^#smrgSAHAF Portrait of a Turkish Family - 1993

“My father Irfan Orga (1908–70) first set foot in England in July 1942, as a staff captain commanding Turkish Air Force pilots completing their training with the RAF. The posting changed his life. In London, challenging the Turkish law of the day forbidding members of the armed forces or diplomatic service from cohabiting with foreign nationals, he took up with a young, irregularly beautiful Norman-Irish lapsed Catholic, Margaret, then married to someone else. She assumed his surname in 1944, seven months before I was born.

Leaving his desk at the Turkish Embassy, Father returned to Turkey after the war, resigning his commission in January 1946. But his ‘crime' rumbled on. Appalled by the possibility of imprisonment, friends in high places and his brother-in-law, one of Atatürk's security chiefs before the war, urged him to leave the country. Given just a one-month visa, he flew to Northolt on 23 December 1947, my mother (and I) following on the 27th. Within a fortnight they were married, 48 hours after her divorce came through, and on 23 February 1948 the Home Office granted him indefinite leave to stay and work in Britain. Nineteen months later a Turkish court found him guilty in absentia and placed a fine on his head roughly equivalent to £145,000 today. His appeal against his conviction was unsuccessful and he never went back to Turkey, spending his last days in Kipling country near Tunbridge Wells, victim eventually of depression, loss of self-esteem and a weakened heart.”