My Romanian father was broken as much by Brexit as by leukaemia

On the night that Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu were shot by firing squad in full sight of TV cameras, their bloodied corpses seen around the world as they lay sprawled on the ground behind a courthouse in the town of Targoviste, my grandmother, a Romanian exile living in a cottage in a small village in Kent, lit a candle in her window and prayed for her country’s deliverance. She would never have cheered such an execution, but there was no question in her mind that the dictator whose brutal rule had condemned millions of her countrymen to death and suffering deserved what he got.

My family’s story was intimately bound up in Romania’s tumultuous 20th-century fortunes, and it’s why even now, 30 years on, the fall of Ceausescu raises so many questions in my heart and in my mind.

I have never lived in Romania, but those questions remain – of identity, of perceptions – and somehow they grow more urgent with the passage of time. What is this country where my family’s roots run so deep? And what is it about the associations that Romania triggers in the outside world? I wish my grandmother was still around to help me answer these questions, but she died in London in 1992.