Three weeks after carrying her dead daughter's ashes home to England, Heather, a young Second Secretary's wife in the British Embassy in Mexico City, was back on the diplomatic cocktail circuit. When asked how many children she had, she would answer: "One, a three-year-old-son". Cocktail-party conventions did not allow her to tell her story: that her bright, beloved eight-year-old daughter had just died of a brain tumour; that she had been cremated a month earlier; that Heather was playing the game, doing her best not to let the side down.
I, too, was a British diplomatic wife, for 18 years from 1969 to 1987. That was before I came to live in Ireland, a country where mothers are allowed to mourn their dead children and friends are permitted to grieve with them. But my Foreign Office training still makes it hard for me to cry in public. For it was not just the serving officers who cultivated the British stiff upper lip: wives too were servants of the imperial tradition, obedient to the same rigid code.
In her forthcoming book, Daughters of Britannia (to be published by HarperCollins next month), Katie Hickman, a diplomat's daughter, says that times have changed. There is now a Foreign Office counselling service, with community liaison officers at some embassies. In my time we weren't allowed to attend counsellors, lest we inadvertently let slip state secrets. Wives with marital or other problems were told to buck up and stop whinging.
Reading extracts from this book, I felt a savage fury at the psychologically harmful rules by which we were forced to live. I became aware of a pool of grief deep within me at the damage done to diplomatic wives, mothers and children, in the service of an organisation that seemed to care not one whit about our emotional welfare.
There are so many stories I would like to tell. The eight-year-old boy screaming for his mother as he was pushed on to the plane back to his UK boarding school, his mother hiding her own tears for the sake of her child. The high rate of alcoholism and suicide among Foreign Office wives. The middle-aged women who stayed in unhappy marriages because they had never had a paid job and would lose their right to their husbands' pensions if they got a divorce.
Perhaps the greatest harm was done to our children. When I refused to send my own sons away from Tokyo at the age of eight, a senior wife reprimanded me for depriving them of a British education. But the same woman added wistfully: "You lose them, you know. After you've sent them away, you never have the same relationship." And I know she found it a hardship continuing to attend cocktail parties during the school holidays, when she longed to be tucking her children up in bed in the precious few weeks they were at home.
The alternative solution - educating your children locally - also had its difficulties. My own sons' education was severely disrupted, particularly the year we were moved from Mexico city to London to Tokyo in the space of three months. However, they coped remarkably well with the switch from American to British spelling and back again.
Losing their friends was particularly painful. Shortly after arriving in Mexico I sat one morning on the stairs of our new home tying my five-year-old's shoelaces while he wept for the loss of his London kindergarten playmates. I cried too, for myself as much as for him. For I had also had to say goodbye to my friends, my home, my job, and, in a sense, my identity.
"We have to put up with it," I said then. "It's Daddy's job." Only now do I realise how many sacrifices we all made for a job that implicitly held connotations of a vocation. Wives and children were enlisted in its service, and the rules bound us just as much as our husbands.
I met my husband Peter when we both joined the Foreign Office as Third Secretaries in 1968. In those days there were very few women diplomats. Although we women were entitled in principle to follow the same career paths as our husbands, in practice, there were almost no women in senior positions.
Our training opportunities were also severely restricted. Since all female diplomats then had to resign on marriage, the Foreign Office considered it a waste of money to offer them, for example, language training. So I wasn't surprised that my application to learn Japanese was refused.
The extraordinary thing in retrospect is that I accepted this without complaint. But I will never know if I married Peter because I loved him or because he got a posting to Tokyo, where I'd be able to learn Japanese after all.
There were, of course, magical times. A charity ball in Tokyo where I danced all night with the Duke of Devonshire. A musical soiree at which Prince Charles burst out laughing when the Ambassador's black Pekinese howled all the way through a rendering of God Bless the Prince of Wales by the imperial court orchestra. Garden parties. Co-presenting live television coverage of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Japan in 1975. Above all, the opportunity to live and work in fascinating countries, to learn languages and to travel.
But I prefer life now. I can paint my sitting-room walls any colour I want without having to ask permission. My furniture has been chosen by me, not by the Civil Service. I don't have to invite people I don't like to dinner. And Peter can plant apple trees in our garden and we can watch them grow.
Judy Denison is now a writer and poet, living in Killaloe, Co Clare.
