The look of love

Arif was dressed in his best clothes when he left for hospital.

In hospital, he was given a blue toy truck to hold before his operation, his small hands touching, probing, exploring the size of it, the shape of it.

Joanna Lumley travelled with Arif and his mother and representatives from the charity Sight Savers International. Few in the remote village had seen a white European face: they had no concept of Lumley's fame as a Bond girl, as Purdey in the New Avengers or Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. They have no television, no telephone. The village's main resource is its people. Even children barely able to walk lug baby sisters and brothers on their hips, or tend animals in the fields for hours at a time. But five-year-old Arif could not do any of this. Cataracts covered both his eyes, a blurry white opaqueness smearing his eyeballs like vaseline over a camera lens.

Lumley watched the surgeon cut away the cataract on Arif's weakest eye. The second eye would be done in a month's time. "I watched the needle going in," she recalls, "the eyeballs being stitched... It was riveting. The skill was so great, and they told me exactly what they were going to do. Once you knew that, it was like some fantastic recipe unfolding in front of your eyes. They put in a little scythe and cut the cataract into pieces for the little hoover that goes in, which then sluices water in and hoovers out the blurred cataract. And suddenly you are looking at a clear pool of darkness. It's all gone."

Fourteen minutes to correct the blindness, 27 for the operation - although tracking the children down and providing transportation costs a lot more. Sometimes, though, treating blindness in Bangladesh can be as simple as providing a 30p tube of ointment.

After Arif's operation, it was just a day before his eye bandages were able to be removed. "You may take the bandages off," Lumley was told, and the air of excitement was palpable. Carefully she unravelled the bandage, exposing the slightly bloodshot eye, that for the first time ever began perceiving not just light but people, faces, objects.

Lumley "cried like a hound", she says. Even the hospital director, well used to such operations, had great tears splashing off her cheeks. "You cannot remain unaffected by it. You cannot become hardened to it," says Lumley.

But it was probably Arif's mother who moved her most. Back in the village, Lumley had noticed the way her skin was pulled taut across her cheekbones. "She was extremely courteous, but the stress showed on every part of that beautiful, quiet face. She could hardly bring herself to smile."

But she was smiling now, watching her boy. "There was this extraordinary dignity. She was behind him, but her face had become suffused with colour. It was as if all the tension had gone. She was smiling and smiling. She couldn't stop holding his shoulders and smiling."

There was such noise in the room then, people clapping and shouting out, "Arif, how many fingers am I holding up? Is it one... or two... or three?" Arif answered now by sight, not touch.

His mother stood quietly, not demanding his attention. And perhaps because her presence was familiar, as essential as the air he breathed, Arif had other things on his mind. He knew his mother; beyond sight he knew her. But he did not know the truck they had given him to hold. It mesmerised the little boy, his eye exploring it in the way once only his fingers could. And for the first time, Arif saw that it was blue.

You CAN forget your Trinnys and Susannahs. Joanna Lumley wears clothes in that show-stopping kind of way: elegantly and effortlessly. She walks into the foyer of a hotel in posh St James's, the morning after a long-haul flight from Bangladesh, carrying a bouquet of creamy roses from a television company that look as if they have been especially chosen to cast light on her skin. In that swirl of first impressions there's height, and blonde tousled hair, and pale grace, but all of it is suffused with the warmth of a smile that embraces strangers in her path.

She is quite actressy - that air of refined largesse - and also seems quintessentially English. It is somehow fitting to be walking past St James's art galleries, the old-fashioned cobblers and milliners making hand-made shoes and hats, to meet her. But underneath the looks, the slightly breathy sexiness that has fuelled a million men's fantasies over the years, is something solid. Her beautiful jacket is by designer Jean Muir, but while she likes nice things she is not defined by them.

"I have always known this: people are the same the world over," she says when describing the impact of Bangladesh. "I was brought up believing it. We have different cultures and beliefs, different looks, different circumstances. But underneath, a mother is a mother is a mother; and a naughty little boy is a naughty little boy; and an honoured grandfather is the same. We see things in different circumstances, but once these are cracked and the nut is opened, we are all exactly the same. I find that more and more moving as I get older."

Lumley felt comfortable in Bangladesh. She was born in India and her parents lived there for many years. Her mother was brought up by ayahs, Indian nurses, and spoke Urdu as her first language. When Lumley's parents wanted to talk privately, they would speak very fast, her mother conversing in Urdu and her father, a Gurkha, answering in Gurkhali. "They were fantastic. Liberal, interested always in the world, in everything. And if they didn't know something, they would get down the encyclopaedia or the dictionary and look it up. They were great readers."

She moved from India when she was just one year old, and was brought up in the Far East before returning to school in Britain. Later, she even had to pay to become a British citizen. "I remember being homesick when I first came to the UK, having been brought up in the Far East, with its heat and storms and vivid flowers and sounds and smells. England seemed strange and cold and pale and misty."

When her parents came home on leave, they headed straight to Scotland. Both had strong connections here; Lumley's mother's maiden name was Weir. But coming from Malaysia, Lumley had no concept of Scotland and imagined it like a willow-pattern plate. She found her parents' departure there terrifying, but now she has a house in the Borders. "Scotland always feels like going home now. Isn't that strange?"

When she left school, she was turned down by drama school and went into modelling, eventually winning some walk-on parts in films. Her role as Purdey established her career, though it was 2000 before she achieved the acceptance she craved, when she won a Bafta for her role as Patsy in Ab Fab. In the 1960s she had a son, Jamie, with photographer Michael Claydon, and there was an eight-month marriage to comedy writer Jeremy Lloyd in 1971. But her most enduring relationship has been with composer Stephen Barlow, whom she married in 1986.

Just weeks before Lumley travelled with Sight Savers to Bangladesh, her mother died. She had cried when Lumley first told her about the charity, sending off a cheque immediately. She knew about this trip. "She loved to hear about everything I was doing. She loved the acting, but what she loved most of all was travel. Travelling is my greatest drug, so I'd always go to her and tell her about new things I was up to. She loved it, loved it all. And she had a fierce sense of the injustice of the world."

Perhaps, then, the trip helped Lumley in her bereavement? "Absolutely. I wouldn't have gone if she had been alive and needed me. But since she had gone into what somebody has called, rather marvellously, 'the great mystery', it was wonderful to be able to do something that was so much part of what our family is: helping children, rural communities, India - or Bangladesh, in this case. It was really terrific."

For many of us, the idea of travelling to that part of the world is frightening. There is perhaps, on some subconscious level, an understanding that if you see, rather than hear, what poverty really is, your life will never be the same again. The work of Sight Savers International is partly metaphorical: it is about helping poor blind people to see; but it's also about helping rich people to see the blind poor.

For Lumley there must have been insight into herself as well as into another country. "Yes, you learn so much about yourself." And the main lesson? "I've got too much."

And yet, in her autobiography, Lumley says, "Things - I love 'em." The whole book was a journey through her London home, telling her life story partly through her possessions. What did she mean, she loved things? "I meant that you see something and say, 'Oh, look at that little saucer... It's 30p and it's got a little crack in it, but look at the work in it.' It's that. My house isn't an Aladdin's cave. Well, to me it is, because I know what everything is and where it came from and how beautiful it is.

"Over in Bangladesh they make a very simple yoghurt, better than anything you can eat here, and they put it in earthenware dishes. I was given two earthenware dishes to bring back. They are more precious than china to me. So those are the things I acquire. I squirrel rather than..." She breaks off .

"But I'm not exonerating myself. You start looking at your stuff and think, 'My god, everything I wear is...' But then you have to think, 'What is my Joanna Lumley job in the world?' I am not, unfortunately, a surgeon, a builder or a dam-maker. I'm on television. Therefore my job might be to draw attention to things. And also to give. To give."

A rich woman once said to her, "You don't want to throw money at Africa." When Lumley made a film for Comic Relief, she used the comment. "If you throw 5 at Africa, this is what you can get," she said. "A scythe, a hoe, a handful of grain. It gets you a cornfield and work. This is what throwing money does. Such a little can do so much."

It struck her forcefully in Bangladesh that the people who have least give most. "The poorer people are, the more generous they are, the more courtesy and manners they seem to have. They'll give you anything. They have nothing, but they'll give you even that. It was terribly affecting."

She watched children play contentedly with toys made from coconut shells and a piece of bamboo. Children who were desperate for school, desperate to learn. "I wonder what we have lost here. I don't want to go into that 'to live in poverty is better' kind of stuff. But at the same time, we do lose something. We have to try to tread the line between enough and too much."

In our constant search for happiness in the west, we fill our emptiness with possessions. "We are being encouraged more and more to think of ourselves first, and it doesn't bring happiness. Then you think, 'Well, how do I get happier? I've got get some more things.' Then you're not happy yet. 'I thought I'd be very happy with all this nice stuff, and funnily enough it's nice for a minute and then it's not nice any more. So I need some bigger and better things - and, actually, I deserve them.' But you don't. Nobody deserves more and more and more. It's mad."

Lumley has a lot of respect for Buddhism. A vegetarian and keen animal lover, she likes the emphasis on the sanctity of all levels of sentient life, not just human life. But she particularly likes its emphasis on the spiritual rather than the material. "Most of what I admire in the world are not things and not money. They are human qualities, and you tend to see them in great quantities in poorer countries This tends to just fizzle out as you get richer, until you have electric gates to keep people out, because you are very rich and could afford to feed 1,000 people. But if you are very poor, you don't even have a door, and you let people come in and you give them coconut juice that you could have sold."

It is, she says, just a human tendency. "I imagine if you took a Bangladeshi peasant, and if they became a billionaire, it would happen within two or three generations. They would have their private jets and their electric gates and their big guard dogs to beat off beggars."

Despite her desire for change, Lumley seems like an anchor of the establishment with her posh voice, her OBE, two honorary doctorates and invitations to royal weddings. Her public persona is very controlled and ladylike. "Do you think so?" she asks, almost curiously, puffing on a cigarette. She was once interviewed on television by Anthony Clare, but didn't unburden herself the way she would have loved to, because it was on television and she's very private.

"I feel myself as shallow as a puddle, but that's because I am me, and we all feel a bit like that - completely transparent. But actually there's masses to find out about each other." And did she follow it up later with Clare? No. "It would have been such a me, me, me, thing to do."

Because she plays the outrageous Patsy in Ab Fab, people tell her their own stories of getting trashed. But, actually, she doesn't want to know. She wouldn't do that. She was brought up to believe that you should behave well in public.

But there is something about Lumley. She has a very beautiful, conventional exterior, but you really sense that it houses a quirky free spirit.

"I don't ever want to be part of the people who don't go out in the rain," she says. "I still want to be able to take my clothes off and run out in the rain."

She did that once, when she shared a flat in Earls Court with three other girls. "We had a whacking great hot thunderstorm, and it was about 90 degrees. It was like a Malaysian thunderstorm. It was very late one night, about two in the morning, and there was this fabulous drumming rain. The devil got in me and I took off all my clothes and I went down and ran in the street. Not a soul saw me... I just splashed up and down, not a stitch of clothing on. I thought, 'I don't ever have to wear clothes, I don't have to.' And I came back and felt completely liberated. It was fantastic."

After THE operation, Lumley got back to the village before Arif. His father was there, waiting. She welled up, watching him. "To see that proud man's face, waiting for his boy to come back. He was so anxious before it happened, and now someone had managed to get a message back, on the bus or something, and had come to say the operation was a success and they were coming back home."

The entire village was there for the reunion, rows of seats laid out in the shade, a black sea of faces. And then Arif, seeing for the first time his village, his friends, his father. "There was something heartbreaking about it," says Lumley, "because we've got used to a different way of behaving over here. We tend to let everything hang out. There, there was this natural dignity. The whole village... and it's daunting to be in the centre of that anyway. But then, in the middle of that, to see your son walking towards you, and he can see for the first time. It's pretty serious stuff."

Sight Savers International has made a public promise. Like something out of a Hans Christian Anderson fairy story, says Lumley. "They have promised to track down every child, no matter how poor, in every village across Bangladesh, no matter how distant. Every blind child will be operated on. And it's achievable." Achievable, sometimes, for less than the price of a bar of chocolate.

"Once you know that 30p can solve blindness, you can't ever unknow that," says Lumley. "So you have to give. It's back to the G8. We've got to level the ship a bit. It's tilted right over. We've got to level the ship."

To make a donation to Sight Savers, or to find out more about the charity's work, call 0700 014 2020 or log on to www.sightsavers.org.uk