About
I am grateful to my parents for the gift of being 'mixed race'. My mother was a Jewish refugee from Germany who fled to
the UK in 1939 at the tender age of 16 and never saw her parents (wealthy business people prior to Nazi persecution and the confiscation
of all their possessions) again. My father's father was a grandson of the great Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. My father's mother
was a refugee of somewhat shady origins (possibly, Hungarian) - a feisty woman (do these things run in the family?) who, rumour has it,
was much admired by both Lloyd George and Bertrand Russell and who was the first General Secretary of the Free Trade Union.
It was wonderful to grow up in the atmosphere of my parent's strong sense of social concern and social justice - they had spent two years in India before I was born and continued to be inspired by Ghandi, Tagore and the Upanishads for the rest of their lives. They always supported and encouraged my early enthusiasms (of which there were many) whether of an artistic or animal rescue or social change nature.
Another formative influence was the fact that our family shared a large house with another family for 5 years where the children
grew up together and the parents were able to deputise for each other when one or other was away or indisposed. Apart from the value
of feeling part of an extended family, the experience set in motion a deep interest in communities and community living that has
remained with me ever since.
Building on my early passion for all things cultural (literature, music, art, theatre) and a natural inclination (sometimes closer to dogged determination) to create new ways of doing things whenever the conventional approach seemed seriously inadequate, I have forged a rather zigzag path in terms of what others might consider 'my career'.
I was a professional singer and actress as a child and in my early teens - this included busking in the London underground system to pay my way through college and having the great privilege of working with Benjamin Britten (still one of my favourite composers) when singing girl's solo roles in a number of his operas. A remarkable and sensitive man who made children feel individual and who seemed to genuinely value their point of view.
Let's Make an Opera, Benjamin Britten, Vaudeville Theatre, 1964
Perhaps it was inevitable that having done poorly in my final exams, I went to drama school rather than university. I thrived at drama school and after my somewhat humiliating school experience, was surprised (and, of course, delighted) to find myself top of the class in a whole heap of subjects including phonetics! Drama school has undoubtedly influenced the way I do things - helping deepen my powers of observation, sense of transformational potential and capacity to 'get inside the skin' of different points of view - See TRAINING PHILOSOPHY
After leaving drama school I spent many years doing a number of different things including:
- Working in a range of community development projects;
- Running a cutting edge programme for young offenders;
- Going to Thailand to study T'ai Chi with a Chinese Master;
- Teaching drama and theatre studies;
- Setting up internships for American undergraduates in Parliament, the health service, arts administration and elsewhere;
- Starting a self-help food co-op for people in short-life housing (cooking with date-stamped food donated by the big supermarkets);
- Helping to create a housing co-operative designed to create more integrated housing arrangements for people who had been in long-term institutional care;
- Working with architects to create participatory approaches to building new communities;
- Becoming a CEO of a holistic health charity integrating complementary and mainstream medicine into a primary health care facility.
For a more sanitised and 'grown up' CV go to my curriculum vitae
Somehow in the past 20 years I have managed (though sometimes only just) to maintain and build my range of other interests.
The most important one of which is Trigonos. I am hugely proud to have been a co-founder of this
social initiative in a former slate mining region in Snowdonia, North Wales. I have only been a small part of its remarkable growth
and quiet achievements over the past 10 years but being involved in it (I live there!) feels like coming full circle to my parents
experiences in India and to their early experiments in community living - see SOCIAL BUSINESS.
Other interests include: Reading (voraciously), Music (mostly but not exclusively classical), Writing (still a heap of short stories waiting to hit the page), Dabbling in art activities (now, more seriously, pottery), Exploring more philosophical / spiritual things since I refuse to believe that there is not a deeper meaning to our lives even if it is sometimes obscured and / or elusive. see OTHER INTERESTS
Above all, I do try to spend as much time as possible with my lovely family - immediate and extended - and friends about all of whom I propose to remain completely silent!