Orange Blossom
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 […]
Scripts
Film scripts I have recently written an original film script called ‘Orange Blossom’. It is about an old lady who is in hospital suffering from a haemorrhage. Before she dies, she needs to unburden herself and tell her only son about his true paternity. He is not only determined not to hear what his mother […]
Short Stories
I have published short stories in Wandsworth magazine and MONK. For MONK, I published an article dealing with art and the spirit, interviewing the painters Caroline Dean and Qu Lei Lei’ The Idiot The car screeched to a stop as it rounded the corner to the hotel. Several small boys ran across the road and […]
2020 Interview
Transcript below… CHILDHOOD / ACTING So you weren’t supported by your parents very much? Absolutely not, I didn’t particularly want to, but I was going to go to university and do medicine because that was a good thing to do, though my mum was determined that I was going to be a secretary. So I […]
Film & Television
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 conventional fairy stories. I was also commissioned to script a film adaptation of a children’s book ‘My Father Sun-Sun Johnson’. I have recently written an […]
Blood for our Blood
‘Blood for our Blood’ is the true story of my mother’s cousin, a brilliant young surgeon, who was stabbed to death in the Lady Reading hospital in 1932 by a hospital orderly. Although the orderly was arrested and hanged with undue haste, the true reason for the murder was never discovered. Reading through the letters […]
Acting
After leaving school, I got a one-way ticket to England from Africa and immediately went to drama classes. At the first lesson the guy teaching said ‘are you going to take this professionally?’ And I said ‘yes’. My parents cut me off without the proverbial penny so I not only had to earn enough to […]
Drums on the Night Air
‘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 been assassinated and the country was in chaos. The palm olive plantation where we were living was close to Stanleyville, the location of Conrad’s Heart […]
Radio
I began my career writing plays for radio and went on to conceive and broadcast documentaries as well as ‘packages’ for Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service. I travelled extensively and had the privilege of going out to South Africa when Nelson Mandela was released. I made ‘packages’ for ‘Woman’s Hour’ about the […]
Adventures in the Congo
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 wasn’t even enough proper food to feed my baby. But then we got caught up in a war, which was terrifying. We both wanted to […]