Katya & The Prince of Siam

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After my father Prince Chula died when I was seven, my mother and I often used to spend the evenings at our house in Cornwall watching the many 16mm films they had shot together – films spanning a thirty year period from 1935 to 1964. We would sit together in the room called the ‘Bira Bar’ surrounded by my uncle’s motor racing trophies. At the time I was not sensitive to the fact that these films might upset my mother, but perhaps in a way they comforted her and brought my father close to her again. For my part, I simply enjoyed asking who all the different people were and hearing the stories about them. Thus it was that I first saw a smiling middle-aged woman and was told that this was my Russian grandmother Katya. (Apparently, I was taken to see her once in Paris when I was about two years old but no memory remains.) In the films she moves across the lawn with the slightly speeded up motion of 16 mm, or sits sipping a cup of tea on a terrace. The weather is always fine and I could gain no conception of what she was like, or the life she had led.

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