When the British army served the same purpose around the globe as the United Nations does now - being imperially present and occasionally useful - most military wives on station chose to import the social gradations of Sussex to Simla and saw the lands of their exile as plentifully servanted picnic grounds.
Not so Veronica Bamfield, who died on May 22nd aged 91. She wrote of the life of the British army wife from the 17th to the 20th century in On The Strength (1975).
It was the life she had been born to: her father was a lieutenant-colonel, killed in Palestine in the first World War, her stepfather a general, and in 1930 she married Captain W.H. "Tich" Bamfield of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
But she was not a snifter at tiffin on the verandah sort of lady: she identified with those women who had shared male hardship, and had explored upcountry for themselves.
Veronica Bamfield came out as a debutante in the last days of the bright young things, but escaped to study at the Sorbonne before her marriage.
Tich was posted to the Assyrian Company of the Iraq Levies in the early 1930s - chaps in an advisory capacity dotted the Middle East because of the British mandate in Palestine and the new petroleum fields.
In Baghdad, the Bamfields did not set up housekeeping in a Wimbledon bungaloid manner; they moved into a traditional adobe house by the Diyala river. An 18th-century forebear of Veronica Bamfield's had written of ruined Palmyra, the Assyrian-Greek-Roman city of Queen Zenobia: it was a day-trip away from Baghdad.
The Bamfields drove their open-top Lanchester car over dubious roads east into Persia, north into Kurdistan, west through Syria: their mechanic rode in the back seat both as a human tool kit and a charm against the evil eye.
The Iranian Shah had ordered nomads to settle and westernise; radio and Royal Air Forcemanned airfields were abridging the distances between the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea; yet Bronze Age ways of life continued in the hills and the Bamfields pottered off to see them.
In Baghdad, they met Freya Stark (who described Veronica Bamfield, in Beyond Euphrates, as "a tall and lovely Juno"), a fellow spirit, though rather more expert at operating on muleback. Stark had discovered the privilege of a woman traveller - booted, behatted and disparaging of female silliness, she became an honorary man, welcome to discuss public affairs in the selemlik, the masculine half of the house; while, in a crumpled frock from her saddlebag, she had access to chat about sex in the haremlik, the women's quarters. Veronica joined Stark on jaunts into this double life, slipping into the all-male zones of mosques, attending weddings and anointing brides with cold cream, washing in beaked ewers of water drawn from heated cauldrons.
The Bamfields were posted to India in 1938, where she stayed on until 1942, although Tich came home at the outbreak of the second World War: long after, she corresponded with Paul Scott, novelist of The Raj Quar- tet, who recreated his pre-partition India from details checked in fact and tone with those who were actually there - though it is hard to imagine Veronica, with her inquisitiveness about local life, among his India-despising memsahibs in Pankot.
In 1945, she and Tich rooted themselves in Shrewsbury, Shropshire.
She went into radio in the 1950s, broadasting on BBC's Woman's Hour, and later interviewed Percy Thrower from the potting shed at Shrewsbury Flower Show. Her interest in the forgotten histories of ordinary people led to her work for the re-publication of Richard Gough's History Of Myddle (an account of a Shropshire parish, circa 1700), and to the research for her own second volume, Victory Of The Vanquished (1990), a history of the 1793-1796 insurrection in the Vendee region of France against the Parisian revolutionary republican government, a tragedy not much written about, even in France.
She was inspired by the Vendeean heroines, notably the amazon Celeste Bulkeley, who led her crack troops into battle, and survived wounds, defeat, repeated widowhood and a sentence of death by guillotine. Veronica rented a cottage in the region and supplemented her archive investigations into the period by walking the ground and recording local family memories of the uprising. The book, in translation, provoked scholarly debate in France: she was delighted by the response.
Her curiosity did not abate with age. She took to the computer at 83, and wrote for both the Shrewsbury Hospice and the Assyrian Journals in her late eighties.
Tich died in 1975; four daughters survive them.
Veronica Bamfield: born 1908; died, May 2000