Author, broadcaster, playwright, actress…
Longlisted for Euroscript 2023 competition Alastair is summoned to his dying mother Edith’s bedside. She needs to tell him that he’s the result of a love affair in 1940s India.
‘Drums on the Night Air’ is a memoir about a year spent in the newly independent Congo in 1963 and ‘64. Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected Prime Minister, had recently
I give hour long talks to various branches of the University of the Third Age. Using a story board with photographs of the various places I have visited, I have
My husband was working for a multinational company in Leopoldville (Kinshasa). I’d never been anywhere before that where there was no law and order and such dire food shortages. There
After giving birth to four children I started writing for television and got regular commissions to write half hour plays for Jackanory Playhouse. They were mostly a satirical take on
I have lived a life on the edge of the great chasms of the twentieth century. A child of partition – growing up on North West Frontier, bordering on Afghanistan, as the Great Game played out in my girlhood home and the Nazi threat loomed; a white child in South Africa as it descended down the monstrous road of Apartheid; a young woman caught up in a deadly civil war in the Congo, a cat’s paw of the superpower Cold War conflict.
I write memoir with a difference – the backdrop is the conflict and upheaval you read about in the history books. I give you the mood, the intrigue and the lies adults told each other about a world changing in front of them. I show what it was really like and paint the past in vivid colours.
I am widowed with four children and nine grandchildren.
I have performed, taught drama, broadcast on the radio, and written for most of my adult life. I am widely travelled and give talks on my adventures.
I started my career as an actress – in repertory companies including Newcastle and Richmond in the UK.
When my children were small I got regular commissions to write half hour satirical television plays for children. I scripted a film and wrote two stage plays and published a short story in New Stories 3, an anthology published for the UK Arts Council in 1978 by Hutchinson.
I also wrote plays for BBC Radio 4
After taking a degree in English and Drama, I taught drama to young adults.
This was followed by a career as a freelance reporter making features and packages for BBC Radio 4 – mainly for Woman’s Hour – as well as Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. I also wrote and broadcast documentaries and wrote and read short stories for Radio 4.
In 1990 I went out to South Africa and did a number of pieces mainly about the women in South Africa.
Having been born in British India I got a commission to go back to where I grew up and wrote and broadcast a series of six ‘Letters from Abroad’ about what the country was like during the days of the Raj and the current situation in what is now Pakistan.
I have also written articles among others for the Guardian and the Oldie – about playing a cameo role in the Profumo scandal when British Intelligence listened in on the MP’s sexual exploits through our nursery wall.
In 2011 I wrote a book entitled ‘Drums on the Night Air’ published by Constable and Robinson, a memoir about going out to the Congo with my husband, getting caught up in a war and having to give birth to a baby while fleeing with my one year old son.
I have written a book entitled ‘Blood for our Blood’ about the murder of my mother’s cousin, a brilliant young surgeon, in Peshawar, British India 1932. The case appeared to have been abandoned for political reasons. In 1995 I went out to Pakistan and discovered the true reason for the murder.
After leaving India in 1947, my family went to Southern Africa.
I am currently writing a book about racism and colonialism entitled ‘Confessions of an Imperial Childhood’