A Foreign Affair

Paperback. Reprint. Originally published in Australia and New Zealand, imprint: Bantam, by Random House Australia in 2004. 'Walking along the drab, grey streets past bomb craters and piles of rubble, I daydreamed about a more romantic world where people spoke exotic languages, played music, sang and danced with passion.' Trapped in the austerity of post-war London, 20-year-old Valerie Barnes yearned for the good times promised by the wartime songs. Then two chance meetings catapulted her into a high-flying career at the newly formed United Nations in Geneva and the arms of a glamorous Frenchman... Joining an elite breed of independent women who travelled the world in the 1950s and 1960s, Valerie lived a jet-setting life as one of the first simultaneous interpreters, working in exotic locales and rubbing shoulders with prime ministers and presidents. In those days, United Nations was new and its staff were convinced that if they got everything right there would be no more war. There were no precedents, no protocols in place - everything had to made up as they went along. Valerie worked long hours, sometimes starting at 9 a.m. and not finishing work until 3 o'clock the following morning but it was in the interest of getting agreement on a resolution so it was worth the effort. At the same time she was juggling a Swiss chalet home, three children and an unfaithful husband. But whatever Valerie did, she threw herself into it with zest. From dancing the flamenco to being kidnapped in Cairo, wooed by an African President who wanted her to become his fourteenth wife or falling for a passionate Slav, Valerie's gift for storytelling makes this book a lively, funny, utterly delightful memoir. Her marriage started with a wedding in Geneva on a cold, dismal, rainy morning, the French family, in muddy, damp clothes trying to pull their coat collars up and their hats down to hide their bruises - the bridegroom had driven them from their home in France to Geneva at high speed causing a collision so that they had all ended up in a muddy beetroot field - and ended with a wild summer evening divorce garden party complete with a jazz band, the planting of a tree, a firework display and a midnight balloon release. Vogue: 'Oh, to have had Valerie Barnes' life!'