Forty-seven years and 19,500 parties after Betty Kenward began writing Jennifer’s Diary in Harpers & Queen, she has handed it over to Sue Crewe, who admits to loving society gossip but, in the column’s tradition, will keep it to herself. She talks to CAROLINE PHILLIPS

SUE Crewe, unattached and the former shopping editor of Harpers & Queen, is taking over from Betty Kenward as ‘Jennifer’ of Jennifer’s Diary in the same magazine. Mrs Kenward, 84 and always ready with a withering semi-colon, has had 47 thrilling years of marvellous chronicling of charming partygoers, dear dear friends, looking radiant and living in a world of silk organza. It is said that the redoubtable Kenward went to 19,500 parties during her tenure and every Royal Wedding since 1944 except that of Princess Margaret. (A palatial oversight.) It was she who covered two consecutive days at the Royal Windsor Horse Show interrupted by a dinner party in Venezuela by Concorde. And there was that incident on the operating table when, minutes before the surgeon drew his knife, she insisted on reading her galley proofs.

As Crewe and I enjoyed a pre-luncheon drink (Nescafe), we looked out at the delightful grounds on the other side of the house which included no ornamental lakes but a few parking meters. Her W11 sitting-room is decorated in shabby Good Taste with a bit of exotic bohemia and brown wrapping paper on the walls. Henrietta, a charming old Kensington High School friend of mine, was staying there, between houses. Crewe also has a ‘tummy-turningly beautiful’ little grey rented cottage in Cumbria.

The relations-in-oil of her first husband, author and foodie Quentin Crewe, glower down from the wall. ‘They’re called the Spoonbills. That’s the Cavendishes’ generic name for other people’s gloomy relations,’ laughs Crewe, 41, nee Cavendish, and granddaughter of the Eighth Duke of Devonshire and second cousin to the present incumbent of Chatsworth. She says things like ‘oh heahverns’, ‘goooodness’ and ‘oh golleh’.

The regal Kenward would have presented the most glorious sight in black pleated dress, court shoes, immaculate coiffure neatly pinned with a large velvet bow and three-strand pearl choker. ‘Do I look all right? I’m very insecure,’ says Crewe, who is resplendent in unstructured gold Nicole Farhi cardigan, flowing burnished almond T-shirt and acorn-kernel trousers plus drop gold earrings.

If one works for H&Q, she reckons, golly, it’s rude not to be brushed and combed. ‘I’m naturally untidy. Some children are born with their nappies round their left ear . . . and I was. The Cavendishes are famously badly dressed. People go into print talking about their awful clothes.’ Her ‘wonderful cleavage’, on which H&Q editor Vicki Woods has gone into print, is not on show. But she is pretty, with lovely eyes, although she thinks she is ordinary. ‘In the first year, I expect I’ll go to absolutely everything I’m invited to. With any luck, I’ll lose a lot of weight. I used to be thin and nervous. Now I’m just nervous.’

She was chosen from 17 applicants for the job. She was approached; it didn’t occur to her to apply. She will take up her post on 5 August, editing her first diary for the December issue.

So how does she feel about taking over from the legendary Kenward? ‘A mixture of excitement, ebullience and trepidation.’ The indomitable Kenward got up at 6am and went to bed at 2am daily. And Crewe? ‘I’m hopeless in the morning. I can’t do anything useful until 11.’ She reckons it a hard act of stamina to follow. ‘She was like Mrs Thatcher.’

But, above all, she feels tickled. ‘I was so proud of myself for getting a career – and now a job!’ She was freelance before. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been employed since I was 19. It’s amazing! I get a pension!’ In addition, and this she finds the astonishing thing, she is going to have a secretary. She won’t have Kenward’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes or maid – she drives a four-year-old Citroen.

It all reminds her rather of that benchmark seven years ago when she got her first mortgage. ‘I thought it was such a grown-up thing to have. I wound down my window by some unknown passerby in Kensington High Street and said, ‘I’ve got a mortgage’.’

Kenward never committed the social faux pas of taking a pencil or notebook to a party – when one was a guest, one behaved like a guest, holding only sherry in one’s perfectly formed hand. ‘I think I’m going to do a lot of muttering into a small tape recorder. I’m very bad at remembering people’s names,’ says Crewe, endearingly.

In front of people? ‘Oh yes. I’m going to say, ‘I’ve got concussion, could you tell me your name?’ ‘ She laughs. ‘The more nervous I get, the more the memory completely evaporates, don’t you find?’

And will Crewe be writing nice things? ‘I see no point in being gratuitously unpleasant. I think it’s much stronger to be enthusiastic. It’s so easy to knock people,’ says Crewe. So she won’t change the style? ‘I’m not saying. I want it to be a lovely surprise when it comes out!’ She giggles.

She grew up at Holker Hall in Cumbria and went to St Marys, Wantage, before having a couple of marriages (the second to now chairman of TV-am news Nigel Ryan) and a couple of children (Nathaniel and Charity), and doing a variety of jobs which included selling sofa covers to the Army and microlights to Turkey.

She also studied dairy (not diary) management at agricultural college. ‘I got a cup for trying hard. But it was awful when I forgot to test the brakes on this bloody great tractor and, of course, we went sailing into the side of a barn.’

She’s a special person, deliciously nice. She’s funny, imaginative and kindly yet assertive. One imagines her easily wounded. She’s straightforward and the remark attributed to her (‘I know I’m getting old because all my friends who were marquesses have become dukes’) was actually said by a friend of hers, tongue firmly in chic.

She’s unsure of herself. ‘I have a very low opinion of myself. Don’t we all? I think English women particularly are not encouraged to look at their talents and gifts. And I was one of the last of a generation of girls not to be educated or trained.’

She is currently romantically uninvolved. And what of her marriages to famous men? ‘It’s a huge privilege to be married to interesting people who achieve a great deal in their lives. It wasn’t only a rare delight, it also made up for my paucity of education. It was 50 times more instructive than going to university.’

And did she prefer one marriage to the other? Quentin Crewe or Nigel Ryan? She snorts with laughter. ‘Both of them told me only to say ‘f*** off’ when you’re asked an impossible question and then nobody prints it. But nowadays they do.’ She hoots again. ‘Of course not is the real answer.’ She says she doesn’t know why either of the relationships broke up. ‘I really don’t know. I think about it a lot. But I don’t think there are any absolutes in love, marriage or divorce. No two-sentence answers to those sort of questions.’

But back to the job. She doesn’t think ‘social connections are the most important thing for the diarist. Connections are like multiple joints that plumbers use. They are no use unless you are a good plumber and you have the pipes’. She considers herself a good plumber, so presumably the parties must be the pipes.

So is she a great party gel? ‘I don’t think the person taking over the diary necessarily has to be a society person or party person. I’m not a mad partygoer.’

She’s interested in the sports or politics, or mating rituals that generates parties. One wonders if she’ll be writing about such Important Sociological Undercurrents. ‘Not necessarily. But I will be aware of them.’ Does she love gossip? ‘Love it.’ And will she write about her friends? ‘Yes.’ She has a huge range of acquaintances and a small group of intimates.

Is Crewe as discreet as her predecessor? ‘I have old-fashioned notions of integrity. And I’m also old enough not to be bullied or coerced.’ So she won’t reveal even the teeniest gaff? ‘Certainly not. I’m a repository for gossip, not a conduit!’

She doesn’t think there’s something a touch anachronistic about writing a compendium of high society’s race meetings and garden parties. ‘High society living it up is an endangered species,’ she smiles. No one works harder than the aristocracy.

Environmentally friendly and forthright presenter of Bellamy Rides Again who would like to be a graceful but tough birch tree. Big cuddly green and adventurous giant who has broken nearly every bone in his body and has a ballet company.

Clever and funny honorary Maori-cum-conservationist who spent 24 days at home last year with a menagerie, his child, four adopted ethnic ones and a wife. Affable and ebullient millionaire naturalist who once went to jail in Tasmania and has written 44 books.

Enter David Bellamy.

He’s foregone his habitual T-shirt and shorts in favour of casual mountaineering gear suitable for the Piccadilly clime. ‘I have 27 pairs of these trousers,’ he says, waving his arms at the garb he’s worn from the North Pole to the tropics. He wears Cornish pastie shoes on his feet. ‘I suppose my clothes show that I’m a pretty sloppy person really,’ he booms, in the voice of a nasal East Ender crossed with an animated cave man. ‘I don’t like wearing suits. I turned up like this at a lunch at the Park Lane Hotel at which I was the guest of honour – and they wouldn’t let me in!’ He laughs. ‘I wanted all girl children so that I could buy them wonderful dresses. So perhaps,’ – hopeful tone – ‘I should’ve been a girl.’ He talks as if he’s imitating himself – and doesn’t, he says, do it as well as Lenny Henry. He speaks to plants in the same way. ‘Just as I talk to people. I say things like, ‘You’re a hairy one for your sort of species’.’ The model for the caricature laughs.

And how would the bewhiskered botanist with the famous broken nose describe himself physically? ‘A moderate wreck,’ says the buffoon who doesn’t have one undamaged vertebrae in his neck.

Does he think he’s intimidating? He’s 6ft 2in with a rugby-toughened frame. ‘Not verbally – but physically, perhaps. Imagine, I have to look at it every morning – that’s why I don’t shave!’ He’s expressive with his body, using it (he later says) as an instrument of music.

And does he think he’s good looking? ‘Sorry!’ (surprised tone). ‘No. But recently I’ve found myself combing my hair before speaking to camera – which is awful. I never used to carry a comb. I’m getting vain in my old age.’ He later alludes to himself as the ‘ugly face other people use to save the world’. Does he think he’s ugly? He looks taken aback. ‘What is ugly? A wart hog is the most beautiful thing to a lady wart hog. And I really don’t think what somebody looks like is important.’

So ask him how he would change his looks. ‘I’d use all my muscles. I went to Pineapple Dance Studio and did a cardiac funk which almost killed me. I wanted to be a ballet dancer until I grew this big.’

I say, jovially, I can’t quite imagine this beefy bloke in a tutu, ho ho. David Bellamy as you’ve never seen him before, ha ha. ‘Males don’t wear tutus – though I have worn them many times at college dances. Do not mock – if there’s one thing I don’t like, it’s mocking. Mock me as much as you like – but don’t mock ballet, it’s far too important.’

He says he’s ‘58 heading for 60′. And what does age mean to him? ‘Desperate. I hate being old. I don’t want my end to be tranquil and wonderful – I want to go out with a bloody great bang. If ever I get to the stage when I cannot do all the things I want to do, I’m going to chuck myself off the Himalayas. I know exactly the place.’

He comes over, however, with an infectious enthusiasm, charm and immense energy. He is excitable, with a dry wit and greatly likeable. He is also clearly a sensitive, shy man who suffers from self doubt.

So how would he describe himself? ‘Oooh, I don’t know. What a terrible question! Bloody minded,’ he says, in a thudding way. He then talks slowly, with lengthy pauses. ‘Abrasive but not misguided. I think I’m 99.99 per cent honest. I try too hard sometimes – because the world’s in a bloody mess. Also I’m a baby sometimes, ‘cos I don’t like being kicked by my own side . . . I’m a big softie. I’m the Andrex toilet paper that isn’t really made from sustainable sources!’

And what does he particularly like about himself? ‘Nothing very much’ (long hesitation) ‘but I’m like a little terrier who stays in with his teeth as long as he can – that’s why I’m not retiring.’ And is he happy? ‘Yes, I enjoy everything I do – and if I didn’t, I’d stop doing it.’ He has one helluva impact. What sort of effect does he think he has on people? ‘I’m overpowering if I’m talking about environmental matters or ballet. If they’re talking about anything else, I simply opt out. I can just go to sleep and wake up in five minutes.’

He’s doing live television in front of me – without the cameras. But what’s the difference between his public and private persona? I don’t imagine he talks to his children in this way. ‘I do. I was told ‘when you’re at home be Dad and not David Bellamy’ – unfortunately it’s one and the same thing. I can’t switch it off.’ He says he first turned it on aged 21. So who were you before that? ‘A dispossessed ballet dancer.’

He’s also a workaholic who puts in an 18-hour day. ‘I really find doing nothing very boring.’ He feels such a sense of urgency because he reckoned he was a drop-out at school and that he let his parents down badly. ‘So when I finally got switched on, I’ve been working ever since.’

Such behaviour might indicate a low self-esteem. Certainly there’s a sense that he doesn’t feel he measures up. ‘Yes, it’s very low. I don’t think I’ve lived the sort of ethical life my parents did . . . I’m a worm. But worms are useful – they make soil.’

He talks loudly and blames it on genes. Is he actually shy? ‘Yuh. I still hate using the telephone and I won’t go into shops. The media has done a lot of good for me because I can step out of my shyness and Be David Bellamy, the telly personality. But sometimes I just want to crawl away and disappear.’

Is he intrepid? ‘Yes. I will go anywhere in the world as long as it’s not with nasty people. I’d rather go swimming with Jaws than come up against people.’

So how does he see himself sexually? How does he rate himself as a man? ‘I was immensely lucky. I met someone who could put up with me – with my workaholism, overt shouting and bigoted self opinionism. I found a really beautiful person who wanted to marry me. So I didn’t have to wave myself about all that much.

‘When I was a youngster, the only time you were going to get it was when you got married. Whatever anybody says, sex within a marriage – and I don’t know anything about it outside married life – gets better and better. Not as often – but by God it gets better.’

So what makes him tick? ‘Mars bars.’

Redundancy, recession – the everyday words strike a menacing note as the meaning of unemployment strikes home on a personal basis for more and more of London’s white-collar middle-classes. Alistair Delves plunged from earnings of more than £100,000 a year to unemployment benefit of £50 a week. Jane Hill felt emotionally shattered and then filled with rage after being told she was no longer wanted. Bert Casey offered to go in the hope of saving a younger man. How did these three victims cope? And are there lessons in it for those still threatened by the recession?

ONE day senior ad man Alistair Treves was earning more than £100,000 – and the next he was on the dole. ‘I get paid £50 a week from social security because I have a wife and children.’ He had worked for leading London advertising agency Young and Rubicon for 21 years.

He used to have a chauffeur-driven car, his own fancy motor and holidays in Florida. Now he’s recognised on the number three bus where he sits on the top deck and practises Chinese breathing techniques and relaxation exercises.

He’s a rare breed: a senior professional who has been made redundant and will talk about it. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of. These things occur in modern life.’

We’re sitting in the garden of his four-bedroom Victorian house in Dulwich – a better class of sun streaming onto our faces, mugs of Lapsang Souchong in our hands.

Alistair, 44, has a boyish haircut atop a long oval face with expansive pink cheeks and facial expressions that look as if he is mimicking himself. And he’s wearing Saturday-lunch-in-Bibendum kind of garb: pink polo shirt, grey cords and navy blazer.

Until he left his job on 10 January, he wore three hats: assistant managing director; director of client services, running a department of 80 people; and group director, handling £35 million worth of business. In the Eighties the agency had been making money, money, money. But then the recession hit and by 1989 it was biting with rottweiler teeth. Costs and overheads were out of control, they had too many senior people, and the budget for 1991 was looking dire.

‘I was called back from a day’s leave at 5.30 one Friday (30 November). I didn’t realise I was the third senior person to go in there. I was like a marked man.’

A white collar redundancy! The Gaultier fabric of his life threatened! Would he not lose his status and everything he had worked for? Would he have to reschedule his mortgage? Lose the respect of his wife? Tell the kids they couldn’t have mountain bikes?

He looks at his light and spacious residence: freshly painted, immaculately tidy, with a guinea pig in a pen in the kitchen, a wife planting in the garden and the sort of vehicles that a three and six-year-old leave strewn around the place. Owing to management upheavals, he no longer felt he fitted in at Y and R; and he’d long wanted to get the hell out but couldn’t think of a way.

His pay-off after 21 years was hardly guinea-pig feed. (He won’t reveal the sum. ‘There’s loyalty among thieves,’ he says. But it would be enough to keep the show on the road for about a year if he didn’t earn a penny. He can’t or won’t imagine the show coming to an end.) He had neither savings nor credit card debts. He has a pension. Y and R is still paying for his private health care. And homes like his £300,000ish one weren’t selling. So he worried, briefly, whether he might end up on a caravan site in North Wales or have to move to New Zealand.

Instead he went to Peckham Social Security and queued for three hours. Then he was told he had been misdirected and should really be at the Department of Employment. So he queued there – and was then told he was meant to be in Peckham. ‘It was a real eye-opener. I realised for the first time how lucky I am.’

Now he’s not exactly sitting around at home. He still gets up at 6.45. ‘No reason to stay in bed, there’s too much going on,’ says the man who has decided he wants to do ‘anything and everything’ in the communications business. He’s approached 90 headhunters and spends his time ‘meeting terribly interesting people’. He’s been doing a little consultancy work too.

But what of his ‘over £100,000’ mortgage? He howls with defensive laughter on being asked whether he will manage to pay it. It’s a forced laugh and his fists tense up noticeably. But he hasn’t reduced it. And will he keep his children at private school? ‘I’d clean the bloody streets to make sure they stayed.’ A lot of streets, I say; ha, ha, he says.

They’ve slashed their outgoings by a third. ‘We went into siege mentality.’ They’ve stopped buying spirits, reduced their wine intake and cut out new clothes and eating out. ‘It was strange coming from an industry of largesse – where I was eating out breakfast three days a week, lunch four days and dinner a couple of times. Now if anybody kindly buys me lunch, for a change I appreciate it.’

He’s become less arrogant. And he’s realised the fragility of life. ‘When you’re made redundant, it’s a bit like a death. You wake up to life and think if there are things you want to do, just get on and do them.’ But what of the chance that he might never be in full-term employment again? Pause. ‘Good question. I don’t know. I’ve got another 30 years of working (he’s 44). If I’m not in full-time employment again, it’ll be out of choice.’

So what of his loss of status? ‘I’ve never been hung up on that. I didn’t make advertising my life. I have a supportive wife, a young family, other interests.

‘My wife told the children that Daddy hasn’t got a job at the moment. Andrew occasionally worries about Daddy getting a job.’ And are his kid’s worries justified? Daddy hoots with laughter. ‘I’m laid-back. I know we’ll make it.’

Morose and hunky photographer who is compulsively attracted to gun battles and death and was once hit with a shell in both legs. Non-violent, courageous and honourable man who has worked from war-torn Africa to Vietnam armed only with a camera.

Dyslexic, tanned and sinewy co-author of Unreasonable Behaviour. Complex and contradictory character who is exhibiting at the Royal Photographic Society in Bath from 29 June.

Such is the image of Don McCullin, 56 – the John Wayne of Somerset. He’s wearing Docksiders, a lumberjack-style flannel shirt and hair that hits his collar. ‘I wear clothes that are convenient,’ he says, in a hesitant way. ‘I like rolling my sleeves up.’

The strange thing is that he has too many of certain items. ‘Like upstairs I have 60 pairs of new socks. I can’t bring myself to wear them, to take them out of their pristine wrappers.’ As a child, he wore secondhand clothes.

He’s also very neat and tidy – curiously, one of the things he’d like to be remembered for is his presentation – and as we talk, it feels as if he organises things in an attempt to order his inner chaos. (‘Yes,’ he says later, ‘I’m in permanent turmoil.’) ‘It’s to do with lack of confidence, I suppose. And I’m just trying to make up for things I didn’t have when I was a boy. We didn’t have a bath and we shared a loo.’ He is soft, unassuming and modestly spoken. He has the face of a rugged model, kindly with shaggy eyebrows and piercing blue eyes that are sad. ‘Mournful eyes?’ He laughs, and crosses his arms that end in workmanlike hands. ‘They’re what God gave me.’ His is a face that often has trouble at Customs; and in Africa they accused him of being a mercenary. ‘I often think I’m punished for other people’s misdemeanours,’ he has said.

‘I’m not what you’d call good-looking, not the kind of person to attract a second glance in the street. But I do suffer from vanity – and I’m always checking myself out.’

He’s not, he says, any kind of sexual thing. ‘Obviously, one knows one isn’t a sex symbol. I’m sure my appeal as a man is because of my occupation. It’s nothing to do with the way I look. I’ve known lots of beautiful girls – and they’ve all been interested in my work, not me. That’s what I think, anyway.’

He is, he says, yer average 5ft 10 man. ‘But people often think I look surly and don’t want to argue the toss with me . . . I have this strong feeling of confrontation in my make-up. I won’t run away from an argument and I won’t run away from fear.’

Why? His was a savage and underprivileged childhood – his father, an invalid, died when he was young; he was evacuated to violent homes; and he was tormented and bullied by schoolmasters and boys tougher than he. Fear, he says, has been his companion over the last 25 years, and there is a tremendous strain of adventure in him.

He’s overwhelmingly nice: accommodating, sensitive, telepathic perhaps, full of pain and sometimes martyrdom. He says he buttons up his emotions, but he’s actually very emotional. Apparently confused and depressed, he tends to be (in protective manner) self-deprecatory. And one also feels a sense of disillusionment: that his pictures didn’t change the world, partly. ‘A burnt-out and tense old bugger,’ is the way he puts it.

So how else would he describe himself? ‘People think I’m a misery. But I’m not.’ Certainly, he can be heavy-going. He says he’d like to be known for his photos and his fairness. And he then says he’d like people to consider him fun. ‘I bet that surprises you.’ He laughs. But it’s true that there are occasional bursts of humour and happiness.

‘I’m just motivated by intense thought and emotion. I can’t let anything past me without analysing it,’ says the man who compares his eyes to a combine harvester, taking in everything in the field. ‘I’m constantly thinking, like a 24-hour-a-day machine. I’m a kind of captive of my own eyes, mind and body.’

In bed last night, he was counting people. ‘A dozen really nice people I knew who’ve been killed in the last 20 years. And I thought, why them?’ His delivery is placid and there’s something in him that makes you want to mother him.

‘I know this sounds sinister, but the ghosts of those dead people are in those filing cabinets here at night with me. I really believe those pictures in there have some kind of effect on this atmosphere.’

He spends a lot of time alone, here in the house he dubs a private factory of emotion. ‘Yes, I am lonely,’ he flinches at the question. ‘I suppose that’s why I over-clobber this place and spend so much time polishing up. I am burning myself up all the time, I’m on fire. But let’s hope the fire engines don’t get me.’ Vrrrzzzzzooom-the Royal Naval plane from the nearby base screams overhead.

His guilt and conscience weigh heavy. ‘It’s like having two vests on a hot summer’s day.’ He looks bleak. ‘Obviously something nasty is going to happen to me for getting away with all these things’ – like escaping being murdered, photographing dying people and starving children. ‘That’s probably why I look worried all the time.’

That’s also why he works so hard, working to divert himself. ‘As a human being, I’m worn out,’ he says later. ‘I feel as if all my nerve endings are hanging out. I’ve almost been skinned alive, really.’

He’s passionate about his work – ‘I inject a pound of flesh into each picture’ – and inspirational. ‘I love it. And thank God I do, because I haven’t anything else to do.’

Central to his character is a desire to prove and overcome things. ‘I can’t overcome not being able to read the written word properly. But I try to overcome my photography: every night I go to bed and fear my darkroom.’ He’s racked by guilt at leaving his wife, Christine, for former model Laraine Ashton. His wife then died of cancer, ‘and the other person (he doesn’t name her) somehow went off me’. Christine died on the morning of his son’s wedding. ‘If you think I haven’t picked up the bill for this feast of misery over the last 20 years, you’re wrong. I have.’

Does he let people close to him? ‘They don’t get much chance, really.’ He later explains: ‘I’m a social outcast in some respects. People get bored with my downer conversations at dinner parties.’ He also says he’s so emotionally wound-up that he used to drink a lot. ‘And that broke up all kinds of relationships.’

Is he potty? He starts laughing and looks down. ‘I’ve walked a very fine line between madness, hypocrisy and contradiction. I’ve probably crawled through it all and come out reasonably balanced.’

And does he consider himself brave? ‘I’m certainly prepared to go a lot further than most people. But in some ways that’s just folly.’ He holds with destiny and fate. ‘I have looked at myself as some sort of Dalek that is controlled, although I don’t know who’s controlling me.’

And does he believe in God? ‘That’s your most important question. I behave like an atheist. But deep down, I find it hard to believe that this was not all created. Yet when I see people being murdered and men crying in front of me . . .’

The soviet space chief last night launched an extraordinary attack on women astronauts-including orbiting Briton Helen Sharman, whom he described as a loner who ‘works like an iron lady’. CAROLINE PHILIPS talked to the parents of the down-to-earth girl.

WHEN Helen Sharman arrived in the world 27 years ago, she weighed 6lb 12oz more than she does now. Currently weightless, Helen is the first British astronaut in space-aboard the Russian Soyuz TM12 rocket for a journey to MIR space station.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Helen the toddler didn’t let on she might one day be an astronaut. Instead, she said she was keen to become a nurse-like mummy- before she decided to be a doctor and then, of course, a ballet dancer when she took dance lessons aged eight.

What is striking about her childhood is its ordinariness. ‘She was a very normal girl,’ emphasises her mother, Lyndis. ‘It’s just that she’s gone and done this rather extraordinary thing.’

If there was a hint of individualism and unconventionality beneath her stable and composed exterior, it manifested itself in her early teens. When she wanted peace and quiet, she’d climb to the top of the tree in the garden to sit and read a book.

She loved Waltzers and white-knuckle fairground rides. And the signs that she wouldn’t suffer space sickness were good. ‘We could drive 500 miles without a problem,’ says her father, John, ‘while her sister Andrea (now 25) would be sick before we left Sheffield.’

We are sitting in the family home in Sheffield, a detached house in a leafy suburb, to which Helen was taken aged eight. In the sitting-room there are swirly carpets, flowered sofas, patterned walls and a chair which bears a plastic sign which reads ‘recliner’.

We’re drinking tea granules ready-mixed with dehydrated milk. On the mantelpiece stand congratulations cards and photos of Helen in the space capsule. On the table is a magazine cover reading ‘Don’t Dream It, Be It’-a diet magazine.

There are dogs in the kitchen. Helen was interested in animal welfare from an early age. The family kept dogs, cats and hamsters and she became a vegetarian at the age of 15.

Helen, who moved into her own flat when she went to study chemistry at Sheffield University, no longer has a bedroom here. But until she was 18 she shared the large room overlooking the street-now occupied by her brother James, 15, and with multi-earrings in his lobes-with her sister Andrea. Helen had the tidy half, and Andrea the messy one. She didn’t have posters of pop stars, she wasn’t keen on them. Instead she had pictures of animals-particularly elephants.

When she was six, her parents started fostering pre-adoption children, mostly babies: 24 infants who stayed up to four months, including two West Indians. They discussed the idea first with Helen. ‘She thought it tremendous and behaved like an older sister to them.’

There was sibling rivalry. But sensible Helen never competed with the sartorially interested Andrea. ‘She was always the trousers sort, not in the least interested in fashion,’ remarks her father. ‘Whatever was practical and no-nonsense, she wanted to wear it.’ So temperate Helen saved her pocket money and bought only music scores, books and occasional sweets. The news comes on the television-and suddenly there’s her daughter in a space capsule. Live! Lyndis watches it with one finger in her mouth. ‘Oh heavens! Look at Helen’s hair.’ (Appalled tone) ‘She’s got nothing to hold it down.’

If she’s anxious about the safe return of the mission, this mother-who has brought her daughter up emotionally secure and stable-doesn’t vocalise it. As soon as the broadcast finishes, she apologises for having turned away from the interview and recommences talking.

At Jordanthorpe comprehensive school, Helen’s former physics teacher noted that her looks hadn’t changed since schooldays. ‘She still wears her hair in the same style. She’s still physically slight and about 5ft 3in. She was always pale and you wouldn’t have looked at her and said, ‘Ooh, there’s a physical powerhouse’.’

So how do you raise an astronaut? ‘Children need security to know they are loved and the freedom to think for themselves. We’ve always given them the opportunity to do what they want,’ says Lyndis.

‘There was no great discipline-she went to bed when she was tired.’ Helen wasn’t raised particularly to believe in God-but she was confirmed when she was 13, at her own request.

She learned the piano, saxophone and played in the recorder consort; joined the Brownies and Girl Guides; represented the school at hockey; played tennis and badminton and cycled.

She never worried her parents. She never did anything wrong. She was never even naughty enough to have a midnight feast or go somewhere and not tell her parents where she was.

She rarely even got ill as a child-and never once went to hospital. ‘We didn’t,’ concludes John, ‘bring her up. She brought herself up.’ Helen has said: ‘I don’t get upset easily. I don’t get scared. I don’t get depressed, and I fit a lot into my life.’ Recently she has coped with solitude and social isolation in Star City near Moscow. She has displayed an unusual steeliness of character and a streak of emotional toughness. Were there early indications?

‘I always say she got her father’s brains and my insanity,’ says Lyndis. Helen’s father is a college lecturer. ‘Her calm, placid personality and the fact that she doesn’t get easily upset by things developed early. She very rarely flew off the handle. Instead she’d talk it out-she was very grown-up.’

‘She showed,’ says her father, ‘a scientific interest, a logical, enquiring mind and a preparedness to stand her own ground.’

Her grandfather once jokingly asked if Helen, aged two, would like to join him for the weekend. She went. It was just such a streak that manifested itself when she went off cycling in Norfolk with a girlfriend for two weeks when she was 15.

When she was at university, she dug-in her stubborn heels against parental opposition to her having a motorbike. ‘My mother expressed displeasure. But that didn’t stop me,’ she has said. She graduated to a 750cc Suzuki-and did her own repairs.

But the Soviet space commander, Anatoly Artsebarski, has said women do not belong in space; that more work can be done by men; that Helen is a loner who does not fit in well with the crew; and one who has no inhibitions about changing clothes in the presence of the male crew.

‘He’s sexist,’ says John. ‘He once insisted he drive Helen’s car when she was giving him a lift back to Moscow. She refused. And she wouldn’t have been chosen if she were a loner. Part of the selection was to ensure that she could get on with crew members. As for clothes, part of the training involves being taught to make a full change of garments in the capsule.’ Helen is used to an all-male environment. In some A-level classes, she was the only girl. Her former headmaster, Ken Cook-who knew her for seven years-remembers her as a high achiever. ‘But what stood out was her strong sense of justice. She was very respected.’

She would sit at the front of class, always handing in her homework on time. Nine O-levels and four A-levels at grade B-she was bright. She also got a 2.1 at university and has a grasp of six languages. And she got a thrill from watching crystals on her window sill.

Her physics teacher, Paul Pollard, remembers her determination. ‘People were in awe of her. The lads knew she wasn’t to be meddled with . . . she wouldn’t be the prime mover in social outings-but she’d join in.’ Another teacher, Geoff Wilson, recalls that she didn’t have a wide circle of friends. ‘And I was surprised that she opted for Sheffield University when she could have gone anywhere. I think she wanted the cosiness of her family nearby.’ Her best friend was-and is-Philippa Keeling. They stuck together from her first day at school.

And what of her boyfriends? She didn’t dally with those at school. ‘Her last relationship finished 18 months before she even started the selection process for the space mission,’ says Lyndis. ‘She had steady boyfriends-ordinary, likeable, young bank-clerk types.’ A child who grew into a woman of the Right Stuff, really.

International and egghead author of 34 tomes including Handbook for the Positive Revolution and I am Right You are Wrong. Self-contained and quiet Maltese originator of lateral thinking who can write an entire book on the London to Sydney flight.

Visionary and pundit who thinks about thinking, talks about thinking and lectures about thinking. Curious-minded, gentle and clever TV performer who, er, thinks he’s descended from Napoleon.

This is Dr Edward de Bono-or Bono de Edward if you want to think about it another way. The man who once had four working breakfasts with four different people before 9.30.

He’s wearing sober suit, striped shirt and de Bonoed tie. ‘Because I work in the field of creativity,’ he says, ‘I don’t want clothes that say ‘aren’t I creative-looking?’ That has a negative effect.’ Curiously, he cites advertising men’s open shirts and medallions as an example of such creative garb.

He travels a lot and likes to carry his luggage with him. So he holds on to one navy suit and wears the other. ‘To show that I’ve changed, I wear very bright ties. Then the focus is on my tie.’

He finds it extremely difficult to find striking ties, so he’s started to make them himself. ‘There’s a very simple way of doing it. Well, you take a long tube and you fold the top in two halves . . .’

On his mantelpiece are little fluffy toy ducklings, Hindu artefacts, pots of pollen and so on. And then there are books and papers everywhere. He sits in an armchair, emphasising with his right hand while his left eyebrow moves up and down; hand movements that he reckons he adapted to the early days of television. ‘If you used your hands a lot, they’d pop in and out of frame.’

He tends to use Americanisms. And he speaks in the voice of a smart Englishman; a lovely rich and even-toned voice. ‘I suppose I have a calm voice that shows I don’t get antagonistic or worked up.’ Certainly he appears equanimous.

He looks like the doctor he is. He has nice, swarthy Maltese looks (which he says come from his Irish grandfather-shipwrecked Armada chappies swimming ashore and all that), a touch of the genial uncle, a receding hairline, a bit of a tummy and hirsute hands. ‘I think I look a bit like Saddam Hussein,’ he laughs. ‘Dark, I mean . . .

‘And I think I weigh more than I should,’ he says, with his hand under his lip. Characteristically he looks down to speak. ‘One’s writing and getting bored so one eats whatever’s put in front of one.’ He squirms in his chair talking about his overeating. ‘I look very ordinary. Tallish, not stocky and intelligent-looking, I hope. I’m neither florid nor muscular, of football or wimp build.’

So why-in seemingly underconfident gesture-does he turn away to talk? ‘Interesting . . . The reason for doing that is so that when you look back it makes more of a point.’ He punctuates with a look at me.

He likes to categorise himself as a thinker. ‘Of course, some people think I’m mad. And others just think I’ve just done very well with a simple idea,’ says the lateral thinker who wakes up in the morning with ideas for improving his coffee percolator and irrigating the Sahara.

Ask him to describe himself and a smile crosses his lips. He has a rather sluggish feel to him, perhaps he’s slightly lonely, and he doesn’t dazzle with brilliance. He’s genial and mild. And with the practicality of a doctor.

‘I’m interested in designing. I’m active, constructive, positive, easy-going, calm, sensitive and simple.’ More? The son of an entrepreneurial, active mother and pensive father laughs. ‘I’m interested in things, curious, very bored by chores and administration, organised, disciplined and not neurotic.’

And what does he most value in himself? ‘Three things’-he looks up-‘My being constructive, curious and striving to end up with something as simple as possible.’

And what does he most dislike? ‘My overeating, that sometimes I run out of energy and, probably, my laziness. Also I’m probably not ruthless enough.’ He says he’d like to be hypermanic. Does he lack energy? ‘Yes. I’m just driven by interest in what I’m doing,’ says the man who once said he could well do without cinema, theatre or galleries. And is he easily bored? ‘Not by people. I suffer fools gladly.’

Does he think he’s brilliant? ‘No. I think I’m more interested in thinking than other people. Sometimes I can see things more clearly. And I’m more able to hold onto different points of view at the same time.’ So speaks the Rhodes scholar whose books have been translated into 24 languages. And how many marks out of 10 would would he give himself for his thinking? ‘About four.’

In one year he spent 230 days away from his wife. That, he says, is the nature of his work. ‘I think that families settle down into the modes that are available.’ One assumes he doesn’t have a close relationship with his wife. But no: he looks at things in a different way.

‘Relationships that are very enduring don’t depend on whether you’re around or remember their birthdays or whatever,’ he says, citing the example of a friend who he called in Sweden after a 25-year break. They spoke as if they’d talked the day before.

‘It’s probably true that I don’t have intense relationships. I regard those as a hassle. I hate the demands. There are lots of things I’m interested in and want to get on with.’

So people aren’t important to him? ‘They are. But not on the level of needing them. I grew up in a big family and you learn to be independent. You develop your ways of dealing with the world. You certainly don’t rely on anyone or expect people to do things for you.’

So is he lonely? Sitting in his chilly chambers in the Albany, he shoots me a challenging look. ‘Not really. Only in the sense that you travel. Not lonely in the sense of sitting around saying ‘poor me, poor me.’’

Next to the ‘door bell is a sticker bearing the legend: ‘Make his day. Break in.’ On it is a picture of a pit bull terrier, stocky and muscular with a steel-trap jaw.

So why would anyone want an American pit bull terrier-or APBT, as the new Sporting Dog periodical would have it?

There are an estimated 10,000 APBTs in England, of whom 1000 reside in Dave and Maria Britons’ borough of Waltham Forest, an area where youths walk in the park: one with an APBT, another with a rottweiler. With its killer instinct, the APBT is a loaded weapon.

Dave and Maria, 36 and 35, live in a terrace house in Walthamstow on a short stretch of road that houses no less than one dobermann, a Yorkshire terrier and 13 APBTs. Of these, 11, including nine puppies, are in the Britons’ 20-ish ft paved garden.

They have a one-bedroom flat on a heavy traffic road. They have lived in it for two years-with exposed plaster work and unfinished floor in the microwave-only kitchen. There’s a picture in the hall of a hand carrying a spearhead, blood trickling down-and in the sitting room, ones of fierce-looking tigers’ heads. In the bathroom, the Sunday article is open at The Hiss of Death. There is an uncomfortable atmosphere of violence restrained.

The dogs, Nash and Misty, don’t even bark when we arrive. They wag their tails. They show no sign of aggression. In fact, they are rather placid. And in the garden the five-week-old puppies frolic, squealing and squeaking. One chews my foot, another my handbag.

‘The vet’s always saying how gentle they are,’ says Maria, in black leggings, wine T-shirt and long brown hair. She has a face that looks as if it has experienced the rougher side of life and a character that fluctuates between being meek and showing a very hard edge. ‘It’s sad people are so nasty about them. They’re such lovable things,’ she says, passing them a tray of rice, egg and biscuit.

Maria is a housewife who says she doesn’t do a lot. Like her husband, she left school at 16. ‘I generally take the dogs out for a couple of hours a day.’ She says she only bred so her bitch would put on weight. But she hopes to sell them for upwards of £300 each.

‘They’re good with everyone, particularly children, very good guards, obedient, very affectionate,’ says Dave, showing me bookplates of one with a parrot and one pulling a baby in a cart.

He’s rough-spoken, bullish and thickset, wearing a tracksuit that he has worn to mend a friend’s car, and long hair. He’s clearly very strong. ‘Currently unemployed, and looking for business premises,’ he says, adding that he’s a motor mechanic when ‘working. They live on the dole, claiming (between them) £124 every two weeks.

They don’t have any children. ‘I have no intention of having any, either,’ says Maria. ‘The dogs are my kids.’ He, too, is mad on the creatures. Ask him to describe his lifestyle, and he says: ‘My dogs . . . when I get home I’ll walk them or play with them in the yard.’ He goes to the club for APBTs and other sporting dogs which started in Basildon six weeks ago. Operating alternate Thursdays, it offers events like ‘flirt pole variations’ and ‘weight pulling’-in which a 70 lb dog pulled 5151 lb harnessed to it. They sell T-shirts which read PITBULL, where P is for protective, I for intelligent, then tasteful, boisterous, unspoilt, loving and lively.

When Dave’s ‘not with the dogs, he’ll ‘shoot off to see some mates or go down the betting shop’. He’ll bet on anything, he laughs-except dog fighting. Nor would he fight his dogs. ‘If they get hurt, I get hurt.’ He says they’re part of the family.

‘My dogs have never bitten anyone and they’re never likely to. Only about .001 per cent of the 9000 registered dogs have ever attacked people. And a dog will only attack if it feels threatened, annoyed, protecting its own territory or jealous.’

But what about the case of the mutilated six-year-old, Rucksana Khan? ‘Sad,’ says Maria.

‘But we don’t know the full circumstances,’ says Dave. ‘You never hear both sides of the story as to why the dog attacked.’

Maria thinks it’s untenable that the RSPCA should suggest treating the animals in law as wild. ‘It’s disgusting because they are our pets!’ And what do they think of the MP’s suggestion that the dogs should be neutered and imports banned? ‘Well,’ says Dave, ‘I think MPs should be neutered.’

Originally the Britons had a German shepherd-which didn’t stop them being burgled. So two years ago they decided on an APBT. ‘We’re living in a high risk area with lots of muggings. When my wife goes out in the evening with her friends, I don’t want her walking around the streets with nothing on her arm.’

When he goes walking, he carries a breaking stick-a long piece of wood ‘with which I can open their jaws in a flash’. So there must be just a hint of a thought in his head that the dogs could attack? ‘Oh no, no, no. It’s just a precaution we take.’ And one that he’s been taking for the last two years. As he says, these dogs do have five times more power in their jaws than rottweilers.

Dave decided to let his dog breed. ‘So it doesn’t get possessive about its owners. A nasty streak can come out in them otherwise. If a dog hasn’t had a litter, it’ll show a lot more aggression to people,’ he says, letting his bull defence down for a minute.

He shows me their leather harnesses. ‘No princess, no darling,’ says Maria, as she picks up the brass-decorated leather, £35. ‘You can get them with spikes all over. And you can pick the dog up with it,’ he says, lifting the creature in the air.

He also has a leather arm protector. ‘To play with them.’ Like a piece of leather armour, it also has sackcloth over the hand (£120). And then there’s the treadmill (£250), which is like something for a giant hamster. ‘For walking the dogs when it’s raining. They love it.’

Once he had a visit from the council’s animal wardens. ‘They said they’d seen us hanging the dogs from the first-floor window. I thought: ‘That’s a bit strange since we live on the ground floor!’ The thing is, the dog was tugging on a piece of rope-and all they could see was the top of the head and a rope.’

And has he ever been in fights? ‘Years ago.’ His voice goes quiet. ‘Three or four years ago.’ That was when he worked as a doorman in clubs. He did that after he ran a security service company.

And has he ever been the wrong side of the law? He’s standing up now, towering above my seated position. ‘Er, yes.’ For what? ‘Well, if you read a book by James Campbell there’s a chapter in there called The Professional-concerning a robbery case I was involved in. I got eight-and-a-half years. That was in 1978 when I was 23. I was tying up the chairman of the Walthamstow Building Society and took some jewels that were given to him by Mountbatten. I lost all my remission.

‘But that’s years ago. I’m not anti-police. The police have got a job to do. I’ve had no trouble from the police concerning my dogs.’

‘CHESS’ proclaims the huge banner outside the drab one-time cinema that is now the Playhouse theatre in Edinburgh. Scarcely noticeable beneath it, a small strip reads ‘Rudolph Nureyev’.

The audience file in, looking as if they were going to the local bistro, no one particularly glammed up for the occasion.

Inside, an usher gives me-and every other woman in the front stalls-a pink rose, to throw on stage at the end of the performance. An adolescent girl in jeans and T-shirt (no pearls and fur coats here) asks her companion: ‘Where’s the orchestra?’ There isn’t one. For the £30.75 ticket and £6 programme you get pre-recorded music, on a diabolical system. The performance is billed as part of the 16-stop Nureyev Farewell Tour, the road show which reaches Wembley Conference Centre on Friday. But what we are witnessing tonight is the pathos of The Long Goodbye, the tragedy of a legend who cannot let the final curtain fall.

Has it really come to this? Inexorably, the man who enthralled millions around the world is joining the ranks of those who destroy their own mystique. The Maria Callas, Sarah Bernhardt, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald Club.

The first time I ever saw Nureyev, he was in the Russian Orthodox Church in Kensington. The incense burned, people chanted gloriously and he paraded in an ankle-grazing sable coat. He had that distinctive haughty tread and trademark cap pulled over his thick brows and dark eyes.

This was the international superstar incarnate; defiant, handsome, magisterial, proud, temperamental. And now here he was playing in a provincial theatre in Edinburgh. It was a bleak, undecorative and charmless affair.

In Sunderland, on the opening of the tour five days ago, 50 fans demanded their money back. His performance at Liverpool was described by critics as lacklustre. ‘Nureyev leaves them shouting for less,’ said the headlines. Here in Edinburgh, there were 700 tickets still on sale the night before. During the performance, there are rows of empty seats at the front. But where is Nureyev? Ah, yes. He comes on just before the interval. He does no solos and after a little exertion in The Lesson, the fiery Tartar sits breathless. Sweat pours off him. He is in constant pain and virtually disabled by a calcium spur on his heel. He’s 53 years old and for more than 20 years has performed a near-masochistic 250 performances a year. His body has grown weary, his stamina nigh gone.

Tonight he is no longer playing virtuoso roles, but ones which depend on dramatic presence. Imperiously, he milks the audience for applause and to be fair he still has a fading sexual charisma and compelling stage presence, but it is based on an association with the glorious past, not the now. What he is now doing is really low grade theatre. The soundtrack crackles dismally out of the PA, ugly great speakers set to the fore of a space that has no stage set and no design to relieve it. It is as alluring as a school hall on a Sunday night at midnight. The whole evening grows artistically like . . . like . . . well, like something thrown together by the promoters for the sole purpose of spinning a fast buck.

So there we sit with our pink roses. If they are meant to be thrown to the maestro, nobody does.

So why does he do it? Not for money, ambition or fame. ‘I am a dancer. I am a dancer. Maybe I am the dancer,’ he once said. There is a demon inside him. He is simply a man obsessed; one consumed by a passion; one for whom dancing is the focus of life.

He is also a man who has always fought against critics, competitors, his own muscles and even gravity. He is a warrior who has the will to fight-even when he is losing. He won’t give in to loneliness, old age or infirmity. At the end of the evening, the audience dutifully claps. But there is none of the foot-stamping or whistling that denotes serious approval. A girl in the stalls calls ‘Bravo!’ Nureyev’s eyes light up as he hears it, the single voice in the dark. A lone cheer that is of little cheer. Where is the retinue of yesteryear? The fans straining at the police cordons? The autograph hunters? Gone are the nights of 89 curtain calls. As the performance ends, those watching file out. Many leave before the applause is through.

The dancers’ hero bids farewell DANCERS lost their most formidable champion last night when Wayne Eagling gave his final performance for the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden. Flowers cascaded from the balcony, and bouquets materialised from both sides of the stage, as he blew a departing kiss to the cheering audience and turned to snap the assembled company behind him for his family album. His talents as dancer, choreographer and fighter for dancers’ rights were generously acknowledged by Mr Jeremy Isaacs, the general director of the Royal Opera House, who found him a testing adversary during the dancers’ strike in 1989.

‘He steadfastly championed the cause of dancers in debate and dispute with management,’ said Mr Isaacs.

‘He has fought hard for them and in spite of the spats and recriminations, he is widely respected for his experience, flair and powers of leadership.’

As a dancer, Mr Isaacs continued, Eagling ‘had a formidable technique, a handsome presence, and masculine vitality. He played every prince that ever was’.

For Eagling, who moves to Amsterdam in August to take up directorship of the Dutch National Ballet, his farewell was not an occasion to rake over old coals. ‘I told my mother that I would not say anything controversial,’ he joked.

He said: ‘I have a very warm place in my heart for this building and this House. I hope it remains one of the best in the world-along with the Dutch National.

‘After 25 years with the Royal Ballet-22 with the company and three in the school, which I hated-I’ve a lot of memories. I will miss everyone that’s around.’

He paid tribute to a long list of inspirational dancers-Rudolf Nureyev and Royal Ballet Director Anthony Dowell among them-and to choreographers like Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton.

* THE BBC is joining with the Royal Opera House, the Kirov Theatre, the Opera de Bastille and other organisations to show a new production of Prokofiev’s War and Peace by British producer Graham Vick at the Kirov this summer. Viewers will be able to see the production, which marks the centenary of the composer’s birth, relayed live from Leningrad on 14 July.

Sandie Shaw is wriggling and giggling. Now she’s sitting cross-legged. Now there’s the laugh that hits the ceiling. And more wriggles. And lots of funny voices. If you didn’t know she hated the song, you might say she was acting like a bit of a Puppet on a String. But she’s just recorded an interview with Jonathan Ross, and she seems to be quite high. Grace, her lovely-looking and, at 20, her eldest child, has just left us. (‘Yummy Mummy’ is what her children call her.) ‘Grace is really beautiful, not just physically but mentally and spiritually. We relate very much to the child in each other as well as the woman.’

Sandie Shaw came back after an absence of more than 15 years-‘my black hole, I call it. I don’t know the exact dates’. She ‘retired’ at 24, pregnant and with 17 hits behind her. Always Something There to Remind Me… This is the girl who came from Dagenham and whose first job was with the Ford motor company, training to be a computer operator. She who finished her marriage to dress designer and television presenter Jeff Banks in poverty and went to work in a restaurant in Soho where, once Warhol’s guest, she found herself waiting on him. ‘I didn’t feel ashamed. I loved it. It was such fun.’

Sandie Shaw is clear-complexioned and bright-eyed (penetrating blue and ‘blind as a bat’), with curly lashes, rich brown hair, little-girl dimples, architectural cheekbones, and what is probably a willowy figure beneath the billowing pink T-shirt. Grace’s mum, in other words. She’s wearing lurid-fluorescent, even-green Ozbek leggings and the trademark bare feet are shod with lime running shoes. ‘I might be sophisticated from the neck up, but from the neck down . . .’

The eternally youthful 44-year-old (on being asked, she says she’s about my age; I’m 31) who has just published The World at My Feet takes a sip of her white-wine spritzer.

She left singing so prematurely ‘because I’d buggered up my career’. She was, she reckons, slipping artistically and soaring commercially. ‘I’d done some really great stuff-and then I was talked into doing this crappy song Puppet on a String and entering the Eurovision Song Contest. I didn’t know what a feminist was then because they didn’t exist. But instinctively I knew it offended my sensibilities.’

She walked off live German TV when they played it. (‘I don’t want to wallow in nostalgia, it’s so negative. It’s valuable to look in your wing mirrors from time to time, just to know where you’ve come from. But you shouldn’t drive like that, without consulting the road ahead.’) ‘There were hits after that, but nothing I enjoyed.’ The turning point, she says, was this bloody song where they kept changing the lyrics and it was in Italian. ‘I went and hid in the gazebo in the garden and covered myself in hay and waited till everyone went away.’

Any fool, she reckoned, could get up and sing. But the book reveals she was looking for an inner conviction, having spent years ‘winning publicly and losing privately’. Her self-confidence is fragile. She’s known what it is like to ‘descend into the pit, to live in the dark, airless basement, to be traumatised by pain, to be paralysed by fear . . . sometimes life kept hitting me so hard that I would crawl around on all fours unable to stand up. For days I hid under the smoked-glass table top, curled up foetus-like’. Grace-who held her mother’s hand at the births of her next two children-would pass her her meals, sometimes forcing her to chant. Did these Dark Ages continue throughout her ‘retirement’? All through her marriage to Jeff Banks? ‘Oh no. That sounds awful. But that whole time (10, 15, 20 years, she doesn’t know which) I lost my direction, my self-esteem, my money and I lost a baby. I’d lost just about everything you can lose. And look at me now.’ (Giggle giggle and she’s putting on silly voices again.) ‘I needed to get away from everything. I had no respect for myself as a woman, artist, human being, person of talent . . .’

So why did she write the book? ‘Cos I was in kind of a unique situation. I realised I was getting these kind of parallels of everything I had lived in the past and not done quite right. So I thought I’d resolve it in this new situation. Every day seemed like a second chance-every relationship I had, my re-emergence. It was all a kind of reliving of something.’ Meet Sixties Person. Mrs Time Warp herself. She who used to ride a tricycle and, it is said, breast-feed in interviews. She who, along with Jean Shrimpton, Mary Quant and Twiggy, was the inspiration for a generation; a household name in Europe and the pin-up of every mod astride a Lambretta. ‘I think I’m a very Nineties person. I really do. The things I carry from the Sixties are really right on. Things like being spontaneous, really connecting with the whole, the universal-consciousness thing, the peace initiative. But I think I’m always in the eye of the hurricane. I’m always in the middle of what’s happening.’

But don’t ask who it is inside the hurricane. We’re not allowed to grasp her essence. You see, we can fuse (her words) at a particular time, but we can’t capture her. She changes from moment to moment, and it’s like we can’t read her personality-just pick up (still her words) certain nuances and atmospheres. ‘It’s just like I’m so multi-textured. I mean that’s what’s so great about people.’

Her mother, in The Sunday Times in 1965, described her as ‘quiet, reticent . . . she was quite a lonely child. She used to like her own company . . . I’ve tried to teach her to be good and believe in God’. Which brings us onto her Buddhism. Sandie Shaw is another singer-Cat Stevens, Cliff Richard, Aretha Franklin-with the religious impulse. A dedicated Buddhist who works as a district leader for central London for the Nichiren Shoshu brand of Buddhism-Tina Turner, Lynn Franks, Herbie Hancock-she chants daily. (Nam nyoho renge dyo . . .) It improves the tonal quality of her voice as well as giving her an inner calm, balance and happiness. ‘It makes the quality of my life fantastic.’ She started in 1977 and has gone on record as saying she has been able to change everything she doesn’t like about herself. But as to what she didn’t like . . . well, that sort of thing changes from moment to moment.

But why? ‘I’m quite prone to lose my confidence. And I understand now more what triggers it. No, I won’t tell you. That’s between me and me. But I think people are unique and each person’s karma is so theirs.’ What sort of childhood did she have? ‘Some of it was happy, some of it wasn’t. You can’t grasp someone’s personality in a moment . . .’

Why did her first marriage go wrong? (She is now married to Palace Pictures film millionaire Nik Powell who proposed on their first date and married her in the Buddhist Centre.) ‘I don’t think that particularly matters. I think what is important is why my second marriage is succeeding.’

So why did she re-emerge into the public eye? (‘Did I let Nik know I was going out?’ she writes about her thoughts on her first tour. ‘Have I left the kids something to eat? Did I leave the washing on?’) ‘I was dragged out of my shell by lots of people who said I was wonderful. And they said it often enough for me to start believing it a bit.’ Right at this moment, perhaps she is.

Then I was talked into doing the Eurovision Song Contest… it offended my sensibilities

‘How did you get on with the Queen, Mr President, and what did you think of Windsor Palace?’ Lech Walesa thought for a moment and replied: ‘Windsor is very nice. But I’d move a few things round a bit if I lived there. The light was too far away from the bed and the bed was so big I could hardly find my wife in it.’

A few days before Walesa lost his wife in a Windsor bed, Neil Kinnock had Glenys to dine with the Queen, a meeting which prompted a much-quoted exchange between him and John Major across the Commons debating chamber. What actually goes on at Windsor Castle? The mix of guests is intriguing (the Kinnocks dined with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Home Secretary and Sir Paul and Lady Fox) and the etiquette virtually unknown outside the walls. Such little jaunts are known in The Household (when it comes to the Castle nearly every other word has a capital letter) as a ‘dine and sleep’. If this sounds like ‘wash and go’ or ‘bed and breakfast’, it is not intentional.

WC is the plum invite, the thing to go to. Obviously better than a lunch at Buckingham Palace, it is also rated by those who have been there much better than Balmoral which is a glorified camping holiday (hamburgers on spits and so on). But very few people are getting invited at the moment because of the rewiring at WC. Even One’s Family Christmas for 30 has had to decamp. It is, however, during April, Ascot in June or the Windsor Horse Show that invitations get extended. Gatherings at WC are the most formal and the Queen tends to be at her most relaxed during Ascot when she knows everyone who’s staying there.

Instructions on how to get to WC, what time to arrive and the code of dress are furnished. And a lady-in-waiting will answer questions about tips (yes, do) clothes (black tie; but ankle-grazing Scotch House rather than Thierry Mugler. HM is not a wild dresser) etc etc. What do I say to the Queen? is the one that can make the most hardened socialite go weak at the knees. Apparently anything goes-as long as it’s not in any way contentious or controversial. Something like ‘How are your horses?’ will usually do. The way to behave when receiving royal hospitality is subtle and arcane. Call her Mam (like ‘mum’) and curtsy or bow on first clapping eyes on Her. Thereafter the scraping and bowing ceremony is repeated only before going to bed and on first seeing the Royals in the morning.

One notable recalls how, years ago, Prime Minister Harold Wilson kept all the other guests up half the night drinking balloons of brandy. HM had retired to bed hours ago. The poor Canadian Ambassador was dead on his feet, but stayed up into the early hours. It wouldn’t, you see, have been etiquette to leave before the British Prime Minister. Generally, however, one doesn’t get drunk with the Queen.

Lady Longford remembers a friend having her plunge bra removed from her room at WC, rendering her earth-bound in her glamorous gown until she tore her other bra into a new model. The Countess says that sort of thing happens all the time in houses where there are servants. The brisk ladies of The Household are not famed for having their fingers on the pulse of fashion. They do understand, however, that during Ascot week, ladies wear a bowl of fruit and veg on their heads.

WC is just up the M4 and within spitting distance of Heathrow Airport, from whence the roar of over-flying jumbos can be heard every three minutes during the day. (After the nervous exhaustion of the shindig, a ghost is likely the only thing to awaken the overnight guest who will probably not notice any shift in the medieval foundations either.) A place of muscular towers and serried battlements, going through the gate to WC is a bit like entering an up-market housing estate-on which Liz, there since the age of 26, is the oldest resident. The place is full of tenants like military knights, the dean and cannon and lots of chaps in funny outfits. In addition, the shrubs tend to reveal assorted cranks, Fleet Street types-and former members of the Thames Valley police force keeping a close eye on the sleeping arrangements. The Queen has her own self-contained apartment where she can rustle up bacon and eggs or try on a tiara and sash with a tracksuit in peace.

There’s a swimming pool too. One of the guests found the Queen’s bikini top-yes, she wears one in private-and light-heartedly tried it on. A man, he was. HM caught him cavorting. She definitely saw the funny side of the proceedings. But the offending article was rapidly removed and replaced in the Royal Ladies Changing Room.

The main guest gets a suite in, say, The Lancaster Tower. WC notepaper-and loo paper-is provided, but there are no bath robes or giveaway shower caps. While Countess Spencer whacks stamps on the envelopes in her guest rooms, our dear Queen is known to make a little saving in this department. State rooms are hangar-sized and of concussing splendour-mostly the handiwork of George IV and his chappies-in various forms of neo-Gothic, souped-up and florid. And the Grand Reception Room is dazzling. George IV and the Duke of Wellington types glower from the walls, and the place is awash with Van Dycks, Canalettos, Stubbs’, Holbeins and old-master drawings.

Bedrooms are pretty standard decor-tapestries, glowing wood, richly wrought ceilings and suchlike. The Woman of the Bedchamber, it must be understood, is a lady-in-waiting. A quick peek round the door will reveal endless pages and footmen wandering around wearing livery. Like all old-fashioned bedrooms, bathrooms are rarely en suite and they skimp on the heating and have endless huge chests of drawers. Bedrooms also tend to be a good 15 minutes from where the food is served. And if one brings a nanny or lady’s maid (these days few do), she’ll be another 20-minute walk away. It’s well known that Princess Michael wasn’t impressed with the nursery arrangements for the dreadful Freddie. And the maids’ rooms are primitive and spartan.

Queen Victoria used to forbid people to smoke. One Archbishop of Canterbury was caught puffing up his chimney. Things these days are much more relaxed. There’s a story that the whole Royal Family drank from finger bowls on observing some African dignitary doing so. But this is probably not true. It is, however, all right to eat one’s salad with fingers, as Mrs Tebbit found.

You are led to dinner by HM, and the seating arrangement very properly goes boy-girl-boy-girl. All this takes place on a great long table in somewhere like the Waterloo Chamber which is not where the battle was fought, although it has a size that suggests it could have been.

The Queen and Prince Philip will often sit in the centre of the table, opposite one another. Forests of flowers preclude having to make eye contact or conversation with the person opposite. These marvellous huge bowls of flora have been home grown and arranged by people who have had to clamber onto the-at that stage felt-covered-tables to do so. This is not generally done during dinner.

Food tends towards the Dover sole and peas variety. Simple and good is the way it is described by those who have savoured it. Fruit and veg come from the Home Farm. The wines are all served by white-gloved men. Mam talks to the person on her left during one course and the person on her right during another. It is advisable to follow suit, otherwise you end up nattering to the Countess of Hoo Ha’s hairdo during the sorbet.

After dinner, the Queen does a guided tour around the State Apartments, ending up in the Royal Library. Like the head girl of a boarding school, she expects people to pay attention. And the Royal Library goes to a lot of trouble to find out what the guests are interested in.

Michael Foot, something of a bibliophile, was amazed to see The Household didn’t just read Dick Francis. And the Library doesn’t just keep books. They have all sorts of curiosities like Henry VIII’s cricket bat, the flying gloves that Prince Andrew used during the Falklands and the diary that Elizabeth kept of the Coronation. Depending on your interest, you’ll arrive in the Library and find a cricket bat or an illuminated manuscript in the display cabinet.

HM loves to hear jokes, (maybe something to do with being partly Scottish). ‘What do you get when Batman and Robin are run over? Answer: Flatman and Ribbon.’ That was the one that made Her Majesty roar with laughter.

She likes to provide some entertainment-and even during the house parties of Ascot week there will be some kind of drawing-room reading or string quartet on offer. The Queen also sometimes shows films. But probably not King Ralph.

Cool, self-assured, forthright former waitress, clerk and receptionist who was born in New Zealand. Devout, unimaginative housewife who was convicted in 1981 of murdering her nine-week-old baby Azaria by cutting her throat with a pair of nail scissors at Ayers Rock. Hard, unsympathetic, little bitty lady who was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Unflinching author of Through My Eyes, a direct and detailed account of her conviction and subsequent exoneration, phenomenally recalled in 768 pages. This is the image of the lady who went from housewife to household word. Enter Lindy Chamberlain, 42: Logical Lindy as she was known in prison, or Lindy Gulla (which means ‘good one’) to the Aboriginal girls. ‘It meant that I was all right and wasn’t going to put them down because of their colour or because they couldn’t read or talk properly.’

Former prisoner 2958 looks like a smart secretary in her neat make-up, patent shoes, sheer tights, black skirt and striped shirt.

‘I’d wear shoestring straps, bare shoulders, very light clothes-Stubbies (shorts), thongs (flip-flops), boob tubes. I wore a sun frock for the first inquest.’ She speaks in a light and clipped antipodean accent, very Neighbours-ish, emphatic, high, but full of apparent self-assurance. She steamrollers interruptions-and my attempts to tell her she’s going off the point-pressing on determinedly with what she is saying, even when the questions are about something else, although the interview can only be short owing to her schedule.

She’s insistent on giving a history of her wardrobe, relating it mostly to her various court appearances. She is very much the one in control. Her look turns out, curiously, to have been moulded by the Press-after constant criticism, comments, admonishments ‘not to wear anything too busy or provocative’, photographers saying wear this or that. She’s very professional and has packaged herself nicely into a very saleable commodity.

‘I have a designer friend, Jean Bas, who dresses me for my interviews.’ She borrows the clothes and gives them back afterwards. ‘So it gives the impression you’re rich when you’re not.’

She charges for interviews, apart from when she’s launching a book. Exonerated but not compensated, she needs money. ‘All that publicity has meant I can’t get a job.’ It is the newspapers and television stations who have made money out of her plight.

She has been described as tough, unsympathetic and not showing enough emotion for a mother who had lost a child to a dingo.

‘I suppose my face in repose is fairly straight. It’s fairly severe when I’m not smiling. When you have 1500 cameras around you, jurors and hostile people looking at you, your face goes stiff. I tried to keep as neutral a face as possible. And then it looked severe.’ And now? ‘Well, yeah, this is it.’ (She’s smiling.) One of the things that went against her was her apparent passive acceptance of her loss. ‘An English response, misunderstood by the emotional Greeks and Italians in Australia . . . and when you believe in something after death, it doesn’t affect you so much. You don’t have a cold, hard feeling of nothing being left.’

People just saw a hard-nosed murdering bitch (her words) when they saw her. But she is a private person, guarded even, who doesn’t show her true feelings to strangers.

She has brown hair, brown eyes and has put on two stone while writing the book-which weighs almost as much. She laughs at the latter notion. She laughs easily and also has a sense of the ridiculous, which comes out in her book.

So how would she describe herself? ‘I’m normally about seven stone. I’m only five feet one inch and people think because I’m on TV that I’m taller. They always go, ‘Ooh, you’re tiny’.’

Does that make her strive more? ‘Oh no, I think nice things come in small parcels-otherwise, diamonds would come the size of Ayers Rock.’ She comes over as cool, very self-composed with a perkiness.

She has sad eyes that have seen a lot. Meryl Streep went further and said she had eyes like the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. ‘I don’t know.’ (Laughs.) ‘I’ve never been in one of those.’

While she was in the prison next to an abattoir, kept awake at night by the sound of pigs being slaughtered, she worked on the drains and did cementing without gloves. How resilient! ‘With my bare hands. It’s really good hand cream.’

Suffering from flu, your interviewer repeats a question. ‘I told you that in my last answer,’ she says sharply. She knows how to keep a person on her toes. So how would she describe herself in terms of character? ‘Now in what way is that question different from the last one?’ she retorts in a chilly tone. What a hard time she gives! (Too intimidating to dare ask her about her sexuality. On simply enquiring about her relationship with her husband, one gets a frosty: ‘No comment.’) ‘Well, you have to be specific. I have a very accurate attention to detail. I’m fairly tidy, fastidious, too meticulous. I’ve always relied on memory-my book is from memory-and in court they’d say you can’t possibly have that good a memory.

‘I used to be shy in public, but not any more. That’s the greatest change . . . I don’t let people walk over me. If I get the wrong change in a shop, I say so instead of walking away disgruntled. I don’t suffer fools any more, though I’ll still be polite to stupid people.

‘I don’t think there’s any call to be rude to people. And I think you should remember to treat people the way you want to be treated.’ And what sort of mother is she? ‘A fairly reasonable one. I think I’m pretty laid back. If the kids fall over, I don’t scream and panic. But I do see if they are really hurt . . . I like to keep them fairly tidy and neat. My kids and I have a lot of fun . . .’

She continues: ‘I’ve always been a very positive person. I like to get all the information in before making a decision and then I’ll stick to it’-she’s rather boring in her delivery-‘I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail. ‘I didn’t see why I should admit to something I hadn’t done just for an extra bit of physical comfort-I would have had to live with my conscience.’ Certainly, she has endurance and spirit.

‘If I make a promise I keep it. I’ll do anything humanly possible to do it.’ She’s leaning forward, fiddling with her leg, cradling herself in her arms; it’s the only time in the meeting that there’s any flexibility in her body, though she becomes progressively softer as the interview proceeds. ‘I guess that’s another reason I got labelled as being hard. I’d do things that went against the tide, even things that got me into trouble with the screws. But I believe in honesty.’

So what does she think got her through all this? ‘Faith,’ she says, her eyes lighting up. (She is a Seventh-day Adventist.) And how does the image of a formerly convicted murderess sit with her now? ‘Well, it never really worried me because I knew I was innocent.’ Does she think she’s a bitter person? ‘No.’

She’s been described as strange, difficult, sneering, callous, mysterious . . . ‘Well, am I?’ (Laughs.) ‘The papers got sick having to come up with something new over 10 years and just put down whatever came into their heads.’

She presents herself as amazingly self-possessed and calm. Image or reality? ‘I think that’s my nature. If there’s a road crash, I’ll pull over, act quite calmly-then feel sick afterwards.’

And is she formidable? ‘No.’ (Laughs.) A friend who hadn’t seen her for 12 years recently came over. ‘After 10 minutes, she said, ‘Gee, you haven’t changed at all’.’

I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail.