Mrs Gandhi and an Englishman Abroad.

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, Rebecca, 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 Rebecca 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 Rebecca 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 she felt Rebecca 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 also 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.

Rebecca 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; Rebecca 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 Rebecca’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.

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.