Listing or sinking?

The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century was no glamorous picnic, as she grappled with a ceremonial sword in a golf bag, three months supply of toothpaste, a crate of hot water bottles and enough safety pins for every emergency. Born in 1915, and having lived in Brussels, Paris, Latvia, Persia and China as a diplomat’s daughter, Elisabeth Knatchbull-Hugessen, aged 24, married Gerry Young, a man from her father’s profession. With marriage she continued the familiar routine of packing and unpacking, and arriving at, and departing from, different countries. As the unpaid ‘two-for-the-price-of-one’, she accompanied Gerry on postings to 1940s Spain during the aftershock of the Civil War; to Beirut in 1944, riddled with Anglo-French tensions; to exotic but politically riven Rio in 1947; and finally to the glamour of Paris in 1956.

Each country involved adventure, unpredictability, hurdles imposed by new languages, danger and the tedium of official sociability.