Talks & Other Books

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 talked about my adventures in the Congo and put them into a political and historical context. My most recent talk was in Ealing U3A about the tribes’ people I encountered on my travels in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush mountains.

OTHER BOOKS

I have other books partially written or in embryo, or simply put away in a box. One is a family scandal called ‘I have a Little Shadow’. I was given a piece of shocking information about my mother after she died which has made me have to rethink everything I thought I knew about her. Another, a novel, about ‘Love in the Fifties’, is about sex before the pill when you were supposed to acquire an engagement ring before going ‘the whole way’ with a man. I get ideas in the middle of the night but I’m so untidy that, if I do write them down, I can’t find them later.

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Orange Blossom

Longlisted for Euroscript 2023 competition Alastair is summoned to his dying mother Edith’s bedside. She

Scripts

Film scripts I have recently written an original film script called ‘Orange Blossom’. It is

Short Stories

I have published short stories in Wandsworth magazine and MONK. For MONK, I published an

2020 Interview

Transcript below… CHILDHOOD / ACTING So you weren’t supported by your parents very much? Absolutely

ABOUT ME

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’