I
once met Mrs Gandhi; now if you knew me you would wonder how some bum
of an actor with only one TV credit in the year of 1983 could get to
meet the leader of the world’s largest democracy.
It
had, indeed, started off as a bad year which I had inherited from the
year before; in February I was offered one episode of The
Angels –
a BBC hospital soap – playing the role of a cop in one scene; I
jumped at it; we had three kids to feed.
On
the first day of rehearsals I bumped into a BBC producer, Innes
Lloyd, in the lift at the BBC rehearsal rooms in North Acton –
fondly known as the North Acton Hilton because of its size - and he
told me that he had tried to get me for his John Schlessinger film An
Englishman Abroad,
with Alan Bates, but that my agent had told him I was unavailable.
As
I was a big fan of John Schlessinger’s films, I wasn’t very
pleased; surely we could have come to some arrangement after all I
was only in one scene in ‘The Angels’ and we could have…..oh it
doesn’t bear thinking about.
I
did my one scene – filmed at some hospital in Coventry and started
to look for another agent.
When
I got home one day my wife was buzzing with excitement; I couldn’t
calm her down.
She
had received a telephone call from The Guardian newspaper: our
fourteen year old daughter had won an essay writing competition and
the prize was a couple of weeks in India for two.
The
trip would include staying in New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Bombay and
Lonavala staying in the best hotels and included £250 spending money
- each.
The
essay compared life in The Himalayas to life in England; of course
she had never been to The Himalayas and her observations were taken
from her geography lessons and her reading of Victor Zorza’s Indian
columns in The Guardian under the title The
Village Voice –
which was about a village north of New Delhi and not The Himalayas at
all.
I
have to take the credit for pointing out the columns to her and
telling her about the competition.
My
wife was adamant that I should accompany our daughter to India; it
was a world away in those days – it’s a world away these days but
we have seen live cricket from there – and my wife felt our
daughter needed her father; as it happened she was right but that’s
another story.
So
we set off for India: the trip was sponsored by Air India and The
Guardian and judged by the editor of The Guardian, Peter Preston and
my favourite Guardian columnist James Cameron – no not the
Titanic/Avatar creator.
There
were two other winners: a fourteen year old girl from Bristol and a
nineteen year old boy from somewhere in the home counties; his father
accompanied him and the girl from Bristol was accompanied by her
female English teacher.
We
had to have injections for cholera, typhoid and polio and took pills
for malaria.
The
evening before we were due to fly out to New Delhi we met and were
entertained by the Indian High Commissioner and his family at his
London residence; they gave us tea with warm milk and samosas; the
High Commissioner and his family were charming – as it turned out
it was a taste of what was to come – and when they spoke to us they
shook their heads, Peter Sellers style, which was something else we
saw a lot of in India.
Later
that day we were installed in a really nice hotel near Gloucester
Road tube station and went out to eat at a posh Indian Restaurant
close by; ‘Princess Margaret comes here often’ we were told and
we felt really important.
The
following morning we emerged for breakfast and it seemed the father
and son, from the Home Counties, had never eaten Indian food before
and were feeling a bit green around the gills; they hadn’t even
tried it as an experiment when they heard they were going to spend a
little time in the sub-continent; this was also a sign of things to
come: on our second day in India they didn’t even make it out of
their room and had to postpone their trip to the Taj Mahal so we went
ahead without them; I had wondered about the title of the John
Schlessinger film An
Englishman Abroad but
in India it was slowly starting to make sense.
Their
Delhi Belly, or whatever it was, deprived them of one of the greatest
train journeys I have ever taken and the wonderful experience at
Delhi Railway Station; it was such a huge exciting culture shock that
I can still smell and taste it now: everything out of the story and
picture books came to life; porters with four or five suit cases on
their heads, a blind beggar and a beggar with no hands; crowds of
people asleep on the platforms; bikes, rickshaws and more
bikes.
There
was a certain smell about the place; a smell not unpleasant although
it might have been to some; a smell I got to like even though it was
probably a mixture of faeces, urine and spices; the father and son
missed the first class travel on that train, and from New Delhi to
Agra, we were extremely comfortable in individual reclining seats –
I remember thinking ‘you don’t get this in Britain!’
The
food was freshly cooked and the staff on the train was at our beck
and call.
The
lavatories on the train gave an introduction to the Indian way of
life; there were two lavatories in each cubicle: one for the western
way and one for the Asian way; the Asian way was just a hole in the
floor as the Asians squat whilst we, the westerners, sit on the
loo.
As
we looked through the windows on the train we saw plenty of evidence
of this as it was early in the morning and people were going about
their daily ablutions – in public; they were standing under stand
pipes washing their bodies and if we saw one man squatting for a crap
we saw a hundred.
I
still have the image now of men in the distance squatting with a tail
going from their bottoms to the ground.
We
learned that they wiped their arses with the paper in their left
hands and ate with their right.
Our
daughter
had never flown before and the journey from Heathrow to New Delhi was
a good way of getting used to it. I don’t know how long the flight
was but I remember eating, drinking, sleeping, eating again and still
being in the air; the flight wasn’t very full and I appeared in the
‘in flight’ movie on that flight and also on the way back; an
embarrassingly small role, I have to add, and nobody noticed me in
the movie but they all saw my name in the end credits.
Stepping
off the plane the heat and humidity hit our ankles even though it was
April and dark. It was something like five in the morning UK time but
we were raring to go.
We
lived in Northampton at the time – maybe that was why my acting
career was going south – and whenever we told anybody in India
where we lived in England, their eyebrows would lift in confusion and
then they would give that charming shake of the head we had seen at
the High Commissioner’s Residence; they had never heard of
Northampton so we would quickly add ‘sixty miles north of
London.’
Even
though it was late we needed to rise very early the following morning
as an extra trip had been arranged; so at five fifteen I had my first
Indian breakfast: masala omelette, toast and tea with hot milk.
Two
Ambassador type cars picked us up at the front of our hotel and we
were whisked off to Mrs Gandhi’s residence.
Yes
we were going to meet the formidable Mrs ‘G’; her official
residence seemed to be in a residential area, and we were led into a
huge garden; there must have been two or three hundred other people
there as there was some rule in India that anyone could show up to
meet the Prime Minister; whether she actually met any of them I don’t
know.
After
the cold and dark of Britain, we were suddenly in a heat wave and hit
by extreme brightness from the early morning sun; I had my white
jacket on and even wore a tie; the local inhabitants wore very loose
clothes, huge bell-bottom trousers or flairs and nearly all wore
hats.
Parakeets
and monkeys roamed freely as we followed a smiling official towards
the main building; there didn’t seem to be a lot of noise but a
kind of hum about the place accompanied by the whirls of cameras, the
odd call from a human in the distance and then lots of squawking from
the parakeets.
Over
one side of the garden was a party of people huddled together; I got
the impression that this was a whole organisation that had shown up
to see the premier and not just their duly elected
representatives.
We
were shown into a kind of outer room and the others waiting in there
seemed very nervous.
I
suppose as an actor I had worked, and have worked since, with well
known people; well known people in show business world, that is, not
world leaders who go down in history; well known people so full of
themselves, sometimes, that they are very unpleasant and sometimes
when these well known people suddenly become unknown people it’s a
bit of a relief.
After
about five minutes or so we were called and led into another room;
the room didn’t seem to have any aesthetic qualities at all, the
furniture was functional: a sofa, an occasional table and a few
chairs; behind the table was an open French window, which led to a
quiet part of the garden, and another doorway was covered by a
curtain.
When
Mrs Gandhi entered she did the full theatrical bit through that
curtain; she walked in as if she was the leader of the biggest
democracy in the world, she walked in like a world leader, an
important member of the Gandhi-Nehru dynasty and a figure of
history.
She
was accompanied by a few bodyguards; I have often thought about those
body guards as it was her private bodyguard that turned and killed
her eighteen months later in the grounds of that very
building.
Everybody
stood up when she entered and she sat down between the two girls on
the sofa; our daughter and the other fourteen year old girl.
Straight
away it was obvious she was very comfortable with them; she started
to chat informally but I noticed she didn’t have any small talk at
all; she asked them about their essays, how they liked India – even
though we had only been there eight hours - and would they ever
consider coming back again; then she asked them where they lived;
when it was our daughter’s turn she said she lived in Northampton
sixty miles north of London: “I know where Northampton is” Mrs
Gandhi snapped “I was at Oxford.”
At
one point I noticed Mrs Gandhi ring a bell she had secreted in her
hand; through the curtain came somebody and before we could see them
she asked them to get a photographer; this was the cue for us to
stand behind her but it was also the cue for the bodyguards to push
and shove each other to try and get into the shot.
I
was standing at the end so didn’t think I had a chance of being
included because when the photographer got ready to take the photo he
seemed to aim it over to the other side of the room; but one of the
body guards tried to get his face in to the shot and gave me a little
push; I shoved gently back and in the subsequent photo he disappeared
totally behind the person standing next to me; serves him right.
See above.
After
the photo Mrs Gandhi shook hands with a couple of us and swept out as
sweepingly as she had swept in.
I
often think about those body guards.
