During what turned out to be the sunset of British colonialism, Margaret McLaren-Reid and her husband Harry lived an elite existence marked by privilege but also isolation, stationed in the Middle East, India and South America. This is her story.

Harry, a decorated RAF pilot. was involved in "air policing" communities regarded as troublesome. Margaret kept up the rituals of British domestic life and tea parties. Temptations abounded, in the form of flirtations, but freedoms were balanced by the stresses of parenting and separation from home.

My book *Flights of Fancy *– based on some 740 handwritten letters dating from the early 1920s – shows that, despite the veneer of order and prestige, service families endured a constant sense of unease, never sure how long any posting might last and what the next one would bring. I also describe the dangers of flying in the remote regions of Iraq and the Indian North-West Frontier, and about diplomatic service in South America, an area of RAF operations about which little has been recorded.