Billericay: She's on song for fulfilment...

Geraldini Afifi looks like Joan Collins (big eyes, excellent bones and skin), dresses like Jackie Collins (leopardskin and glitz) and is flamboyant down to the tips of her glittery gold talons - which, by the way are false and stuck on with Superglue.

Superglue? I enquire nervously, thinking of those casualty stories (ripped flesh, burned skin). "They'll come off and I haven't got time what with the tint," she tells me, indicating her hair, a shade of red which would shame Coronation Street's Rita Sullivan.

With her flame-coloured tresses, passion for classical music and opera and cut-glass accent, Geraldine, a professional soprano singer, looks as if she would be more at home in bohemian Hampstead than the stolid suburban environs of Billericay.

But her unlikely role as a GP's wife (she is married to Asad Afifi, who has a practice in Western Road) decreed a move to the town 15 years ago. And although many of her engagements are in London, she is looking to do recitals closer to home.

She has been married to the doctor for 26 years - no mean feat when you consider the parental opposition as well as cultural, religious and financial divides the couple have had to bridge.

Geraldine was born, the second youngest of five, to a moneyed family in Epsom, Surrey. Her sister is a QC, her brother a High Court judge. The whole family was musical - her maternal grandmother was a concert pianist, and music lessons were the order of the day.

By her own admission, she was a "bit of a handful". Following the birth of her younger brother, she was sent to her elder sister, living the colonial life in Kenya.

She returned to Surrey after a year, and eventually completed her education at finishing schools in France and Switzerland where she honed her musical skills and indulged in the usual debby cordon bleu cookery courses - "though I just cannot cook now."

She trained as a singer at Webber Douglas, a renowned drama school in London, but still lived at home with mummy and daddy. "I liked my home comforts and was very cosseted," she recalls. "We'd go on cruises because Daddy loved to cruise and I'd always be ill so I could be treated by the ship's doctor."

Despite her penchant for men in white coats, she met her husband-to-be by chance. During a heavy downpour, she gave a lift to a nurse who worked at Epsom general. The nurse invited her to go to a dance at the hospital. Geraldine brought along a brother, her fianc and his friend, spotted her future husband dancing with a fat nurse and pounced.

"We were dancing and he said: 'I cannot marry you, I am an Afghan surgeon,' which I thought was a bloody cheek," she bubbles on. "I left the party with him. I told my fianc that I was ill and that the doctor was taking me home."

Both sets of parents were, she admits, racist, and therefore opposed to the relationship. "Both my father and his went to the other's house with an open cheque-book, saying 'How much?' ", she recalls. "His father hated me, with my crocheted dresses and make-up."

The intended bribes didn't work and after two years the couple wed in two separate ceremonies - Muslim and Christian - glowering families watching on the sidelines.

They then moved to a house in Catford. It was paid for by her father and complete with Wilton carpets and antique furniture.

However, moving to the south London area came as a culture shock for Geraldine.

She disliked the curtain-twitching mentality of a neighbourhood not used to mixed-race marriages so, a year after their daughter Faradena (now 22) was born, they moved to Paisley.

The Scottish town was cold and miserable. With her husband working shifts and with a small child to look after, Geraldine was extremely unhappy.

"I was more of a foreigner up there than my husband was," she recalls. "I used to push the pram wearing high heels and although I wore a kilt to try and belong, he was much more popular than me."

Domestic duties had never been her forte - she had never even had to make a cup of tea living at home.

Consequently she spent many weekends flying down south to spend luxurious weekends at the family home - which was so big that when her husband had first seen it he thought it was an hotel!

Despite their initial reservations, Geraldine's family embraced the outsider and in fact took his side against her. "My father used to say he was an absolute saint putting up with me," she smiles.

After a stint in Sudbury, Suffolk, the couple moved to Billericay when their son Russell was about a year old. Geraldine says she found being labelled as the doctor's wife and coping with two small children demanding.

"I completely lost my confidence," she says candidly. "I didn't know how I could break out of it, break out of my role." During that time, music was her only release.

A car accident 12 years ago in which she broke her pelvis, ribs and arm brought her up short and made her decide to train to become a soprano. "Because of my upbringing I had never been hungry enough, never competitive," she says.

"Then I had the children and then I realised I was career-less. I'd go to dinner parties and there were women doctors, and I knew I was clever in my own way."

Her husband was at first less than pleased to have his stay-at-home wife hiking up to London for singing lessons, but now, with her daughter recently graduated and her son studying at college, she feels happier in her new-found career.

She has several renowned pianists who accompany her and is hoping to line up a series of recitals at churches in London.

Now with an agent, she is hoping to get work locally, and is committed to ridding classical music of its elitist tag. "I'm very passionate about music," she says, a dreamy look in her eyes.

Fight for love - doctor's wife Geraldine Afifi went against the wishes of her parents, and the parents of her Afghanistan-born husband Asad to to marry him 26 years ago

Picture: NICK ANSELL

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.