreary.’ As was so often the case in these diplomatic partnerships, her husband was occupied with his job, with sports, visits, and ‘the gossip and scandal of the town, in which he must join whether he likes it or not’. The conditions under which a woman found herself obliged to live were very different: ‘She cannot move abroad without being thickly veiled; she cannot amuse herself by shopping in the bazaars, owing to the attention she could attract unless attired in Persian garments.’ But any European woman who managed to escape suffocation beneath the roobend,^* would surely have been half-crippled by the tiny shoes, barely covering half the foot, with a small heel three inches high in the middle of the sole.

Unlike so many of her successors – and predecessors – in postings in which the seclusion of women was practised, Mary was as much a victim of her own prejudices as the local customs. In her view the acquaintance of only a very few of the Tehran ladies was considered desirable at all; none of them were Persians. The Russian mission, she complained, was too far away for her to be able to cultivate the friendship of ‘Princess D’ and her ‘aimiable daughter’, while the remaining female society was limited to just one or two other ladies, the wives of foreign officers in the Shah’s service. Tehran, she wrote rather plaintively, was ‘one of the most frightful places in the world’ and her life there resembled that of a nun. Although on several occasions she did go to visit the Shah’s mother in the palace harem, it does not seem to have occurred to her that such women might have been seen as equals rather than as exotic curiosities.

Later on, when Mary had learnt Persian and was in a better position to form an opinion, she conceded that the Persian women were both lively and intelligent. ‘They are restless and intriguing, and may be said to manage their husband’s and son’s affairs. Persian men are made to yield to their wishes by force of incessant talking and teazing,’ she noted, a frisson of disapproval in her voice. The Shah’s mother in particular – ‘very handsome, and did not look above 30 but must be 40’ – was very clever: not only was she in complete charge of the harem itself; it was also said that she played a large part in the affairs of government.

The Khanum (the Lady), as she was known, received Mary kindly. She said ‘a great many aimiable things to me and went through all the usual Persian compliments, hoping that my heart had not grown narrow and that my nose was fat.’ Mary was entertained lavishly, and the Khanum asked her many questions about Queen Victoria: how she dressed and how many sons she had. She even made her describe the ceremonial of a Drawing Room, and a visit to the theatre. And yet despite these overtures, ‘various circumstances render it undesirable to form an intimacy with the inmates of any Persian anderoon,’ Mary wrote primly. ‘If it were only on account of the language they are said to be in the habit of using in familiar intercourse among themselves, no European woman would find any enjoyment in their society.’

This memsahib-like prudery condemned Mary to a life of splendid isolation. At first she was amused by the way in which her escort seized any men who came too close to her and pushed their faces up against the wall until she had passed lest she should be ‘profaned’ by their glance. But once established at the mission Mary was allowed nowhere, not even for a drive, without an escort of fifteen or twenty armed horsemen. This was not so much for security, for Persia was a safe country, ‘but that dignity so required’.

Since she could take no part in her husband’s public life, almost her only pleasures were her pets, letters from home, which arrived just once a month, and her garden. At first she found the garden a melancholy place, full of lugubrious cypresses, in which ‘the deserted, neglected little tombs of some of the children of former ministers occupied a prominent place’, filling her with gloomy forebodings. But with the help of a Mr Burton, a first-rate English gardener who at that time was in the service of the Shah, she was soon astonishing everyone with the beauty of her celery and her cauliflowers, ‘for these useful edibles occupied my mind more than flowers.’¹ To be thrown back on her own resources in this way, albeit in the humble cultivation of a vegetable patch, was to prove an invaluable training for the real hardships that she was later to face.

In the mid-nineteenth century there was nothing, and no one, to tell Mary Sheil what living in Persia was going to be like. While various forms of military and diplomatic intelligence existed for the use of Colonel Sheil and his colleagues, the female, domestic sphere was never considered important enough to merit attention. As a woman, and as a European, Mary was doubly isolated.

Present-day Foreign Office wives (and now of course Foreign Office husbands as well) may consult a well-developed system of post reports to tell them exactly what to expect when they arrive in a new country, from schools for their children to whether or not Marmite can be bought in Azerbaijan (it can’t). But knowing the theory, of course, does not necessarily make the practice any easier.

Sometimes even the most basic physical conditions, such as the weather, can be the most daunting. Extremes of heat and cold (-45°C in the harshest Mongolian winters; +45°C in the hottest central Asian summers), of humidity or altitude, are only partly alleviated by modern central heating and air-conditioning. Although most diplomatic women are willing to adapt to a different geography, a different culture, even a different political system, they are often ill-equipped to meet the challenge. Learning the language, as Mary Sheil did in Persia, is vital, but sometimes even the most brilliant linguists find it unexpectedly tough. ‘Why do grammars only teach one such phrases as “Simply through the courage of the champion’s sword”,’ lamented Vita Sackville-West, ‘when what one wants to say is “Bring another lamp”?’² Jane Ewart-Biggs was able to learn quite fluent Flemish in Brussels, but even she was stumped when she had to introduce Baron Regnier de Wykerslooth de Rooyesteyn to the Comte de Crombrugghe de Picquendaele.

The very first impressions of a new posting are the most vivid. These fleeting insights can set the tone, all too brutally sometimes, for the next two or three years to come. Jane Ewart-Biggs arrived in Algeria with her two-month-old baby, Henrietta, in her arms, in 1961, at the height of the country’s savage war of independence against the French. The first thing she saw on her journey from the airport was a man leaning out of a stationary car. It was only when she was past the car that she realized that the man’s strange position, spreadeagled out of the window, could only have meant one thing: he was dead. ‘I had never seen anyone dead before,’ she commented faintly.³

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was both refreshed and exhilarated by her first impressions: ‘Hitherto all I see is so new to me it is like a fresh scene of an opera every day,’ she wrote enthusiastically on first arriving in Turkey.⁴ For others, such as Ella Sykes out in the wilds of Turkistan, part of the lure of the ‘Back of Beyond’ was simply the physical freedom from starchy drawing-room conventions.

There were other wives, however, for whom first impressions were not quite so liberating. When my mother finally arrived in Wellington, after six weeks on the high seas, she vividly expressed in her first letters home her own sense of dislocation at the strangeness of it all, tinged with a faint disappointment.

Dear Mummy and Daddy [she wrote a few days after her arrival in July], We arrived in Cooks Strait in lovely weather and docked at Wellington in bright sunshine and no wind. It was both exciting and sad. Firstly it was horrid having no family among the cheering crowds at the quayside, and secondly it was exciting to see this wonderful harbour. The Second Secretary and Chief Clerk were on the quayside, looking most English and conspicuous by the very fact that they didn’t look excited and weren’t waving to anyone … The town of Wellington has little to offer. It seems rather provincial, unfinished, and a cross between Montreal and some deep southern hick town. All the shopping streets have covered-in ways, with their signs flapping horizontally at you as you walk along, and it would never surprise me to see a posse come riding into town. One feels it should have saloon bars with swing doors.

When her husband was posted to Benghazi, in Libya, Felicity Wakefield was daunted not only by the conditions under which she was expected to live, but also by an acute sense of the life she was leaving behind.

I had just had two years living in our beautiful house in South Kensington. It was like a railway station because there were people in and out all the time, and we were having rather a good time living there. And the children were all there, and all one’s friends were readily available. Life was very easy and very pleasant, and then suddenly one’s taken out of that and put in a new place where you know nobody. And the physical things were very difficult. The lights were on sometimes, and often not on. The climate in some ways was idyllic, but then you got these terrible winds off the desert. The water in the tap tasted brackish. It was very salt. You could drink it, there wasn’t anything else to drink at that stage. Eventually we got organised, and used to fetch water in an enormous tank down from the mountains, but everything tasted revolting because it was cooked with salty water – including the coffee for breakfast. The Libyans were unfriendly; if you invited them, they wouldn’t come. In the end we learnt how they did things, and learned to love them. But my initial impressions were … I was horrified.

Many women, especially those with young families, found, like Felicity Wakefield, that their first impressions were dominated by purely practical considerations. In the harsher and more remote postings, shortages of light and water, and weird, if not downright dangerous electrical systems were commonplace. For Catherine Young, who arrived in Syria for the first time in 1983, it was the even more basic expedient of buying food for her family’s breakfast the next day.

I thought, oh my goodness, the children are going to school, I must go and get a few things. I went in to one of the shops and it looked like a grocer’s shop and there I got some sugar. As for tea? No, no tea. Coffee? No; no coffee. Jam? No jam. Butter? The same. I had to go into four different shops to get enough for breakfast. And I came back and I was absolutely desperate. I thought, I’m going to spend my life doing this – how am I going to manage?

The first few glimpses of a new and unknown country could evoke powerful feelings. Loneliness and homesickness were commonplace, but these were often mingled with other, darker emotions. Angela Caccia struggled to come to terms with the effects of the physical landscape itself. Bolivia was a beautiful country, but its beauty had a disturbing quality to it. Nature, she observed, ‘was prodigal here, contemptuous, aloof’. At midday the sun was so strong that even half an hour in it would burn the baby’s cheeks to blisters, and yet at night they ‘would huddle by the fire while frost fell outside’. Strangest of all, though, was the effect of altitude (La Paz is 11,000 feet above sea level) and the extraordinary mountain light. ‘The air was so clear, the light so pure, it seemed almost to have sparks in it, like fluorescence in sea water. On some days the blueness of the sky had a dazzling intensity; on others it was white, as though the colour had gone into a range of radiance beyond human sight.’ Despite this beauty, or perhaps because of it, during her first few weeks Angela felt miserable and isolated, surrounded by people ‘whose languages and ways of thought we saw no hope of understanding’. And at first she was afraid, too: ‘afraid … of these strange, different people, of the stories of violence, death, and brutality … I was afraid of the Indians, the men in the buses who smelt so strongly of dirty clothes, drink and excrement.’⁵

Her experience is echoed by that of Masha Williams, whose first impressions of Baghdad in 1947 were of a ‘violent, cruel world’. Although she was fascinated by it strangeness and its mystery, she was a little frightened too. ‘I was afraid of the Arabs,’ she confessed. ‘Socially we met them rarely, our time being taken up by the British, but it was a frightening world outside our British circle. In the streets – anonymous, faceless, shapeless women draped in black and the thin-lipped men who stared brazenly from under their head cloths at my bare arms and swollen figure.’⁶

It came as a shock to realize that these feelings were sometimes reciprocated. In Peking during the Cultural Revolution Sheila Whitney remembers the ‘anti-imperialist’ marches, specifically directed against foreigners, which took place every few months or so, during which the Red Guards would throw paint on cars in the British mission compound and smash their flower pots. ‘We used to watch it, fascinated, really. I felt sorry for the Chinese, because they all had to do what the Red Guards told them.’

Other less drastic forms of culture shock could work both ways as well. When Mary Sheil visited the Shah’s harem she was amused to find that not one of his ladies could be convinced that European women undressed at night before they went to sleep. ‘Was it true,’ she was asked, ‘we put on a long white dress to pass the night in?’ When Maureen Tweedy arrived in Seoul she, too, found the people friendly, but puzzled by Europeans and their ways. ‘We had to learn many things in our new post; to say Western and not European in deference to the Americans; to say Asian and not Asiatic; to remember that when a servant giggled on being reprimanded it was a sign of embarrassment and not of impertinence.’⁷ While blowing one’s nose in public was frowned upon, spitting was perfectly acceptable, and to be thought old was a compliment. On her arrival Maureen was met by a group of journalists, and their questions brought home to her how unknown and far away Britain was to Koreans. Why do English girls wear dark clothes? Why does the sun not shine in Britain? What do English boys say to English girls? What is a deb (this was in the late 1950s)? Why do the English not have a national costume like the Scots? How well did she know the Queen and how often did she go and see her? Was it true that the English are such bad cooks they can only live on fish and chips?

The style in which a diplomatic wife first arrived in a new posting varied enormously according both to the country and to her husband’s diplomatic status in it. When Maureen Tweedy’s husband was posted to Kuwait in 1950 it was still only a little-known sea port on the edge of the desert. There was no airport and no one to welcome them, so they landed, unheralded, on a strip of beaten sand ‘under the supercilious gaze of a couple of camels’.⁸ Arriving in Tripoli in the late eighteenth century, Miss Tully found that great crowds of people had gathered at the docks for a good view of the strange new arrivals. The Bey’s chief officers, ‘splendidly arrayed in the fashion of the east’ in flowing robes of satin, velvet and costly furs, had been sent to meet them. But the majority, she noted with revulsion, ‘were miserable beings whose only covering was a piece of dark brown homespun cotton’.⁹

In the grander embassies arrivals were very different occasions. Although there was no public entrance or procession for the Elgins when they arrived in Constantinople in 1779 (as there had been for the Winchilseas in 1661), their reception was still designed to reflect the richness and magnificence of the Ottoman court. No fewer than ninety attendants were sent to the British embassy, each one carrying a round tray covered with beautiful flowers and quantities of exotic fruit; ‘they placed the flowers and fruit on each side of our hall and made two rows from top to bottom,’ wrote the Countess of Elgin to her mother. ‘The Great Man [the Grand Vizier] then came into the room followed by eight trays with five pieces of fine Berlin china on each, filled with different sorts of preserves and painted handkerchiefs over each. Four trays for me and four for Elgin.’¹⁰

Similarly in 1664, when Ann Fanshawe and her husband, Richard, the new ambassador, first arrived in Spain, they were greeted with all the pomp and circumstance that the Spanish court could muster. Her view of Spain, perhaps not unnaturally, was profoundly influenced by her reception. The Fanshawes had sailed to Cadiz, where a barge, sumptuously covered with crimson damask and gold fringes, Persian carpets underfoot, was sent to meet them. As they disembarked from their own ship all the other vessels in the harbour saluted them with volleys of guns and cannons. At the dockside a great crowd of the town’s ‘quality’ was waiting to honour them, and the streets were thronged with common folk eager to watch them go by. The King’s representative, Don Juan de la Cueva, the Duke of Albuquerque and twice a Grandee of Spain, came to greet them personally. With a graceful flourish, Lady Fanshawe remembered with a little flutter, he deposited his plumed hat on the ground before her. ‘This, with my family and life, I lay at your Excellency’s feet,’ he said.

From Cadiz they travelled in state all the way to Madrid. In addition to the Spanish courtiers and their entourages who now accompanied them, the Fanshawes had their own extensive suite, including gentle-men-of-the-horse, three pages, a chief butler, a chief cook, two undercooks, two grooms, two footmen, a governess for their children, a housekeeper, a waiting gentlewoman, a servant to the young gentlewoman, a chambermaid and a washmaid, three postilions, three coachmen and three grooms.

As befitted his status as ambassador, Richard travelled in the principal gilded state coach, which was lined with crimson velvet and fringed with silver and gold. Ann followed behind in a second, green-velvet-lined coach. Many gentlemen, perhaps including the gallant Duke of Albuquerque, rode in front and Ann’s pages, dressed in matching green velvet liveries, rode behind her. Numerous coaches, litters, riding horses, and a string of covered wagons decorated with the Fanshawe coat of arms and carrying their trunks and clothes, brought up the rear. Along the way they were lavishly fêted, entertained with banquets, plays, comedies, music and juegos de toros (bullfights). In the King’s palace in Seville, where they stayed briefly, Ann was presented with a pet lion. ‘Yet I assure you,’ she claimed, not wholly convincingly, in the memoir written for her only surviving son, ‘… that your father and myself both wished ourselves in a retired country life in England, as more agreeable to both our inclinations.’

And yet, while she remained in Spain, everything about the country seemed marvellous; better, in fact, to her dazzled eyes, than anything she had ever encountered in England.

Our house was very richly furnished, both my husband’s quarter and mine, the worst bed and chamber of my apartment being furnished with damask, in which my chambermaid lay; and all the chambers through [out] the floor of them, covered with Persia carpets. The richness of the gilt and silver plates which we had in great abundance, as we had likewise all sorts of very fine household linen, was fit only for the entertainment of so great a prince as his majesty our master.^*

In fact everything she saw or experienced in Spain, even the food, was fit only for kings.

There is not in the Christian world better wines than their midland wines are especially, besides sherry and canary. Their water tastes like milk; their corn white to a miracle; and their wheat makes the sweetest and best bread in the world. Bacon, beyond belief good; the Segovia veal much larger, whiter and fatter than ours. Mutton most excellent; capons much better than ours … The cream called nata is much sweeter and thicker than ever I saw in England. Their eggs much exceed ours and so all sorts of salads and roots and fruits. That I most admired is melons, peaches, bergamot pears and grapes, oranges, lemons, citrous, figs, pomegranates … And they have olives which are nowhere so good.¹¹

As the travelling dust gradually settled, and the last fanfares died away, the blurred kaleidoscope of first impressions gradually gave way to a more measured appreciation of the conditions in store. The house which Ann Fanshawe was to preside over for the next two and a half years, the Casa de las Siete Chimeneas (the House of the Seven Chimneys), with its rich damask hangings, Persian carpets, gilt and silver plate, was one of the grander British residences abroad, but others found that they could be just as happy in more modest surroundings.

In the 1950s Maureen Tweedy was posted to Meshed, near the Persian border with Russia, a place of pilgrimage for Sharia Muslims and the burial place of Harun-al-Rashid, Caliph of Baghdad, a name exotically linked with The Thousand and One Nights. For Maureen the consulate there, still redolent of the last days of the Raj, had a romance all of its own, and ‘the quietude of a purely English setting’. Despite its rudimentary Russian heating system and ‘our old friend from Indian days, the thunderbox’ as the only sanitation in their bathroom, she loved the house: it was a large, square, two-storeyed building with green shutters and wide deep verandas all round it, standing in a beautiful garden shaded by great walnut trees. ‘A sweep of lawn, flanked by herbaceous borders, led to the rose garden. Beyond were two tennis courts and beyond these again a formal lily pond, a swimming pool brooded over by an ancient mulberry tree, an enormous kitchen garden, and peach and apricot trees heavy with fruit.’ Their servants, ‘elderly Indian orderlies, grown old in the service of the British’, stood stiffly to attention as the Tweedys drove through the gates. In addition to the five indoor servants, and five gardeners, their household included an aged Pakistani syce, or groom. Although the consul no longer kept horses, the syce still made sure that all the saddlery was in perfect condition, and was fond of reminiscing about the days when the Russian consul general never went anywhere without his Cossack guards, nor the British without an escort of Indian cavalry.¹²

Similarly, when Diana Shipton, Maureen’s contemporary, arrived in Kashgar in 1946 she found the British consulate a rich repository of memories from other lives. There were photographs in the drawing room, ‘a store full of horns and heads from many shooting trips’, a game book, beautifully printed and bound, and another notebook in which to record sightings of birds and their migration. There was also a good collection of gramophone records, including everything from complete symphonies to old dance tunes. The greatest legacy was the library, which contained an eclectic collection of over 300 books, from improving tomes like The Life of Mohammed, Arithmetic in the Mongol Language and twelve volumes of the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, to the more wistful Hunting Insects in the South Seas.¹³

Other women found themselves considerably less well equipped. Catherine Macartney, the first woman to inhabit the Kashgar consulate, found no such luxury when she arrived there in 1898. The original building was little more than a ‘native dwelling’ built in traditional style around a courtyard. The walls were of sun-baked brick and mud, and there were no windows, only skylights covered not with glass (which had not yet reached that part of the world) but with oiled paper. ‘Our furniture was very primitive,’ Catherine wrote stoically, since most of it had been home-made by her husband, who had no very great experience of designing comfortable chairs. His first attempt ‘was so high that I had almost to climb up to the seat, and must sit with my feet on the rail, or with them dangling. The back was quite straight and reached far above my head, and the seat was not more than about six inches wide. There was no possible chance of having a rest in it …’¹⁴

In 1947, when Masha Williams first arrived in Baghdad during the ferocious summer heat, she found that none of her heavy luggage had arrived, although her fur coat had been sent from the cleaners at Harrods. In the house itself there were no curtains, and no furniture (the office, which provided them with an allowance, expected them to buy these things for themselves) and, worst of all, no refrigerator or fans.

The culture, customs or politics of a particular country could also impose their own particular living restrictions. Sheila Whitney speaks for all the diplomatic wives who experienced communist regimes.

It was quite tough. We weren’t allowed to move more than a twelve-mile radius from the centre of Peking. If you wanted to go any further you had to ask permission. And the Ming tombs were just about within that twelve-mile radius so you could go there. But when you did there was always a little man on a motorbike with a boiler suit watching you. You weren’t allowed to diversify off the main route to anywhere, so you didn’t see any of the little villages, and suddenly you got two or three miles outside Peking and this little chap would appear on his bike. And he would follow you to the Ming tombs and, wherever you were, you would see him in the bushes.

Peggy Trevelyan’s experience in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s was also typical. ‘One had to presume our house was bugged. So if ever my husband wanted to tell me about anything – not that he told me much because he thought it was better that I didn’t know – but if there was anything pertaining to individuals in the embassy that he thought I should know, we used to go for a walk in the botanical gardens.’

It was the dress restrictions that Norah Errock remembers from her lonely diplomatic childhood in Saudi Arabia in the early 1940s. When she and her mother went to visit the King’s harems in Riyadh she was expected to wear Arab clothes. ‘We had sort of bloomers first, then a long shift dress, then a sort of overdress with huge sleeves which you sort of pulled round and that acted as the veil if any male appeared – but in very beautiful colours. And if you went out you put on a black overdress – but then again the overdress was often beautifully embroidered.’ On one occasion Norah’s mother decided that it would be a good idea to show some films to the women.

They had never seen films before. The only films we had of course were propaganda films. I was given instructions on how to run the projector. They were allowing some of the younger princes in, and there was one who kept saying, ‘You should have your veil on when I’m in the room.’ He was probably about eight or so, but he might well have been thirteen and by then, of course, women are supposed to veil in front of them. So I can remember trying to work the machine, and at the same time keep the veil over my face.

The film they enjoyed most was when the previous person who had used the machine hadn’t wound back the reel as you are supposed to do. It was of parachutists and there was this wonderful sequence of the parachute going up – to them of course it was probably just as extraordinary as parachutists coming down from the sky.

Just occasionally a climate, a landscape, a people and a way of life all combined so harmoniously that, even from the very first, a country seemed like nothing short of an earthly paradise. ‘Whatever life brings or takes away … whatever comes, Japan will always be my second home,’ Mary Fraser was to write of her posting there in the 1890s. ‘I do not think I have really been so far from Japan that I did not sometimes see the cherry blossoms drifting on the wind, did not sometimes hear the scream of the wild goose through the winter sky and hear the long roll of the surf thundering up on the Atami beaches.’

Mary Fraser was an American brought up largely in Italy. Her parents were wealthy, liberal, cosmopolitan and artistic. Her sculptor father, Thomas Crawford, rented the Villa Negroni in Rome, once the home of Pope Sixtus V. In 1851 Mary was born there. Its stone walls (the masonry was taken from the ancient baths of Diocletian), its vast warren of long galleries and ‘dimly gorgeous rooms’ were the perfect setting from which to absorb the splendours of Rome. As a young girl Mary met the Brownings, the American poets Lowell and Longfellow and, best of all, Edward Lear, who drew pictures for her youngest sister, Daisy, then still just a little child, and wrote poems for her, including ‘Manyforkia Spoonfoolia’, inspired by the strange meats and unmanageable cutlery of his hotel dining room, and most of the recipes for Nonsense Cookery.

How Mary came to marry the spartan Scot Hugh Fraser we shall never know. They met and became engaged in Venice. Although they seem to have been rather ill-matched, she always wrote of him affectionately. ‘I always leave my real self in cold storage when I go to England,’ she once confessed, ‘and my dear Hugh had very little use at any time for the Mediterranean born side of my personality.’^*

After her first posting to China Mary travelled to Vienna and South America. A photographic portrait of her shows a thin, thoughtful woman with a gentle face and pale blue eyes. Her hair is worn in the style of Queen Alexandra, piled up on the back of her head, a few curls swept carefully over her brow. It was this Mary, older and more wistful, who accompanied her husband, Hugh, when he was sent as minister to Tokyo in 1889.

From the beginning, Mary was bewitched by the beauty of Japan. With its gardens and its cherry blossom, Tokyo was one of the fairest cities she had ever seen: its streets and houses ‘seemed to have grown up by accident – and are of no importance as compared with the flowers.’ In her house, with its wisteria-sheltered verandas and its view, across a little moat, of the Emperor’s new palace, she felt at the very centre of things. Her own upstairs balcony was ‘so wide and cool that every breeze sweeps through it from end to end, and yet so sheltered that I can wander about and work or read in absolute privacy’. Japan seemed ‘absolutely fresh’; ‘All that one has read or heard fails to give any true impression of this vivid youngness,’ Mary wrote. Although she still missed her own country, she felt immediately at home.

Outwardly Mary’s life was still dominated by her diplomatic duties, particularly by the ceremonial of the imperial court; but she was becoming increasingly absorbed by the natural world around her. The plum blossom, ‘eldest brother of the hundred flowers’, came out when the snow was still on the ground, and she was entranced to find that a whole body of poetry and tradition had grown up around this early harbinger of spring. By the beginning of February the plum-gardens were in full bloom, and Mary visited them to admire what the Japanese called the ‘silver world’: ‘a world with snow on the paths and snow on the branches, while snowy petals, with the faintest touch of glow-worm green at the heart, go whirling along on the last gust of wind from the bay’.

In the autumn, it was the maple trees. ‘The autumn has come at last, and the maples are all on fire,’ she wrote in November that year. ‘Since one autumn, when I wandered through the New Jersey woods as a tiny child, I have never seen such a gorgeous explosion of colour, such a storm of scarlet and gold.’ The Japanese sub-divided their maples again and again, and one Japanese gardener told her that he knew of no less than 380 distinct varieties.

Those which please me most are, I think, the kind which grow about ten or twelve feet high, with leaves in five or seven long points, exquisitely cut, and growing like strong fingers on a young hand. They always seem to be pointing to something, and one involuntarily looks round and about to see what it is. They are deep red in colour all the year round, and are constantly grouped with vivid greens, making splendid masses in the shrubberies.

But Mary’s greatest rapture was saved for the cherry blossom. That first spring, the arrival of this fabled wonder coincided with a royal visit from the Duke and Duchess of Connaught. ‘I hope you will not think me wanting in loyalty.’ Mary wrote to her family, ‘if I say that they have been almost more of an excitement to me than the royal visitors.’ Mary had been ill, and the contemplation of the flowers in her garden, particularly the cherry blossom, meant more to her than if she had been up and busy: ‘The crown of the year has come at last … an outburst of bewildering beauty such as no words can convey to those who have not seen it for themselves.’

On the streets of Tokyo every avenue was planted with cherry trees in long, close-set rows; every garden boasted its carefully nurtured groves. ‘Over the river at Mukojima they dip to the water, and spread away inland like a rosy tidal wave; and the great park at Uyeno seems to have caught the sunset clouds of a hundred skies, and kept them captive along its wide forest ways.’ The double cherry blossoms were the most magnificent of all, surpassing ‘every other splendour of nature’. During the two weeks or so when the blossom was at its best, the Japanese flocked, day after day, to look at them. From her veranda Mary watched the tall grove of cherry trees in the garden, their branches waving softly against the sky, storing up ‘the recollection of their loveliness until the next year should bring it round again’.

However, ‘I would not want you to think that existence is one long series of cotillion figures out here,’ she wrote in a more sombre mood; ‘it can be very sad and very bitter.’ At times there was an almost mystical quality to her response to the natural world – her ‘cherry blossom metaphysics’, as she liked to call it, which in her dark moments brought great solace. On her frequent travels around Japan the merest glimpse of Mount Fuji – or Fuji-san, the name reverently given to the perfectly cone-shaped, snow-capped volcano – was usually enough to lift her spirits and banish her lingering sense of disappointment with life. ‘In Japan one cannot think of Fuji as a thing, a mere object in the landscape;’ she mused, ‘she becomes something personal, dominating, a factor in life. No day seems quite sad or aimless in which one has had a glimpse of her.’

This natural affinity with all things Japanese, which began with the natural world, opened Mary’s mind to many other, more perplexing aspects of Japanese life. Throughout her time there she was almost startlingly open to what must have seemed a deeply alien culture. She was strangely aware of the bluntness of her own, western faculties when it came to describing the exquisite delicacy of Japanese sensibilities. ‘English is a clumsy, square-toed vehicle of expression,’ she wrote in exasperation, ‘and stumbles along, crushing a thousand beauties of my Japanese thought-garden, which a more delicate language (or a more skilful writer!) might have preserved for you.’

Very soon Mary learned to love the Japanese people, as well as their country. Her natural peers were ‘the little hot house ladies’ of the imperial court, ‘with their pretty shy ways and their broken confidences about the terror of getting into European clothes.’^* The life of the court was very formal: the clothes, etiquette and food were all strictly regulated. The speech used by the imperial family differed from that of ordinary people. There were special terms for the royal-feminine and the royal-masculine, and courtiers had to take care when speaking to one of the princes to use certain words meant only for royal ears. ‘Is this not a puzzling sum?’ Mary exclaimed. Even when the Frasers attended the Emperor and Empress at Enryo Kwan, their palace by the sea, this formality persisted. A simple walk around the palace gardens was conducted with rigid protocol. Members of the court followed the sovereigns, in the strictest order of precedence, in all their uniforms and finery, ‘like some huge dazzling snake, gliding in and out of all the narrow paths’.

Even the smallest details of imperial life, Mary observed, seemed to have a peculiarly Japanese grace. The chrysanthemum, symbol of the Japanese imperial house, appeared embossed in gold on royal invitations, on the panels of the court carriages, and even on the servants’ liveries. Thursdays were reception days at court and Mary was fascinated by the refreshments offered to the diplomatic corps on these occasions, which included maple leaf shapes made entirely of sugar: ‘Large and small, deep crimson, green and orange, with three leaves, or five or seven, they were piled on the delicate china in such an artistic fashion that I could not refrain from an exclamation of pleasure when they were offered to me,’ she wrote.

Mary was intrigued by the ladies of the court, but she felt greater sympathy for the ordinary people of Japan, particularly her own servants. ‘The very smart people here affect the most impassive countenance and a low voice in speaking,’ she noted, while only the lower classes could express their emotions and joie de vivre, although their habits did sometimes surprise her. She was supposed to enter her servants’ courtyard only at appointed times, but she could not resist observing them from behind the blinds of one of the upper windows. Once, in the terrible heat of summer, when even she could bear no more than ‘the thinnest of white garments’ against her skin, she arrived in her kitchen to find, to her quiet amusement, her cook’s grandmother ‘without a shred of raiment on her old brown body’.

Big Cook San, as her principal chef was known, was a particular favourite. Ever since the influenza epidemic which had swept the country earlier that winter he had suffered from bad lungs, and so when Mary and Hugh went on a visit to Horiuchi, a fashionable seaside summer resort, they took him with them, hoping that the change would do him good.

Big Cook San descended to the platform, jingling like a gypsy tinker with all the saucepans that he had hung round himself at the last moment. An omelette pan and a bain-marie, miraculously tied together, hung over his shoulder; a potato-steamer from his waist; in one hand he carried a large blue tea-pot, and in the other a sheaf of gorgeous irises, carefully tied up in matting, for fear there should be no flowers at Horiuchi!

Mary’s greatest affection, though, was reserved for Ogita, her samurai, guide and interpreter, her ‘right hand in a thousand matters of life’. When he died, of influenza, she recorded his death with real grief. ‘Do you wonder that I tell you so much about a mere servant?’ she wrote. ‘He has been so helpful and faithful, has carried out all my whims with such gentle patience, has piloted me through so many journeys, taught me so many quaint stories, that a part of my Japanese life has died with him.’

Ogita was a tall man of soldierly bearing, a master swordsman and a teacher of Japanese fencing. After his illness Mary was shocked to see death written on the face of this ‘valiant, humble, upright soul’. Ogita lived in a little house in the British legation compound with his wife and five children, and when Mary visited him there and saw him lying on a couple of worn mats on the floor, she thought he looked pitifully long and thin, and much too large for the tiny room. Although he was often too weak to speak, until the very last his two hands always went up to his brow when she entered, and there was always ‘a light of welcome’ shining for her in his eyes. Once or twice he said to her: ‘Okusama^* is very kind; I would get well if I could; but I can never travel with her any more, and I am too tired to live.’

After his death, Mary went to visit Ogita one last time. Incense was burning in the house, and freshly gathered flowers had been placed near the coffin head.

He lay very straight and stiff, with a smile of peace on his thin face. His hands were crossed on his breast, and his long blue robes were drawn in straight folds, all held in place with little packets of tea, which filled the room with a dry fragrance; the coffin was lined with these, and his head rested on a pillow of the same. Beside him on a stand lay his most precious possession, his sword; and before the weeping wife left me kneeling there, she touched my shoulder, and pointed to the sword, bowing her head in reverence, and whispering, ‘Samurai, Okusama!’

Mary, a devout Catholic, had tried without success to convert Ogita to her faith. Although she was to remember this with regret after his death, she comforted herself with the thought that he had been ‘a samurai and a gentleman to the last; and I do not believe that any true gentleman was ever shut out of heaven yet.’¹⁵

When Elizabeth Blanckley arrived in Algiers in 1806, where her father was posted as British consul, it was through her servants, too, that the spirit of the country was most vividly revealed. Not everyone in the Blanckley household was as favourably impressed by their first sight of the country as Elizabeth. Her Maltese nurse was so disconsolate ‘at seeing herself surrounded by turbans’ (from the moment they disembarked, she never ceased weeping and exclaiming, ‘I must die, my heart is broke’; ‘il mio cuore sta negro, il mio cuore sta negro’) that the family took pity on her and dispatched her back home. Instead they found a new nurse, Maria; her husband, known as Antonio the Stupid because he could never do anything right; and a butler who could turn his hand to anything, but was particularly adept at making dolls’ wigs. Most exciting of all for Elizabeth and her sister, who were then still quite young, there was Angela, a seventeen-year-old slave, who was presented to them by the Dey (the local ruler) along with her three-month-old baby.

As Christians the Blanckleys were not allowed to own slaves, who were usually hired out to them as domestic servants (Maria and Antonio the Stupid were both slaves of Maltese extraction). Angela and her baby, however, were gifts, which was just as well because ‘the poor helpless unfortunate’ appeared to be unable to do anything at all either for herself or for her baby, let alone in any capacity as a domestic. The Blanckleys, who were good-natured and rather intrigued by her interesting circumstances, took them into their household and cared for them all the same. The baby, who was known as Angelina, became a great favourite.

It was their janissary, however, who became their most important link with the country. Janissaries were not really servants at all, but aristocrats,^* an elite corps of soldiers created under the Ottoman system of devshirme (a levy of at least one son from each non-Muslim family in the empire). The most talented of these boys either became janissaries, or went into the Turkish civil service; throughout the Ottoman empire at least one of their number was always assigned to the household of a foreign diplomat to act as bodyguard. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, though, Sidi Hassan had much more exciting duties to perform. He would hide behind their drawing-room curtains, for example, and pretend to be a lion in his den while she and her sister took the role of lambs or travellers whom he would proceed to gobble up. But, best of all, Sidi Hassan was a storyteller.

Elizabeth listened to these stories, these ‘Algerian Nights’ as she called them, with a delight that even in later years, when she had long left Algiers, never faded from her memory. These fascinating tales of genii and princesses were so long that some of them took the evenings of an entire week to conclude. One, which she never forgot, was the story of a girl whose eyelashes were so long that she always swept the floor of her chamber with them. Elizabeth and her sister would sit and listen to Sidi Hassan in his room at the back of their house; he would smoke his pipe, the smell of which clung so strongly to their skin and dresses that such visits were finally banned by their mother.

Elizabeth Blanckley spent six years of her childhood in Algiers, from 1806 to 1812. Like Mary Fraser in Japan nearly a century later, from the moment their boat landed (the Noah’s ark so admired by Nelson) Elizabeth felt at home. They did not live in the town of Algiers itself, but in a country residence, a ‘garden’ just outside the city. The house was built on cliffs overlooking the sea. In the heat of summer it was delightfully cool, watered by fountains and shaded with vines which produced bunches of grapes at least three feet long.

Although the house was built in the Moorish manner, around an open courtyard, much of it was decorated in the English style. Elizabeth’s favourite room was her bedroom, which was more dear to her even than the grand Parisian boudoir which became hers in later life. This room had a domed ceiling and was surrounded by four smaller chiosks, or domed recesses. The first was the door; the second was taken up with books and toys, while the third accommodated her bed, ‘with its white muslin curtains, drapé by violet-coloured ribbons, and couvre-pied of scarlet and gold’. The fourth chiosk was a window, shaded by the branches of the vine, which overlooked the sea.

Away from the cliffs, the house was surrounded by groves of fruit trees – pomegranates, almonds, orange and lemon trees, as well as the bergamot, or sweet lemon – in which nightingales sang. The fig trees bore fruit of such perfection that it had hitherto been considered fit for the Dey alone, while the apricots were so abundant that two of their pigs died from a surfeit of them. (It was not only the pigs who became over-excited at the prospect of so much wonderful fruit: a local synonym for apricot was ‘kill-Christians’.) Their vegetables grew in prodigious quantities, too. In her potager Elizabeth’s mother grew cabbages, cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots, turnips, onions, leeks, peas, french beans, haricots blancs, artichokes, calabash, pumpkins, cucumbers, musk and watermelons, aubergines, tomatoes and several kinds of capsicums, okra, strawberries and potatoes.

The Blanckleys kept so many pets that their ‘Garden’ also became something of a Noah’s ark. Their animals included a spaniel, a tortoise, a hare, a silver fox, a lamb, a tame gazelle and a goat called Phyllis. Mr Blanckley tried to keep wild cats, but they did not survive captivity. Nor did their pet lamb, which was eaten by jackals; nor their father’s eagle, for whom an even worse fate was in store. One day, mistaking the bird for a guinea fowl, the cook killed it, plucked it, and hung it in their already well-filled Christmas larder. If Elizabeth and her sister had not missed it, no one was in any doubt that it would have been served up at table.

But even for Elizabeth there were intimations of something more disturbing beyond this vision of childhood utopia. For the convenience of Mr Blanckley in fulfilling his consular duties the family kept a second house in the town, and it was here that Elizabeth experienced the greatest thrill of all – greater even than Sidi Hassan’s ‘Algerian Nights’. As the sun began to set, exactly one hour before the muezzin began to call the faithful to prayer, she would make her way up onto the flat terrace at the very top of the house. Here, almost every evening, she would conduct a secret rendezvous with the secluded women of the neighbouring house.

I doubt not that the something of mystery connected with the rendezvous, and its realization through one of the Gothic pigeon holes in the upper chamber of our terrace, from which our fond Mahommedan neighbours had by degrees completely annihilated all intervening glass, increased the interest of the interview, and caused a battement de coeur, a something inexpressibly delightful, beyond, or at any rate, certainly very different from what I have experienced in all other liaisons of simple amitié.

Although she was only a little girl of nine or ten at the time, these forbidden meetings had an extraordinary, almost sexual frisson, which derived only in part from their clandestine nature. ‘I knew nothing of them,’ she wrote of her Algerine friends, ‘beyond the delight with which they ever sought and conversed with me, and the anxiety with which I ever ascended to the terrace and kiosk, and listened to their signals.’¹⁶

*A white linen veil fitting tightly round the head and hanging over the eyes with only a small open-worked hole to breathe through.

* King Charles II.

* Mary tells the story of one of Hugh’s earliest postings, before their marriage, in Guatemala. When his boss was sent on leave Hugh remained there as chargé d’affaires, with responsibilities in five republics in Central America. ‘His headquarters were in the new town of Guatemala; his staff, a native clerk; and his only means of transport, a mule. He used to tell me how he would journey from capital to capital through the forest, in uniform, cocked hat and all, this latter for the benefit of any stray bandits that might have been drawn there for shelter. They would not touch a foreign representative in a cocked hat and gold lace, though they might have cut his throat in mufti. England was a word to conjure with in those days.’ After a year and a half ‘a dreadful doubt began to enter Hugh’s mind. His mail grew scantier and scantier. His chief had not returned. Appeals for direction were unanswered and the FO turned a deaf ear to his suggestions of an exchange.’ Eventually he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He packed his bags and left. When he reported, rather shamefacedly, to the office, ‘authority was infinitely amused: “Good Lord, my dear boy!” it said. “We expected you home ages ago – we had no idea that you would last it out as long as that!”’

* Western institutions, and western clothes and customs, were officially encouraged in Japan at this time.

* Honorific by which Mary was addressed by her servants.

* The Dey was elected from their number.