This week Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was finally reunited with her husband and daughter in the UK after years of imprisonment in Iran. Now comes the task of rebuilding her life – but the BBC’s Caroline Hawley, who was in touch with the family during her ordeal, says the bond between them has already helped them get through the darkest of times.
It is exactly six years since Richard Ratcliffe stood at Gatwick Airport and waved goodbye to his wife.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe flew to Iran – with her daughter Gabriella to her grandparents. Richard had no reason to think they wouldn’t be home a few weeks later.
“It was a hasty farewell,” he once told me. “Gabriella was one and a half and a little bit of a handful at the time. I was just wishing her really good luck with the flight.”
Earlier this week, Nazanin stepped off a plane at RAF Brize Norton. After years of imprisonment, she and her fellow British-Iranian, Anoosheh Ashoori, finally came home. A small voice asked, “Is that mom?”
Then Gabriella, now seven years old, rushed to her mother to hug her.
And yet Richard, who must have wished with all his heart to run forward and also hold Nazanin, stayed behind at that moment.
The kind, gentle accountant – who ran such a steely campaign to bring his wife home – allowed Gabriella to run into her mother’s arms first, while Nazanin sobbed loudly with relief.
Her story is that of an ordinary family caught in the middle of murky international politics; a long overdue British debt to Iran; and diplomatic maneuvers as far removed from their usual lives as one can imagine.
It’s a story of separation.
But at its core, it’s a story about the power of love – a mother’s love for her child, a man’s love for his wife. And a man’s extraordinary single-minded commitment to getting his wife back.
“He showed us what love really means,” says Tulip Siddiq, the couple’s MP, who has also become friends with the couple.
On Thursday, their first morning together after the reunion began with Richard Nazanin making a cup of tea. Then followed a walk in the park with Gabriella as they began to rediscover each other.
“I don’t think he minds if I say there’s a kind of shyness about getting to know each other again — a bit like on a first date,” Ms. Siddiq says.
“He always said ‘small steps’ when I spoke to him about his relationship with Nazanin. But he just sounds 10 years younger now.”
When Richard and Nazanin first met, he immediately felt so comfortable with her, he later described it as “like coming home.” It was 2007 and they were introduced by a mutual friend at an academic conference.
“She changed his life when she showed up,” says Richard’s younger sister, Rebecca.
“He just has a crush on her. She is everything to him. And you can see why — she’s so beautiful and adorable.”
Nazanin and Richard married two years after meeting – first at a registry office and then at a more traditional Iranian ceremony. Then in 2014 Gabriella was born.
“When they were both taken from him, it was the darkest time of his life. So there was no other choice [for him] but to keep fighting for them,” says Rebecca Ratcliffe.
Richard’s extraordinary campaign gave Nazanin a boost in the darkest days of her incarceration when, according to Ms Siddiq, she harbored suicidal thoughts – even as prison guards taunted Nazanin that her husband’s act of love would only earn her more years in prison.
“Nazanin always told me that she held her head up because she was proud that her husband was there and standing up for her and that gave her the strength to keep going,” Ms Siddiq says.
Early in her detention, Nazanin told doctors that when she was in solitary confinement and the lights were always on, her interrogators taunted her that Richard was having affairs and that they had photographic evidence.
One of her guards used to speak loudly to her own child right outside Nazanin’s cell. “It was unbearable,” said Nazanin. “I feared her shifts because I knew she would do it to torment me.”
The most difficult thing for Nazanin was the separation from Gabriella, which she had only just stopped breastfeeding when she was arrested. There was the mother’s guilt of not being able to care for her child.
In 2017, she wrote to Gabriella – nicknamed Gisou – from Evin prison in Tehran: “Forgive me for all the nights I wasn’t by your side to hold your warm little hand until you fell asleep.
“You, me and your father will never succumb to this hurricane of fate. The love we share knows no borders and walls. It is our life. The day will come when we can live all the days of our lives anew.
“My Gisou, there will come a day when we will be together again, tenderly holding each other’s loving hands.”
On Thursday it finally happened. Gabriella slept in a bed between her parents for the first time since she was a child.
Nazanin has told Tulip Siddiq that her daughter has been attached to her “like an extra link” ever since.
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Husbands and wives must learn to live together again. Her apartment is a “pigsty,” laughs Rebecca Ratcliffe, stuffed full of campaign materials.
“They are different people than they were six years ago,” she says.
“They had very traumatic but separate experiences and need to come together and rebuild their relationship. And there is also the challenge of being parents together again.”
In recent years, they’ve wondered if they still have time to have another child – Nazanin turns 44 on Boxing Day.
Richard, who spoke tenderly to me about Nazanin last year, admitted: “I don’t think I can even understand what she’s been through.” He knows he’s going to have “bumpy” times ahead.
But at the moment only being together counts.
A quick tweet from Richard, with a picture of the three hugging, summed up the reunion: “No place like home.
“Whatever devils there are, they both know they love each other,” says Rebecca Ratcliffe. “If any couple will survive this experience, it will be her.”
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