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. He, however, does not hear what she’s trying to say because he has his own dark secret which he cannot acknowledge. It has affected his whole life and put his marriage in jeopardy.
I have published short stories in Wandsworth magazine and MONK. For MONK, I published an
Transcript below… CHILDHOOD / ACTING So you weren’t supported by your parents very much? Absolutely
After giving birth to four children I started writing for television and got regular commissions
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’
