'We can be an absolute liability': confessions of an ambassador's wife

As a 12-year-old at boarding school in Sussex, learning how to sit still through concerts and avoid controversial subjects at the dinner table hardly seemed like the kinds of lessons my pre-teen days should be filled with. But, it would later emerge, those hours I spent ruminating on how many ways one could introduce the weather into casual chit-chat were to be indispensable training for my future life.

During my student days, I would run back home and find a holiday job to restore the bank balance; teaching English to foreigners in Thanet fit the bill nicely until a new student appeared who would spend most of the lesson asleep on his desk, only showing signs of life when I stretched up to write on the blackboard. This was the summer of ‘65 and the first mini-skirts had arrived in the UK though, presumably, had not yet reached his native Sicily. Giancarlo became a diplomat and husband, though not in that order.

When we first married in Ramsgate in 1968, Italian diplomatic wives didn’t really have the option to pursue a career - in spite of the fact this role came with no title of its own. Even now, the term Ambassadress doesn’t exist. You are supposed to use the cumbersomely correct terminology – Wife of Ambassador (though Diplomatic Bags often feels more accurate). Could do better, I feel, in this age of sexual equality. Partner? You have to be joking. Equality doesn’t even come into the equation here. We are at best an appendage and at worst a complete liability.

You never get warned about spies because neither side is prepared to admit their existence

In the early days, you could sometimes get away with being outrageous if you were bored rigid by formal events and proceedings. Deciding to escape through a window from a dire National Day party in Nigeria because all the doors had been locked for security reasons was risky. We were doubled up for the sprint across the Embassy lawns in full view of the reception rooms, when we ran head first into a security guard and were ignominiously frisked in full view of a couple of hundred guests who, well into their third glass of the evening, luckily thought it was all part of the entertainment.

The higher up the august ladder a diplomat rises, the harder it is for the accompanying spouse to carve a niche for herself - something I realised quite early on, having had ambitions of an academic career, but instead finding myself moving between countries such as Austria, Germany, Nigeria, Italy, England, Belgium and Moscow, children and beagle in tow. It’s a nightmare packing up all that furniture and those knick-knacks you’ve collected (think of all the African masks!), and heart-breaking for parents and children alike to say goodbye to their friends and start all over again when they’ve hardly settled in anyway. The only way to deal with it is to see the funny side.

When it comes to State Visits, you look back on the boring bits with affection, for these occasions can be quite terrifying. Three days before the visit of the Italian President to London, six foot of hand-made pinstriped suiting was seen creeping up and down the cantilevered Embassy staircase with a spirit level and a tape measure. A closer inspection revealed a highly-placed official who had come to prepare the ground for The Visit. Literally, it seemed, for he was crawling up the stairs on all fours.

When he had finished with the staircase, he turned his attention to the teaspoons and table cloths which, with feigned regret, he felt obliged to trash. He had already condemned the bath towels and made copious notes concerning the flower vases and, prior to measuring the staircase, had been spotted skating around the guest suite on the bedside mats in order to test their degree of stability. He was later heard ordering rubber underlay in a voice of shocked horror.

Rubber underlay, it would seem, is essential to the life or death of a visiting Head of State and it is upon such things that the future careers of Heads of Protocol may well hang. The Queen and half the Royal Family came to dinner in honour of the Italian President in 2005 whilst we were posted to London: the guest list was studied at great length by the Protocol Departments of both countries. Hugh Grant was on it.

Now how did that happen?, I was asked afterwards. Does he have a special link with Italy? But like my beloved pet beagle ( known simply as Beagle since she never answered to any chosen name anyway unless food was involved),  I too can suffer from selective deafness when it suits me.

Then, of course, there are the spies. You never get warned about spies because neither side is prepared to admit their existence. In Moscow, the in-house interpreter would give everybody the wink by glancing nervously at the telephones and chandeliers if she thought anyone was being overly controversial. There was a particularly ornate chandelier hanging immediately above the double bed in the Ambassadorial suite, which did sod all for one’s sex life given the circumstances.

Many wives spend their days complaining bitterly as they travel the world in style

Quite exciting too was the battered Lada which would suddenly appear in the rear view mirror just when you were driving off to walk the dog. And invariably, just before an Official Visit, someone would start hammering more microphones into the walls. ‘Putting in new phone lines’ was the official version. 

Many wives spend their days complaining bitterly as they travel the world in style. Yes, it can be hard work, and tedious, and boring, and you’ll probably have an identity crisis halfway through the Ambassadress experience. But never forget that while the front door of an Embassy is for exiting in style, there is always a back one for leaving anonymously in old jeans with a couple of kids and a muddy Beagle  so sort your priorities is my advice. But take care and remember you may smile heroically throughout because that is what you do, but put a foot wrong and you run a serious risk of being shipped off to Ouagadougou on a one-way ticket.

Sandra Aragona is the author of Sorting the Priorities: Ambassadress and Beagle Survive Diplomacy, published 19th October