Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's release: 'Richard showed us what love really means'

This week Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was finally reunited with her husband and daughter in the UK after years of detention in Iran. Now comes the task of rebuilding their lives - but the BBC's Caroline Hawley, who has been in touch with the family throughout their ordeal, says the bond between them has already helped them endure the darkest of times.

It's exactly six years since Richard Ratcliffe stood at Gatwick Airport, waving goodbye to his wife.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was flying to Iran - taking their daughter Gabriella to see her grandparents. Richard had no reason to believe they wouldn't be back home a couple of weeks later.

"It was a slightly rushed goodbye," he once told me. "Gabriella at the time was one and three quarters and a bit of a handful. I was just really wishing her good luck with the flight."

Earlier this week, Nazanin stepped off a plane at RAF Brize Norton. After years of detention, she and fellow British-Iranian Anoosheh Ashoori were finally coming home. A little voice asked: "Is that Mummy?"

Then Gabriella, now aged seven, rushed to hug her mother.

And yet at that moment, Richard, who must have wished with all his heart to run forward and hold Nazanin too, hung back.

The kind, gentle accountant - who waged such a steely campaign to get his wife home - allowed Gabriella to run first into her mother's arms, as Nazanin sobbed loudly with relief.

Their story is one of any ordinary family caught in the middle of murky international politics; a long-overdue British debt to Iran; and diplomatic manoeuvrings about as far from their usual lives as it's possible to imagine.

It's a story of separation.

But, at its heart, it's a story about the power of love - the love of a mother for her child, a husband for his wife. And one man's extraordinary single-minded dedication to getting his wife back.

"He showed us what love really means," says Tulip Siddiq, the couple's MP who has become a friend to them, too.

On Thursday, their first morning together after the reunion started with Richard making Nazanin a cup of tea. Then came a walk in the park with Gabriella as they began the process of rediscovering each other.

"I don't think he'd mind me saying that there's a kind of shyness, of getting to know each other again - a bit like when you first start dating," Ms Siddiq tells me.

"He kept saying 'baby 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 transformed his life when she came along," says Richard's younger sister, Rebecca.

"He just dotes on her. She's everything to him. And you can see why - she's so beautiful and lovely."

Nazanin and Richard married two years after they met - first in a register office and then at a more traditional Iranian celebration. 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 choice [for him] but to keep fighting for them," Rebecca Ratcliffe says.

Richard's extraordinary campaign buoyed Nazanin in the darkest days of her incarceration, when she was feeling suicidal, according to Ms Siddiq - even when prison guards taunted Nazanin that her husband's act of love would only earn her more years in jail.

"Nazanin always said to me that she held her head up high because she was proud that her husband was there and campaigning for her and it gave her the strength to keep going," Ms Siddiq says.

At the start of her imprisonment, Nazanin told doctors, when she was in solitary confinement with the lights always on, her interrogators taunted her that Richard was having affairs and that they had photographic evidence.

One of her female guards used to talk loudly to her own child just outside Nazanin's cell. "It was unbearable," Nazanin said. "I dreaded her shifts as I knew she would do that to torture me."

The hardest part for Nazanin was being separated from Gabriella, who 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 was not by your side to hold your warm little hand till you fall asleep.

"You, I and your father will never succumb to this hurricane of fate. The love we share knows no boundaries or walls. It is our life. There will come a day that we will be able to live anew all the days of our life.

"My Gisou, there will come a day that we will be together again and tenderly hold one another's loving hands."

On Thursday, that day finally came. Gabriella slept in a bed between her parents for the first time since she was a baby.

Nazanin has told Tulip Siddiq that her daughter has been attached to her ever since "like an extra limb".

For husband and wife, they must learn to live with each other again. Their flat is a "pigsty", laughs Rebecca Ratcliffe, cluttered with campaign materials.

"They're different people than they were six years ago," she says.

"They have had very traumatic but separate experiences and they need to come together and rebuild their relationship. And there's also the challenge of co-parenting again."

Over the past few years, they've wondered if they still have time to have another child - Nazanin will be 44 on Boxing Day.

Richard, talking tenderly about Nazanin to me last year, admitted: "I don't think I can possibly understand what she's gone through." He knows there will be "bumpy" times ahead.

But for the moment being together is all that matters.

A short tweet from Richard, with a picture of the three of them embracing, summed the reunion up: "No place like home. Thank-you to everyone who made this possible… You have made us whole."

"Whatever devils there are, they both know they love each other," Rebecca Ratcliffe says. "If any couple is going to survive this experience, it's them."