My Bond girl shame

I didn’t sleep a wink on Sunday night and by Monday morning I was almost sick with anxiety. The High Court was finally about to rule on whether the immigration policy excluding veteran Gurkhas from Britain should be overturned – and I had a sense of terror that things might not go our way.

I’d written to the prime minister asking him to look favourably on us. And I’d had a reply from his office saying that his reply would come, which didn’t give me much sense of how things would go. Mercifully, there was other work on Monday to distract me: the final dub for a documentary I’m presenting on Ian Fleming for the BBC. The film concentrates on Fleming as a writer, but I’m afraid it includes one of those shaming clips of me as a Bond girl in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

I was only 22, but when I saw the footage again it felt like yesterday. The strange thing is that I don’t feel much older. I’m a 62-year-old grandmother, but I’ve got as much energy now as I did then.

While I was in the studio in west London, I was working flat out and managed hardly to think about the Gurkhas at all. Then I had to rush to another studio to do a voiceover to promote a new shopping centre in Cambridge – but once I got back to my home in south London again, the fear started to mount.

My husband [the conductor Stephen Barlow] was out, talking opera, so I spent the evening pacing about the house on my own. It was ghastly, like the feeling I sometimes get before the first night of a play – only much worse because I couldn’t rehearse my lines.

Instead I settled down to do my roots. I often do them myself, as I never seem to have time to go to the hairdresser, but I’m not good at it. I was terrified I’d turn up at the High Court with green hair.

Funeral for a friend

Another sleepless night. But on Tuesday morning there was an interlude of calm when I went to the funeral of the actor William Fox, who died aged 97. He was a great life-enhancer who lived in the same village as my parents. There was a requiem mass for him at the Brompton Oratory, where I knelt and offered a few prayers for the afternoon.

Then it was off to the High Court in my funeral clothes. When we arrived it was a shambles: hundreds of people milling around outside, press everywhere. Nobody seemed to know where to go. And once we got inside there were no obvious lifts – so the Gurkhas had to carry their VC holders up the stairs in their wheelchairs.

Even lawyers cry

I was so nervous that everything had the quality of a dream. When it was finally over and we were making our way outside, I could feel myself shaking. I used to be as tough as old boots but now I’m like Dickie Attenborough – the slightest thing makes me blub.

When we walked onto the steps, it felt as though we’d won the World Cup. There was a storm of microphones and cameras and everyone was roaring. The Gurkhas did their battle cry, “Ayo Gurkhali!” which always makes my hair stand on end.

Eventually a crowd of us made for the pub. I was so high that a photograph of a sherry glass would have made me drunk, but I managed a gin and tonic. It was a wonderful scene.

There were lawyers with tears coursing down their cheeks, toasting British justice, and we were all crying: “It’s happened! It’s happened!” There was a sense that a great burden of shame had been lifted from the British conscience. When I finally got home, my husband and I cracked open a bottle of champagne and I spent the evening walking on air. I slept like the dead that night. On Wednesday morning I travelled on the District line to Tower Hill in east London to discuss a prize-giving event I’m hosting next week. Everyone on the Tube was coming up and saying, “Well done, Joanna.” That was wonderful, the feeling that everyone was on our side.

An evening with Fry

However, the battle goes on, because although the ruling has been overturned, the laws have not been rewritten. I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to generate signatures for our website, gurkhajustice.org.uk. We want to get 2m signatures to take to Downing Street and I think we will. But there will be more hard slog.

This evening I’ll be getting into my Tomasz Starzewski trousers to co-host an Ian Fleming gala with Stephen Fry (The Story of James Bond – A Tribute to Ian Fleming) at the London Palladium.

For a freelance artist there’s no such thing as a weekend. It’s been a hectic week but that’s how I like them.

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