KEITH FLOYD is about to dine in his arch rival’s establishment. He thinks that eating, drinking and sex go together. But he’d like the sex first, he announces loudly to the genteel clientele talking in whispers as they do in nice country hotels.

We’re in Gidleigh Park, Devon, an impeccable hotel set in Dartmoor National Park and a contrast to Floyd’s humble pub. Floyd hasn’t eaten here for four years – his protest vote at the no smoking rule in the dining room.

Gidleigh Park is a 1920s timbered house in a spectacular location with croquet, rows of size 38 green wellies in the hall and staff who plump the cushions and offer a little quelque chose (like a monkfish and potato canape) before you can say parfait.

Getting starrish Floyd here has been a pain. He insisted that I fetch him (a round trip of four hours) or send a taxi. He charges £6,000 for a personal appearance, so I suppose I’ve got off lightly with an £80 taxi bill. He’s been trying to cancel me all day. ‘I don’t go out at night,’ he says in smoky, thespian voice. ‘I can’t stand it.’

He looks spruce in Rolex, bow tie and polka-dot scarf. Thirteen books and nine TV series down, he’s currently being made into a Madame Tussaud’s model, writing his autobiography (possible title, Floyd Still in the Soup?) and Floyd in Italy and appearing in pasta commercials in Australia. There are Floydie fans hanging round his pub and women who send him faxes of themselves scantily clad. (He used to call them up when he was drunk at midnight and they’d say ‘How dare you, just because you’re on television!’) He signs 50 autographs a day and finds it hard to step out without housewives pestering him with their recipes. Fortunately, this evening, only one person approaches: a waitress to take our order.

There’s widgeon on the menu. But Floyd doesn’t order it. Then he turns to the wine list. ‘Very dangerous. You’re paying.’ He claims that his alcohol intake seen on television is the result of weeks of film being edited down. He chooses the Clos de la Vigne au Saint, a snip at £40.

He eats like a widgeon and smokes for Devon, so today, he says, has been like waiting to go to hospital for a barium meal: he’s taken nil by mouth. ‘I dread coming to places like this. You’re not allowed to smoke with your meal so I’ve bought my own…’ and, hilariously, he produces a cheapo ashtray out of his pocket.

He is exceedingly good company. In the dining room, where David Bowie, Ted Hughes and David Gower have all eaten, he talks about Joseph Conrad, pirates and his life. He thinks eating alone is one of the world’s nicest treats. Then he can indulge his sexual fantasies and only pay for one person. How would he fantasise about the women in this dining room? ‘Hungerford ’89,’ he says, choking with laughter. He then pulls out his ashtray, props it on the windowsill and starts to smoke. Does he do it to shock? ‘I don’t do anything to shock. I’m a smoker, I can’t stop.’ HE HAD a call recently from the Good Baby Breast-feeding in Hotels and Pubs in England Guide, or something like that, to ask whether he approved of breast-feeding in public. ‘I don’t give a toss either way. But people come into my pub and they belch, fart and read the paper. It’s fine if you want a cigarette or decaffeinated tea. People should be able to do what they like.’ Sex on the table? ‘An excellent idea.’

More wine arrives. Floyd becomes gleeful and tells the story of a Qantas air hostess who served him in first class, along with Kylie Minogue, Gough Whitlam and Mrs Murdoch, and told an unrepeatable joke involving parsley and pubic hair.

His woodcock arrives, and he sprinkles it with expletives. He says it should fly through a hot oven and complains that it comes with the same slice of foie gras that accompanied his rabbit ragout which he insists wasn’t a ragout. Anyway, he prefers his with a bit of shot sprinkled on the side of the plate.

He indulges in a spot of culinary espionage for the chef in his restaurant, who worked in Gidleigh before he was sacked. ‘I’m a food anarchist. I’m there to sabotage the great culinary skills these people have learned from the master chefs.” He lights up another cigarette. We haven’t yet finished our main courses. ‘We’re not attending a f***ing religious ceremony,’ he explains. ‘We’re having fun here.’

A terrified maitre d’ approaches and whispers solicitously: ‘I’m terribly sorry sir, we don’t allow smoking in the dining room.’

Floyd erupts. ‘I shall get my taxi and go home,’ he says, angrily. ‘You don’t f***ing well tell me not to smoke. I was doing it discreetly. Nobody was sitting next to me. If I were paying for this…which planet are we on?‘ And he storms out.

‘Quite right, too, it affects the taste of the food,’ says one table, sniffily. And the other diners say they’re going to complain about his language.

DAWN Airey, network controller of children’s television at ITV, likes her job. It was, she told a Sunday paper, the best thing she could do with her clothes on.

She also remarked that she thought children should come home from school, put their feet on the table, stuff their faces with crisps and relax for an hour or two. In a stroke, she confirmed what all right-thinking parents had always suspected about children’s TV bosses: that all they want to do is turn their kids into couch potatoes and stuff their heads with the audiovisual equivalent of junk food.

Dawn, 33, is unamused. She says so in her head girl manner, as she sits with fresh-scrubbed face, specs, school neat hair, plain skirt and natural tights in her ITV office with its animation posters on the walls and soft toys on the window ledge. She says she’s been misrepresented, quoted out of context, and has fired off a letter to the offending newspaper. So let’s do some detective work, children, and find out who Dawn really is. A passing resemblance to a Woodentops character – from a recent photograph in which she grins with Pinocchio-style inanity – may be cruelly noted.

But with which children’s TV character does she most identify? ‘Oh good grief,’ she replies. (Her vocabulary is very jolly hockey sticks.) ‘My favourite animation series is Scooby Doo. But I don’t want to be that dog. ‘I know!’ she exclaims suddenly. ‘I’d like to be one of the wolves in Wolf It! They’re mad as hatters but enormous fun.’ True to form, Dawn then agrees gamely to be photographed with her head poking through the office foliage, alongside a variety of soft animals.

She has been at ITV Network Centre since March. Before that she played career hopscotch. She started as a management trainee at Central in 1985, hopped to Channel 4 liaison officer, researcher at Central, associate producer on Classmates (‘a kind of This is Your Life putting stars like Ian Botham or Lord Lichfield with their schoolmates who make cringeworthy comments. Some people’s worst nightmare’) and planner at Central before landing her current position.

She says all this in a PR-ish sort of way; she’s got the hang of presenting herself positively. Very grown up.

Now she commissions 1,000 hours of television a year and schedules and acquires programmes for the networked daytime and children’s slots. Her programmes kick off at ‘oh nine twenty five’ with quizzes, followed by This Morning with Richard and Judy, two factual pieces in the afternoon, then the children’s schedule. She enjoys her own output. ‘I wouldn’t commission it otherwise.’

Her route into television would make a whizzy series. She is a lass from Preston who was schooled privately and comprehensively, then worked in a bank during the day, a pub in the evening and with a vet at the weekend (‘holding down animals to be injected and so forth’ – at the vet’s, not the pub). She saved her pocket money to travel for 15 months in India, Africa and Europe and work in a kibbutz, then went to Cambridge where she read geography, gaining a 2:1. Her hobbies are map-collecting, tennis, cats, food, wine and work. She is a light TV viewer, ‘just 10 hours a week’. Dawn spends three nights a week in London with old Cambridge friends, whose two-year-old she uses for market research; otherwise she lives near Oxford with her ‘de facto partner of 13 years’. Her what? ‘Well, it means your formal partner when you’re not married.’

Ah! Her common-law husband or lover? ‘Well, boyfriend sounds crass and teenaged.’ Anyway, he’s called Martin and works in PR and they’re not going to marry. ‘It’s not on my agenda at the moment.’ (Life as a career move.) Nor are they going to produce target audiences. ‘We don’t want to have children. We’re both so wrapped up in our careers that we’d make lousy parents,’ she says. ‘I’m so busy meeting the televisual delights of children during the day that to come home to children in the evening would be too much.’ She hopes Martin will give her a Nintendo for Christmas. ‘I’d like to play Sonic the Hedgehog.’

So back to television. Parents can hold the poison-pen letters: Dawn is keen on a balanced diet and believes that children cannot live on crisps alone. ‘In terms of televisual delights children want good stories, action, adventure and quality programming. They’re not hugely different from adults.’ She was weaned on Camberwick Green, the Woodentops, Magic Roundabout and Jackanory, but, unlike the rest of her generation, doesn’t think that their modern successors are weak and depraved by comparison. ‘Children’s audiences,’ she avows, ‘are now as well served or better.’ HER offerings to a mass market are Woof! (Emmy award-winning drama), Children’s Ward (ITV’s most popular drama, about the young patients and staff in an inner-city hospital) and The Tomorrow People (sci-fi series about children with special powers).

She doesn’t yet have a character as popular as that pink cultural icon Mr Blobby in Noel’s House Party. ‘We’ve got Rupert Bear, and Bungle, Zippy and George from Rainbow.’ None looks likely to make number one in the charts or edit The Sun, but she’s working on it.

She has to deliver the ratings (‘we’re a commercial channel, not a philanthropic one’) and naturally wants a majority share of the audience: ‘At the moment we’re getting 54 per cent.’ The fight for zapper-happy kids is a tough one, but she acts responsibly. ‘We’re acting in loco parentis. We take seriously our responsibility to inform, educate and entertain.’ Critics wonder how serious she is. They fear her ruthless pursuit of audiences will mean less information and education and more soaps and cartoons. ‘They’re mistaken. We have more educational programmes than ever before,’ she counters. ‘At the expense of entertainment.’ She doesn’t see her programming going the American way of wall-to-wall animation. So what will her end-of-term report say? ‘Very promising start. Should do well – as long as she cuts down on the crisps.

PISTOLS AIMED AT DAWN: ITV’S CHALLENGERS NICK WILSON, Director of Programmes, The Children’s Channel. Age: 44.

Family background: father was a publican (ex-RAF); mother, now a retired publican.

Marital status: married, with three girls and one boy.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Do children watch too many cartoons? Not mine!’

On The Great Crisps Issue: ‘Do children eat too many many crisps? Not as many as me! I love crisps, especially Kettle Chips I curl up and watch TV with them!’

ANNA HOME, Director of Children’s Programmes, BBC TV.

Age: 55.

Family background: won’t say.

Marital status: single.

On The Great Cartoon Issue: disapproves of the United States which offers ‘mainly wall-to-wall cartoons of the kind which we would, on the whole, not buy’. She does acknowledge that cartoons are important for children’s television but insists that she buys ‘only the best’.

On The Great Crisps Issue: won’t say.

JAMES BAKER, Director of Programmes, Nickelodeon.

Age: 29.

Family background: father is the ex-newsreader Richard Baker. Mother, he says, has devoted her life to ‘bringing up two media pansies’ (brother Andrew writes for The Independent on Sunday).

Marital status: going out with BBC journalist Anastasia Cooke. No kids. On The Great Cartoon Issue: ‘Kids are very good at picking and choosing what they want to see. Cartoons aren’t the be-all and end-all, but a good script works equally for adults and kids. Kids like so-called adult programmes too.

“They’ll enjoy the visuals in Blackadder or Absolutely Fabulous just as adults like the verbals.’

RICHARD La Plante, former rock star and psychiatric counsellor, martial arts expert, screenwriter, actor, novelist and husband of the first lady of screenwriting, Lynda La Plante, has written a thriller, Leopard. It is, according to the blurb, about ‘nature’s perfect killing machine’. But turn the pages of Richard’s own life to discover nature’s most unbelievable living machine – a tale of sex, drugs and a woman who was once paid to talk to him.

Richard, 47, has long blond hair, a tattoo, is dressed in black and sits, legs astride, in rock ‘n’ roll pose. He laughs at himself constantly and is Schwarzeneggerishly forceful.

Before Richard wrote, he was the singer in Revenge, a rock ‘n’ roll band. ‘It ended in a New York bar when I slapped the guitar player’s brother for insulting me and broke his nose,’ he says, in his drawly Pennsylvanian accent. ‘He left by ambulance, I left in handcuffs.’

His first job was as a psychiatric counsellor in a Massachusetts hospital. In 1971, he ran off to live in a tent in the Mexican Senora Desert for six months. ‘I wanted to see what I was all about – but I didn’t arrive at enlightenment. I just did a lot of magic mushrooms and bottles of mescal. Then I’d lie there drunk for two days.’ Does he still do drugs? ‘I don’t think that’s a question I want to answer.’

He went then to San Francisco and joined a ferocious-looking hippy called Russell. ‘I lived in a strict vegetarian commune. I gave away my shoes and didn’t wear any for a year.’ Then they walked barefoot – 3,500 miles in three months – to Boston. ‘I was arrested in Utah for being a vagrant and put into jail.’ He talks characteristically with Kung Fu-style hand movements.

He worked next, aged 24, in a Boston mental institution. ‘People don’t frighten me, however freaky they are,’ he says. ‘That’s valuable in the lock-up ward of a psychiatric hospital, because people are like animals and smell fear.’

He ‘bonded’ with two adolescent male patients. When he went on holiday, they broke out of the institution and into his house. ‘When I came back home, they were living there!’ he laughs. He didn’t report them and they stayed for six weeks. ‘When the hospital found out where they were, I lost my job.’ So he went to Mexico and converted a hot-dog stand and sold artefacts.

In 1975, he was best man at a friend’s wedding in England. He looked so strange that Lynda was bet a fiver to talk to him. ‘I was wearing a blue velvet suit several sizes too big. I’d swapped it with a friend who was 6ft 2in and I’m 5ft 8in.’ So it wasn’t love at first sight? ‘No, she wasn’t my type. I liked them dark and Mexican and she was red and English.’ Then they hit it off and Lynda joined Richard in Mexico, for one of the worst trips of her life. ‘She needed surgery in Mexico City and nobody spoke English. While she was being operated on, I was smuggling motorbikes to make money, ate a burger made of donkey meat and ended up in hospital on an intravenous drip. They asked Lynda where to send my body.’ Their relationship suffered. ‘Lynda hated me; I hated her. I couldn’t wait to get rid of her,’ he says. “Then, when she left, I missed her so bad I didn’t know what to do.’

So Richard went to London – where he imported cowboy boots – and cemented their relationship. ‘We fought every day and night for about a year. We still do regularly.’ What about? ‘My being American and not having any manners or social grace. Nothing’s changed.’

They married in 1977. What is the key to their marital longevity? ‘Separate bank accounts and staying out of each other’s way. But the real secret is our fighting. If we don’t like something, we get it out real quick. People who come to our house are often frightened by our relationship.’

Are they faithful to each other? ‘Well, that’s not just physical, it’s a mental thing as well.’ Can he be faithful without being physically so? ‘Yes, but I don’t want to get into that.’ Is sexual fidelity important to him? ‘I wouldn’t like the idea of Lynda with another man at all.’

Lynda had 10 years of a faltering career as a stand-up comic and bit part actress before turning to writing. Now executives trip over themselves to find a slot for any series she offers and Hollywood pursues her avidly. They rarely read each other’s work. But does he live in her shadow? ‘I’m not sitting there saying, ‘She’s doing this, now what am I doing?’ It’s like a parallel street.’

How successful does Richard feel? ‘I feel unsuccessful – until I meet all those people who’re impressed when they ask, ‘Are you published?” Does he live off Lynda financially? ‘No, I pay my own way,’ he says, with a dead tone. But she earns stacks more money? ‘Oh Christ yes, oh heck. She’s in credit and I’m in debt.’ Would he prefer to be the higher earner? ‘I don’t care. As long as I have my motorbikes and my gym. If you want me to say I feel inadequate, I don’t.’

They don’t have children; sadly Lynda can’t. ‘We went through all the tests and did the f***ing by thermometer. Today, with the technology, we’d have been able to have them.’ Thirteen years ago they tried to adopt. ‘The family reneged. They didn’t want to compound the baby’s mortal sin by getting her adopted by a non-Catholic family. It was sad – we had the room ready for her – but we’d never seen her. We no longer want children. Our lives are pretty active.’ Indeed.

THIS week it was Jacqueline Bodger’s 40th birthday and she attended the inquest to hear why her five year-old son Terry died after going to have six baby teeth extracted, visited the stone which covers the ashes of her eight- year-old child Martin, killed by a car just six years ago, said ‘goodnight’ in her head to her dead children as she does every night, and sat on the sofa in her sitting-room with her husband Philip just wondering why. We’re talking in their council flat in Hendon. They moved there to start afresh, away from the painful memories of the home outside which Martin was run over. Now Terry’s bicycles stand in the hallway by the front door and and toys lie untouched in his bedroom. There are framed photographs of two smiling, healthy boys on the walls, and 70 sympathy cards line the sitting- room shelves.

Philip, 41, is a refuse collector and Jacqueline worked as a clerk in Edgware General Hospital after Martin died there. They have both been off sick since Terry died. They are a sweet and gentle couple, honest and unblaming, and were clearly doting parents.

One day Terry had toothache and Jacqueline took him to the local dentist, who said his tooth would have to come out. He was terrified of needles, so was refered to Eastman Dental Hospital for a general anaesthetic. ‘I told them about Terry’s asthma because I was concerned about gas, but they said not to worry,’ says Jacqueline.

Terry had a bad reaction to the gas. ‘Having lost one child, I went into complete panic. I thought ‘Oh no, not again. We can’t lose another child.” Then Terry’s heart stopped. So they transferred him to University College Hospital. ‘Someone, I don’t know who, said, ‘Mum can’t come in the ambulance.” (The hospital blame the ambulancemen for the decision, and vice versa.) Jacqueline went by taxi and got stuck in traffic.

At UCH, she waited two hours to see her son in intensive care. ‘He looked the same as Martin when he died. I couldn’t cope.’ Suffering further complications, Terry was transferred to Great Ormond Street Hospital by ambulance. Jacqueline wasn’t allowed with him and again took a cab, which got lost.

When she arrived, Terry had had another heart attack and the consultant told Jacqueline he was brain damaged. Next day there was further trouble with his heart. ‘We went and put our arms round Terry and he died,’ she says, fighting back tears.

‘I went mad,’ says Philip. ‘I was screaming that we’d already lost Martin. I wanted to smash the place up.’

Martin’s death had been more rapid. He was run over crossing the road, picked up by a passing ambulance and died an hour later. Jacqueline only knew about the accident when a neighbour knocked on her window, minutes after it happened. When she and Philip got to the hospital, the consultant said Martin had died. ‘It happened so quickly,’ she says. ‘I was confused with shock.’

Martin was cremated. ‘I always felt upset wondering what they did with Martin after I left the chapel,’ she explains. She can’t remember much about his funeral. ‘It felt like watching a play. I felt I was going through the motions, watching myself doing these things.’ They put his ashes in the chapel under a stone inscribed with a poem Jacqueline wrote. ‘We felt unhappy, because you couldn’t put flowers on it. So we bought a grave plot, had a headstone made for Martin and put plants on the spot. We knew Martin wasn’t there, but it was in memory of him. We went there every week, rain or shine.’ She pauses. ‘Then we buried Terry in the plot we’d made for Martin.’

Jacqueline’s face lights up when she recalls happier days. Martin, she says, was lively, outgoing and friendly. He loved walking with his parents, adored collecting worms and snails in the garden when his father was digging and enjoyed school.

Terry, a Thundercats fan, was at nursery school and was shy, generous, artistic, bright and loving. ‘He was always saying, ‘I love you Mummy and Daddy.’ But he was a real Mummy’s boy.’

When Martin died, it was very difficult for them to cope with Terry who was just nine months old. ‘But then he’s what kept us going. When you’ve lost one child, the one left becomes extra precious.’ (They keep saying they ‘lost’ him, as if that’s less final than his being dead.) When they first returned home after Terry died, they couldn’t sleep upstairs. ‘Every night Terry used to wake and I’d hear his thud, thud along the corridor. After losing him I expected to hear that noise for ages. We just couldn’t face him not being in his bedroom so we slept in the sitting-room for a week.’

With Terry’s death, it was the wait for his inquest which kept them going. ‘We hoped to find out a reason why a healthy child should have his teeth out and die. We still haven’t got that answer.’ Anaesthetics carry a rare risk and the inquest recorded a verdict of misadventure: there was no question of a lack of care.

Now Eastman Dental Hospital has set up an independent inquiry. ‘If there’s a machine or procedure that’s wrong, it should be altered. We didn’t want to find someone to blame. But we don’t want other children to suffer. No, no, we’re not interested in compensation at all.’

The Bodgers get up every morning, aimlessly. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any future,’ says Jacqueline. ‘We don’t do anything. We just sit at home. It feels like one long day since we lost him. We just don’t accept that he’s gone. It makes you feel empty all the time. Like there’s a big blank space inside and you don’t know how to fill it. We go to bed at night and hope we won’t wake up the next day. All the time I say ‘why me?’ and then why twice.’ She doesn’t get an answer. ‘You just think they were fit and well, so why were they taken away?’ Does she believe in God? ‘No.’ ‘Definitely not after we lost Martin,’ adds Philip.

They don’t want to move house or pack all Terry’s things away. They learnt ‘the first time’ that that didn’t work. Now Philip is prepared to return to work. But not Jacqueline. ‘I can hardly bring myself to go out of the door at the moment. If I go out in the car it has to be somewhere I hadn’t been with Terry. I can’t face it. It’s too painful.’

They are a close couple, married for 19 years, and the trauma has made them closer. ‘We’re just hanging on for each other. We haven’t been apart since we lost Terry.’

Emotionally, they’ve reacted very differently. ‘Phil’s been able to get a lot out by getting upset and angry,’ says Jacqueline. ‘I just don’t seem able, it won’t come out, though I’m very, very angry that I’ve lost Terry this way.’ They saw a psychiatrist for the first time last week. They’ll continue if it helps.

THE man who looks like George Bernard Shaw is queueing for Court One where two schoolboys stand accused of killing James Bulger. He has wild long hair, a streaming beard, carries three plastic bags and later, in the public gallery, he wears odd socks on his hands and eats a Cornish pastie. After him, another man tries to gain entry to the court with a bus ticket instead of a public gallery pass. He mumbles incomprehensibly as the police officers turn him away.

Next day, Matt Jones, a 26-year-old aspiring novelist, comes by train from London for his first visit to a court. He arrives in Preston at 3am. Outside the court, photographers camp to snap the two police vans with blocked-out windows which hide the two defendants. I go through security, body search and past uniformed police with radio earplugs into the imposing wood-panelled Edwardian courtroom. Inside, there are 19th century oil paintings of High Sheriffs and Clerks of the Peace – among them Judge Batty Addison, ‘the terror of the criminal’ – and white plaster cherubs holding up the ceiling corners with swags of fruit and flowers.

>From the public gallery, one sees only the backs and neat haircuts of Child A and B, in charcoal jackets. They are seated on grey chairs on a specially raised dock and next to a burly social worker.

The call comes for the court to rise – and the children barely reach the social workers’ shoulders.

Ralph Bulger, father of James, sits on the seat in front of me. On the first day he listened impassively as the court was told by Richard Henriques QC for the prosecution, the defendants had subjected James to a beating with bricks, stones and metal, before his body was placed on a railway line. The second day, Mr Henriques puts the prosecution case that the children denied all knowledge of the two-year-old and then blamed the murder on each other. As more horrifying details are disclosed to the hushed court, Mr Bulger – with slicked back hair and a gold heart on his lapel – swallows hard. His brother sits nearby, tearing at the skin on his fingers. Behind them in the public gallery, women press their hands to their faces in gestures of self-comfort.

As Mr Henriques recounts Child A’s police interviews – ‘he picked up a big metal thing that had holes in it and hit him on the head,’ – Mr Bulger’s eyelashes flutter frantically in an attempt to stop himself crying. As the QC quotes – ‘I was trying to see if the baby was still alive and he would not move. I got my ear against his belly and he wasn’t breathing’ – the muscles in Mr Bulger’s face twitch uncontrollably. As we hear of Child B’s account that ‘A’ (had) thrown paint in (James’s) face. ‘A threw a brick into his face . . . I picked up little stones because I would not throw bricks at him’ – Mr Bulger bends his head. It’s hard not to cry in this courtroom. There are frequent breaks for the children, legal language is simplified as for a classroom and the court finishes at schooltime.

Mr Henriques invites the jury to steel itself for photographs of the two-and-a-half-mile route along which the boys are alleged to have led James.

Mrs Z, a young housewife, gives evidence of the boys’ alleged attempt to abduct her two-year-old son on the day of James’s death. At the end of the proceedings, Mr Bulger stands watching Boy B’s parents as they leave. On the third morning of the hearing, written evidence from Denise Bulger, mother of the dead child, is submitted to the court. It is heard how she looked desperately for her little boy as she shopped at the Strand centre in Bootle, Merseyside. That is where I am this morning – following James’s march to death.

Outside the shop, T J Hughes, in which Mrs Z was shopping when the boys allegedly attempted to abduct her son, grannies in woollen hats gossip on a wooden bench. Nearby a board displays photographs of the bruised faces of two children. ‘The faces change, the bruises don’t,’ it reads. These are NSPCC posters depicting a child in 1884 and one in 1984. Past them, anoraked children trail after their shopping parents.

A three-year-old girl is being led around by a 14-year-old boy – whose mother is in H Samuels. This is a school morning and, in five minutes, I see half a dozen schoolchildren with skinhead cuts sagging off school. Nearby, the canal – to which it is claimed the boys took James – looks bleak, like a floating rubbish tip. In neighbouring Bootle Library a man is reading a story to a group of schoolchildren dressed neatly in grey: a tale of a child who leaves his home without telling his parents and is presumed lost. ‘What should you do if you go out to play?’ the man asks them. ‘Tell yer mum, cos she’d be worried,’ they chorus.

Then on to Breeze Hill and up to the grass-covered reservoir where James was allegedly dragged. Today, at 11.50am a lone child in school uniform stands kicking his feet. Then past grey high-rises under a grey sky and under a grey subway beneath a grey flyover. I am tired of walking. But on to the alleyway opposite the Walton Lane police station, past desolate houses with the rubbish stacked outside and trails of dog excrement, to the two tracks of the railway where James is said to have met his end. Today, a magpie sits on the line.

In court in the afternoon, I sit in the row in front of the jury. The defendants are wearing stripy school ties. Boy A has forsaken his jacket. Next to Boy B sits his father, a slight man in a turtle-neck sweater and jacket. His face looks wan. He hunches his shoulders and his forehead is constantly furrowed. Then the children settle to watch the television – these are the videos showing two boys allegedly abducting James in the shopping precinct. Child B points to the screen and speaks to his social worker.

As the figures come onto the screen, with arrows from the prosecution to highlight them, both boys sit peering through the rail of the dock. Child B’s father stares at the monitor intently, then he gives up and just looks down. Like some early silent cinema, the court is quiet for 18 minutes but for the sound of people shifting on their seats. Mr Henriques puts his hand up, as if to ask the teacher a question. In reality, he wants to freeze a frame. Next to Boy B, junior counsel Richard Isaacson, props his slipping head on his hand and closes his eyes for a moment.

The jury asks to see the last part of the video again. Boy B’s shirt is hanging out. Nearby, eight men in wigs and gowns, a multitude of uniformed policemen, a jury of nine men and three women and the world’s Press concentrate on the screens.

Down the road is the media annexe, in an office block with panoramic views of Preston. In court it is sometimes hard to hear witnesses. ‘Do speak up please,’ Mr Justice Morland implores frequently but in the annexe on the audio system, the sound is better. And the world’s Press eat McDonald’s, smoke and drink coffee.

SARAH Miles,the actress, is dying. She is in the terrible last stages of arsenic poisoning. Her face is awfully pale and her breathing difficult… She’s filming Dandelion Dead, a television drama based on the true story of a 1920s solicitor who murdered his wife. But her real life is more improbably dramatic and beset with tragedy than fiction.

The star of The Servant and Blow Up to Ryan’s Daughter, Steaming and White Mischief disappears, insisting on having her unflattering make-up removed before she’ll be photographed. But she doesn’t change out of her nightie. She has cascading hair, sad eyes, a pretty face naturally almost devoid of wrinkles and she refuses sharply to divulge her age. Initially, she seems nervy, actressy and incredibly sensitive.

She speaks tantalisingly. Shortly after we start talking, she tells of the fire that raged in her wood-beamed Hampshire home last October. ‘The whole conservatory went up like Manderley. My friends were screaming, panicking. I had no idea of the power of fire, phooooow, extraordinary, so fast,’ she says, in a poetic, delivering-lines kind of voice. (She tends to speak discursively in lengthy paraphrases.) ‘I had bare feet, glass was everywhere and I was chucking bread-bins of water over it.’

Sarah is writing a novel on a computer in her dressing room during film breaks. ‘Filming is so boring,’ she says, wearily. But surely it pays nicely? ‘Alas my piggy bank is almost empty. We had the wrong people looking after us financially. We really messed up.’

Later this month A Right Royal Bastard, her autobiography which charts her life until the age of 18, will be published. (It is embargoed until then and so its contents cannot be divulged.) This is a major feat because Sarah is severely dyslexic. ‘I never took an exam, let alone passed one at school. You grow up with the feeling that you are stupid. There’s an inner pain.’ But 20 years ago, while meditating, she received the ‘joyful message’ that she should write. Since then she’s had paranormal experiences (which she won’t explain) which have allowed her to recall her life very clearly. ‘Alas, I can’t remember back to the womb. A lot of people I’ve met can.’

She says, wistfully, that she had a wonderful childhood. Her father was an affluent engineer (they had servants, which she finds ‘terribly embarrassing’), and she and her three siblings roamed carefree with their animals in Essex. People who have read her book comment, mistakenly in her view, on how sad and unloved she was. ‘They say my mother didn’t love me. But she had every right to be pissed off with me. I was an infuriating, agitated little girl.’

WHENEVER her mother said something important or frightening, a curious thing would happen. ‘A silver screen with black edges would come down in front of my eyes.’ Sarah would be blinded by this vision. ‘It still happens today. Maybe that’s what they mean by blind panic.’

She was frequently hit with a hairbrush, which she found ‘comforting. It allowed me to know my boundaries, to know what was right’. Her voice becomes low. ‘I got whacked after I tried to drown my brother. I was three and pushed him into the pond because I wanted him to go away.’ She failed. ‘He fell in the only part of the pond where there were bullrushes.’ She laughs, a tinkling laugh. ‘I love him dearly now.’

She was also expelled from two boarding schools, including Rodean after a hiccup with Royalty. ‘The Queen Mother was visiting the school. She asked me whether I liked it and I said I hated it.’

Sarah has a son, Tom, 25, by her husband Robert Bolt (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of A Man For All Seasons and Dr Zhivago). In parenting, she tried to compensate for the lacks in her own childhood. ‘I didn’t have cuddles but didn’t feel the loss of them. But maybe I gave Tom too many. I couldn’t wean him off them … I probably did everything wrong. I’m sure I was the most ghastly mother.’

Tom, who was expelled from 10 schools, ended up fighting for his life against heroin addiction. Sarah talks only very reluctantly about this now, for the first time. She is cautious for fear of ‘damaging’ him. Tom has been ‘clean’ for seven years. ‘He’s so strong he’s been able to beat the Devil,’ she says. ‘But less than 10 years ago, he stole everything to get money for heroin. He cleaned us out. He stole every one of my awards and Robert’s Oscars. But he brought back all Robert’s Oscars when he couldn’t sell them because they weren’t real gold. Mine were silver!’ She laughs.

‘During this period, my mother was dying of cancer and Robert, who’d had a stroke, was still unsteady. I was preparing for a ritual where I had to hand Mother over to the next life. I can’t explain it because it’s very personal, but if it’s done gently, it means she gives me some of her spirit when she dies.’ The ritual was interrupted by a phone call for help from Robert.

‘Tom, who was then 16, had come to the house to get money from Robert. I don’t know whether Tom knocked him over. But Robert was on the floor and I thought he was going to have a heart attack. As I went to see Robert, Mother said, ‘Do what they do on telly, call the cops.’ Those were her last words to me before she died.

‘I called the police and when they saw what Tom had done, they put him in jail. When he came out, he became a dispatch rider on heroin. He ended up on the streets, because I threw him out. He was a derelict, sleeping rough. That was tough love, the only way to stop him killing himself, and went on for three years.

‘People used to phone me and say, ‘You’re killing your son.’ I’d say, ‘Thank you’ (politely) and put down the receiver. Finally he nearly snuffed it and we sent him to a rehabilitation clinic in America. You send them to these clinics where you have to pay up front, because they run. You’re paying thousands of pounds each time – and they leg it. We hadn’t got any money left. This time he didn’t run, and he cleaned up.’

LAST year, in an article in the Daily Mail, Tom blamed his condition on his working parents, many nannies, the loneliness of life in a show-business family and his ‘whacky’ and ‘stormy’ mother who would hug him, then suddenly be emotionally absent. He felt unwanted and his drug-taking was an attempt to deaden this feeling. Sarah, with an edge to her voice, denies this. ‘The Press twisted it. Tom had everything he could possibly want in terms of love and friends. But my divorce was terrible for everyone concerned.’ She doesn’t blame herself for his addiction. ‘It’s genetic. There’s a lot of alcoholism on my husband’s side of the family. His daughter from his first marriage died of it. (She commited suicide.) And Robert is a workaholic, foodaholic and drinkaholic.’

She also doesn’t feel guilty because she views the problem in cosmic terms. ‘It’s all karma. Tom and I have an awful lot to work out in this life and we haven’t yet got to the really good part.’ Now, happily, Tom sells watches in markets and is working with Sarah on a musical called Boy, about families and drugs. She’s writing the lyrics and Tom the music.

We talk then about her marriage. In 1967, Sarah married Robert, a former schoolmaster, who was at the height of his Lawrence of Arabia fame. Curiously, Sarah resolved on matrimony after she tumbled down the stairs. ‘Robert was typing in the sitting room and I fell down harshly, bang, and twisted my ankle. His typewriter never changed rhythm and I thought, ‘This is the man I’m going to marry.’ Until then I’d been suffocated by men.’ She was attracted to his implacable self-discipline and dedication to work. But they split up in 1973 after the scandal of David Whiting, her business manager who became obsessed with Sarah and was found dead. Sarah, who’d been filming, returned from a night out to find his body in her Arizona hotel room. Mysteriously, a verdict of a drug overdose was reached, although the inquest revealed he’d taken only two Mandrax.

Sarah had been savagely beaten by him on the night he died and reportedly had evidence of foul play. ‘I’m not prepared to talk about that,’ she says now, ‘I don’t want to go to jail.’ Because people might suspect her to be guilty? ‘Oh please! I only tried to keep the man alive. (He had threatened suicide before.) No, I don’t want to get myself into the papers again by the knowledge that has come about. I can’t ever impart it because I can’t prove it.’

At the time, she claimed the intense publicity ruined her marriage and she practically disappeared to Hollywood for seven years. Is that really what went wrong first time round? ‘We both had huge lessons to learn,’ she replies, simply. ‘Lessons about becoming whole in a spiritual way.’ She divorced Robert in 1976, but remained good friends. He then asked her to remarry him in 1979, the day before his bypass operation and stroke. But instead, he married someone else – Ann Zane, the former Marchioness of Queensbury – although it was short-lived. He was also a vegetable for two years, paralysed down one side and unable to speak.

Their relationship changed after his stroke. ‘Robert was a great raconteur and suddenly he was face to face with the wall, couldn’t speak or move and was told he was going to die. We all thought he was going to die.’ (Sadly, he still talks with difficulty.) What was that like for her? ‘Rather beautiful to see him just lying there accepting everything, and obviously horrific. We didn’t know whether he was all right in the head and he couldn’t tell us. It’s taught me patience. Now it’s a joy to be in service. That’s where true contentment comes from.’

While caring for Tom in the rehabilitation clinic, she re-established her matrimonial commitment to Robert and they remarried quietly in 1988. ‘It would never have worked the second time if it was purely lust that brought us together,’ says Sarah, who once had a reputation as a scarlet woman. ‘I was in love with his spirit, eloquence and wit.’ Now their relationship works in an old-fashioned way. ‘I wouldn’t ever want to be the powerful one in a relationship. I find that unattractive in a woman. I like my man to be dominant and I always put my husband first. He still makes all the decisions.’

Any interview with Sarah has to include the bananas stuff. About Sarah drinking her urine twice daily to immunise herself against allergies – ‘it tastes like every lavatory you’ve ever smelt’.

About her paranormal experiences and spiritual awakening that turned her from her atheism – ‘That’s between me and my maker. But it had a profound beauty and socked me out the fucking sky.’

And about reincarnation, her readiness for death and the value of silence. She talks about it all enthusiastically.

A FILM should be made of the life of artist and writer Phyllis Pearsall – or Aunty Pig as she is called by Chris Patten, Governor of Hong Kong. An astute, mischievous and spritely 87-year-old, she was born into poverty, once tried to hit her mother’s boyfriend over the head with a bottle, walked 3,000 miles and has advised Prince Edward on his love life.

She has also endured the violent murder of friends in the Spanish Civil War, survived an air crash in a Dakota, had a Damascene conversion, starved, went blind and regained her sight, learned to drive at the age of 59 with 259 lessons, and met the Queen.

We’re sitting in her unprepossessing flat in Shoreham-by-Sea. She is tiny with silver hair, navy slacks and flowery shirt. She’s the founder and managing director of the A-Z Map Company and drives, sometimes daily, to its Sevenoaks offices. ‘I go to see what the darlings are up to,’ says Phyllis. Her company grew out of her inspired belief in the need for a comprehensive map of London streets.

In 1935, maps hadn’t been updated since 1918, so she stalked 3,000 miles of London streets, rising at 5am, walking daily for 18 hours and listing 23,000 roads. After an unfortunate accident with a shoe box of ‘Tr’ street names, she omitted Trafalgar Square from the original proof for her street map; luckily a beady compositor spotted the mistake.

Initially nobody was interested in her maps. ‘They hadn’t seen women reps and just asked, starting to fondle one, whether I was beddable,’ says Phyllis, with wonderfully old-fashioned enunciation. ‘I said I was too busy doing the maps to be beddable.’ WH Smith gave her her first order and received its initial delivery in a borrowed wheelbarrow. More than 12 million maps have now been sold.

IN 1986, she went to Buckingham Palace for her MBE: ‘The Queen put the medal on one and then one curtsied, which I couldn’t do very well. So I toppled over but somebody saved me.’ She was invited to ‘luncheon’ in 1990. ‘Prince Edward and I discussed his girlfriends. I told him he should look for kindness.’

The Prince and Phyllis discussed sincerity. ‘He said, ‘I’ll find a girl fascinating, charming and fall for her, then just one sentence can finish it. Just one remark will suddenly end one’s interest in her if it’s not sincere’. Yes, he was talking entirely about girls.’

Phyllis’s charming tract, An Artist’s Pilgrimage in Business, is published this week. She turned her business into a trust in 1966; and the book, illustrated with her line drawings, describes her Utopian philosophy. Art is her ‘passion’. She’s painted for Sir Richard Luce and a commission for the former Speaker, Lord Weatherill. ‘Dear ‘Jack’, bless his heart (he has a twin sister, ‘Jill’), is coming to the exhibition.’ (The Little Gallery, Arundel, 25 October.) In December she’s going to Hong Kong to paint, staying with Chris and Lavender Patten. ‘I’ve known Lavender since before she was born,’ says Phyllis, who helped Lavender’s mother, the late Joan Walker-Smith, through the traumatic birth after the death of her husband. Last year Phyllis stayed in Government House painting a commission for the Pattens. ‘Chris is the most huggable of men with a tremendously affectionate nature,’ she says. ‘He calls me Pig because those were my initials before I was married.’ Phyllis was educated at Rodean, which was ‘awful’. In 1919 her family struggled across war-torn Europe, seeking her grandmother, and arriving in Budapest after the communist rebellion. ‘People were starving and being crucified. Jews were being thrown into the Danube with weights on them. When I returned to Rodean and mentioned I’d been in a revolution, they said, ‘What do you mean by coming back in the autumn in your winter hat?” Her father was a Hungarian emigre and her mother Irish Italian. Once they pitched up together at the school, loudly accusing each other of adultery. ‘I hid in the airing cupboard,’ says Phyllis. Later, scandalously, her mother turned up on horseback, wearing men’s clothes and with her lover, the portrait painter Alfred Orr.

WHEN Phyllis was 14, her father, a map maker, wrote saying she should get a winter coat on credit, because he was bankrupt. He fled to America and Phyllis left school and took a taxi home with no money. The Maharaja of Patiala (being painted by Alfred) opened the door in full regalia and paid. ‘Then Mother said, ‘Alfred has an artistic temperament and couldn’t possibly have a little girl in the house. Get a live-in job’.’ How did Phyllis feel being abandoned and rejected? ‘But my mother was infatuated, dear,’ she replies, surprised at the question. ‘I’ve always accepted whatever happens.’

Phyllis went to Paris and slept under bridges, under newspapers. Was she pestered sexually? ‘Not in the way girls are these days. There was a feeling of camaraderie.’ She also starved, frequently for three days and once for 10. ‘So did Vladimir Nabokov. And we used to watch James Joyce sitting blind and miserable in a cafe.’ She taught English then studied philosophy and Byzantine art at the Sorbonne, supporting herself by selling pictures and articles.

Back in London, aged 21, she married a struggling artist 17 years her senior. ‘I’d just rescued Mother from being murdered by her husband. I was bringing an empty whisky bottle down on his head because he was strangling her. That’s how they lived,’ she laughs. Phyllis was thrown out for ‘interfering’, and took up with the Irish artist she bumped into on the way out.

They went to live in Spain but her husband, Richard, was ‘always angry and frightened’ and she found life impossible. ‘I walked out after eight years, without saying a word. That’s the worst thing you can do to anybody. I wouldn’t do it now. I’d tell him first.’ They didn’t have children. ‘It just didn’t happen. When I was young I wanted 12.’

In 1946, she was getting her maps reprinted in Holland when her plane crashed off course in dense fog on a wooded hill. She suffered a stroke, fractured skull and spine. ‘I longed to be dead.’ Instead of resting, she soon carried on working. Her disabilities, she writes charitably, led to diminished self-interest and the discarding of any fear of death. In 1948, she returned to Spain to visit friends. ‘Many had been murdered. It made me completely apolitical.’ She then begged a passage on an orange freighter from Seville and was painting on the bridge when two stowaways appeared, ‘out of the oranges, still vomiting from the fumes. They said if they were taken back, they’d be shot by Franco’. She looks distressed. The Captain shopped them.

On a happier note, the officers’ sexual advances were not unwelcome. ‘I think I was fairly free with myself if I fell for somebody,’ she says, brightly. ‘I was susceptible. That was part of bohemian life.’ Suddenly in 1950, she went completely blind for three months. Did she just lie in bed? Of course not! She wrote, sightlessly, about a Japanese artist, Itiro Takeda, for the New Yorker.

She writes of her Damascus Road conversion in her book – in 1954 when she was reading Schopenhauer’s analysis of Evil Man. ‘Suddenly whoof, an ethereal light flooded me.’ A few days later she had a Fra Angelico vision of Christ on the Cross. Bang, she says, she was faced with the Herculean task of discarding self-justification, white lies and pride. Phyllis describes herself as an old fool, but a happy one. Her life may sound batty, but she is terribly sane.

THE television journalist Kate Adie, who was adopted as a baby, was reported yesterday to have been happily reunited with her natural mother and sister after searching for a year. But the newspaper stories made one person unhappy.

Ariel Bruce is a unique professional who specialise in tracking down the families of adopted children or those taken into care.

‘I understand the family were very upset about the way this came out. It’s such a private matter,’ says Ariel. ‘There’s enough strain in being adopted and deciding to search for your birth family. Having then to reveal yourself as a public figure when you find them is even more stressful.’ The glare of publicity further aggravates the tension.

Ariel, 41, was aware of these problems when she traced the half-sister of actress Stephanie Cole. But yesterday Stephanie was happy to talk on radio about Ariel and the consequent meeting with her sibling.

Ariel explains: ‘We did a lot of careful work to find out that her sister was interested in the contact before she knew who Stephanie was. Psychologically that’s very important. The fact that it is someone you might have watched regularly on television is revealed much later.’ We’re sitting in Ariel’s attic flat in Bloomsbury, from where she works. There are thank-you cards from grateful clients, photographs of her four children and eclectic reference books, from a 1954 London Post Office directory to stacks of Who’s Who. The office wall is covered with photographs of smiling people – the relations she has reunited. Ariel has a peaceful, open face, studenty specs and wears jeans and a T-shirt. A trained social worker, she has been tracing lost relations for nine years. It started with a chance encounter with James, an 18-year-old odd-job man, who had wanted to find his mother since early childhood. Ariel comes from a Jewish, Hampstead-intellectual, bohemian background. She empathises with her clients’ feelings of rootlessness because of her own experience: her parents were refugees from pre-war Germany who parted, and her mother was deemed unfit to bring her up, so Ariel was put into care from the age of 11 to 18. She was in six foster homes and cannot even remember the names of four of her foster parents.

‘But my relationships with my foster parents give me some understanding of the sort of work I do. I am poacher turned gamekeeper.’

She has been married and divorced twice and has four children, the eldest a 22-year-old son, the youngest a daughter still at school.

She tells the moving tale of one case she worked on for three years. ‘When we found the birth mother, she told us her daughter had been born as the result of what you’d call date rape these days. She was blamed by her husband and family for having ‘asked for it’. I was touched that she had wanted the child at the time, and 40 years later she still did.’ But they are not all happy endings. Recently she did a search on behalf of a man who had a background of both mental and alcohol problems. ‘When we found his mother, she was an alcoholic. The meeting had a traumatic effect on everyone involved.’

Ariel doesn’t just work with adoptions. One man in his seventies wanted her to find his old sweetheart. Ariel didn’t think they’d be able to find her – or that she’d be available if they did or that she’d still like him. It took nine months. ‘But we managed – and they fell in love all over again.’

Since 1926 three-quarters of a million children have been adopted in Great Britain. ‘Adoption touches most of us in some way,’ says Ariel. Now, every year, there are about 10,000 adoptions, of whom 500 are infants, and since the Children’s Act of 1975, they have the right to see their birth certificates.

She says there are no trade secrets in her work – it is 90 per cent rote and 10 per cent inspiration. ‘It’s a mixture of rational, logical – akin to a game of chess – and human.’

She works with a permanent staff of another social worker, a genealogist and administrator, and draws on a pool of research specialists. A successful search tends to end in a highly discreet letter, and she has helped hundreds of people of all ages and social classes. Her charges are normally from £650 to £800.

Many adoptees, she believes, need to know their origins. They need to know their roots to feel secure.

But why do so many people want to trace their relatives rather than leave well enough alone? She looks incredulous. ‘The question is more curious about why people wouldn’t want to. In my view, closed adoption (where there is no information or contact) is an unnatural state.

IN PASSAU, a picturesque Bavarian city at the confluence of the Danube, Inn and Ilz rivers, the Second World War is still being fought.

On one side are the respectable citizens of Passau and on the other, 33 year-old Anna Rosmus. Since she was a teenager she’s been obsessively trying to expose what she sees as the truth about her home town, an outwardly affluent and charming Catholic community.

Frau Rosmus has worked single-mindedly to expose Passau’s Nazi past since she wrote a schoolgirl essay on My Home Town During The Third Reich. She is known locally as ‘the nasty girl’ after the title of an Oscar-nominated movie based on her story. She has since exploded single-handedly the post-war conspiracy of silence that allowed prominent Passau Nazis to disguise themselves as former resistance men by publishing material that might not otherwise have appeared.

In return she has been spat on, called a Jewish Whore, threatened with death and had stones thrown at her. Frau Anna Rosmus still receives threatening phone calls and is told her house will be burned down. Today sees the publication of her book Wintergreen: Suppressed Murders, which records the mass murder and mistreatment of the Russians in 1945 and includes more than 300 names, including surviving local perpetrators and further documentation about the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz, a local obstetrician.

Earlier this month, the family of the late Dr Franz-Maria Clarenz of Passau took Rosmus to court over her allegations that the surgeon had carried out brutal late abortions on women from eastern Europe used as forced labour. The family won an order banning Frau Rosmus from repeating allegations that all the abortions were brutal and made at a late stage of pregnancy.

She faces a £200,000 fine or six months imprisonment if she refers to the alleged atrocities again.

The publisher expects the book to be stopped. Frau Rosmus thinks several ‘honourable citizens,’ perhaps ‘even the government’, may take her to court. And Bavaria’s criminal prosecutors will consider whether there are grounds for trials of any of those mentioned.

‘She makes untrue accusations,’ lawyer Klaus Zehner shouts, punching the air with his fist. ‘She selects her documents to fit her case.’ He doesn’t yet know what’s in her book.

The allegations are chilling. ‘Rosmus said that Clarenz performed abortions on mothers sometimes in the eighth month of pregnancy,’ says Zehner who fought the case. ‘Rosmus said the babies were wrenched out of the womb, limb by limb, and that the mothers, slave labourers, received no anaesthetic. That many of the babies forced into the world were left without food to die.

‘But this is not true. He performed over 200 abortions legally on eastern prisoners, under order of Hitler’s government,’ says Zehner. ‘There were no late abortions.’ He says they were natural births forced prematurely with medicine. ‘The mothers consented willingly and many babies survived and are still alive today.’

So why would a mother in an era before incubators want to induce birth at eight months? ‘They were women who had been frightened to have abortions and now wanted to be rid of their children because they knew the Russians were coming,’ he replies. ‘If the Russians found their women pregnant by Germans, they knew they would have an awful time.’

Frau Rosmus has painted the town brown. Behind the facade of caring Catholics and friendly bakers is a town which played host to three forced labour camps. Hitler lived here briefly, so too Heinrich Himmler. Anti-semitism is still rife. Passau is 80 per cent Catholic and officially there are no Jews registered, although Rosmus knows 19. ‘They are afraid to declare themselves,’ she said. The town’s Nazi constructed concrete Nibelung Hall is the annual meeting place for the far-Right Deutsche Volks Union. A local baker, she claims, makes swastika shaped bread for the occasion and the flea market sells SS memorabilia.

But Herr Riederer, a baker who recalls the Russian soldiers looting the shops and being executed afterwards, has never heard of the swastika bread. He is uneasy about Frau Rosmus’s other claims.

‘’Thomas Heller, an antiques dealer, who otherwise supports Frau Rosmus’s research, says it is strictly verboten to sell SS regalia. ‘She’s mad to say this.’

The town of 50,000 inhabitants is riven. Everyone has an opinion on ‘the nasty girl’ and, according to the letters to the local newspaper, the majority have had enough of her. Most think her motives pure, but there is a feeling that she should now be quiet.

She is seen as a woman obsessed. ‘There is a very bad taste and feeling in the town,’ says Gisa Schaffer-Huber. ‘We feel she’s doing it mostly for her own publicity.’

In the Fifties Passau’s town council removed all crosses marking Russian graves. In one cemetery, the desecration failed to wipe out the wintergreen, a hardy flower. The bones were exhumed in the Fifties and placed in a mass grave. Even the wintergreen has gone.

The nearby Innstadtfriedhof graveyard, set in the lush Bavarian forest, has stone crosses and metal plaques to commemorate the dead. Some were SS soldiers, some high-level perpetrators.

Back with Klaus Zehner in his gloomy office I ask whether he can help put me in touch with the family of the accused? ‘I am the accused,’ he says. ‘I’m the son-in-law of the deceased doctor.’

‘’‘’He feels outrage that Frau Rosmus has opened the wounds nearly 50 years after Clarenz was cleared of war crimes.

Frau Zehner says her father was patient, artistic and musical. ‘He only joined the Nazis to get a job.’ And what of anti-semitism? ‘I don’t have any Jewish friends. But my grandfather did.’

When I meet Frau Rosmus it is unexpectedly when she was broadcasting outside her home.

Inside there are two huge yellow cardboard Stars of David fringed with pencilled barbed wire and a massive collage depicting Moses. She is an unpredictable and volatile woman. Her eyes dart around fearfully. She wears a Star of David ‘out of sympathy’.

‘If I’m alone they say whatever they like. If I’m broadcasting they’re terrified.’ Now Rosmus, who has an open face, is natural and compelling. But her story contradicts the lawyer’s tale.

Back in town there is graffiti on a wall behind the cathedral with a Star of David daubed in red paint and the legend ‘Nazi raus.’ It means ‘Nazis piss off.’ On another wall, there is a poster advertising an anti-fascism disco, depicting a fist smashing a swastika.

SOMEONE recently said to Lis Howell that launching a television channel was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. ‘I must be dead then,’ says Howell, waggishly. Howell was the director of programmes at GMTV who was sacked from her £100,000-a-year job amid rows about the F for fanciability factor. Now she is launching UK Living, a women’s satellite channel of which she is head of programming. UK Living, she says unrepentantly, will have the F-factor too. But this time, F stands for feminine.

UK Living welcomes girlies to agony aunts, Jayne Irving with chat, horoscopes and exercise, reruns of Delia Smith with creative cookery, reruns of Kilroy and reruns of Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. ‘A year ago if I’d been asked to do a women’s channel, I’d have said, ‘I don’t want to be ghettoised and sidelined.” Now she argues that the channel isn’t patronising. ‘It reflects what people do. Just because women traditionally do something doesn’t make it a demeaning, lower-grade activity.’ Howell, 42, changed her views after being sacked. ‘I had to fall back on my friends, family and the security of domestic detail. It suddenly became a pleasure to go to the school gates to meet my daughter or to bake.’ She is adept at plundering her experience for media purposes. She was actually only without a job for four days before she was given work on Good Morning… with Anne and Nick. Five weeks later, she was offered the UK Living job. Howell is wearing a white see-through T-shirt with sober suit and pearls, and is a small, bottle blonde with a northern accent and beseeching eyes. She looks tired, has a slightly forlorn air but speaks and thinks extremely fast.

When GMTV went on air in January, she was dubbed the most powerful woman in ITV. ‘That was hysterically funny. It doesn’t say much for women or TV.’ When ratings dropped, she pushed Michael Wilson off the sofa. They dropped further then under Big Breakfast competition and Greg Dyke (who with Roland Rat saved TV-am) stepped in and said F-off to the F-factor.

THE big problem was the F-factor, whereby Fiona Armstrong was encouraged to wear shorter skirts because she has great legs. Howell denies having played the game by the worst male rules. ‘I don’t regret it. It hit a truth and a nerve,’ she says realistically. ‘We live in a society which is confused about the way women behave, dress and act on TV.’ GMTV, running at a £10million loss, has only increased its 38 per cent audience share by 2 per cent since Howell left.

Howell was deeply distressed after being sacked. (She’s contractually obliged not to talk about her departure.) ‘I was shocked, upset and damaged. It was an alarming experience. I still feel scarred. Many women don’t like women achievers. When you fall from grace, people laugh, snigger and punch the air. But then there is support that you don’t expect.

‘I’m resilient but not tough. I get frightened and worried. I always think ‘maybe this is it’ and I’ll not be able to earn a living. I get scared that I’m not as good as I think I am. All sorts of self-doubts.’ Did she feel a failure? ‘Of course. But I was wrong. It’s the old female thing of ‘everything’s my fault’.’

Howell believes she is a feminist, hot on equal opportunities. (‘How on earth does taking a well-known and respected woman and making her as attractive as possible conflict with feminism?’ she remarked during the F debacle.) ‘I’m an organic feminist. That makes me sound like somebody who grows her own vegetables!’

Once she threatened to sue a newspaper when a journalist asked whether she exploited her own sexuality to get her way. Why did she consider it so damaging to be thus accused? ‘I find it offensive and hopefully inaccurate, although we all bat our eyelashes.’

She had a happy, lower middle-class childhood. ‘We were part of that aspirational post-war generation. Education was tremendously important.’ She was educated at Liverpool Institute for Girls.

She has said that there is no way somebody like herself is going to land a plum job at the BBC or ITN. Realistic? Or inferiority about being a grammar school girl from the provinces? ‘Maybe I’m a bit chippy,’ she replies. ‘When I moved to London I was resentful of metropolitan people. But it was fashionable to be chippy, and I have an opportunist element in me.’ She married a law student after she finished studying English at Bristol University. It lasted three years. ‘We both married too young. He has just married for the third time.’ For the last 13 years she has lived with reporter Ian Proniewicz. Why has she never married again? ‘That’s personal.’ Thinks quickly. ‘He’s never asked me!’ Giggles.

‘I don’t think marriage is particularly relevant. We might have got married when I was pregnant, but I couldn’t stand up half the time – let alone get down the aisle.’ (She had high blood pressure and had to lie on her back for six weeks before the birth.) She talks then about motherhood. Just eight years ago she dropped out in Cumbria in a well-documented interlude as a postmistress and earth mother. Aged 33, she had her daughter, Alex. She desperately wanted to go back to work. ‘Almost unheard of in Cumbria.’ Did she resent her child then? ‘No, because it took so long for her to be conceived. I was desperate to have a baby.’

Howell didn’t work for 18 months after Alex was born and felt ‘quite lost’. Does she lack the inner resources to be all right without the identity of a job? ‘I did wonder about that.’ At GMTV she was portrayed as a demonic worker. She didn’t socialise, and worked from 4am to 4pm. ‘I’m driven, in a way. But I’m not a workaholic.’ Driven because she needs to prove herself or make her mark in the world? ‘No.’

THE HERCULES in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground. I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane, known to the crew as Fat Albert, is used for Operation Irma.

The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly. The humour of the crew is macabre, like that in an operating theatre, a doctor comments later. The lashing tape is marked in red pen, ‘same shit, different day’. And they have sayings like: ‘You can kick ass or save Sarajevo – but you can’t do both.’ On the ground in Sarajevo, Foreign Legionnaires run around among white UN armoured vehicles. We deliver 26,000 lbs of tinned tuna and flour, with the plane engines still running. They like to get out in three minutes flat. But we’re picking up 30 Canadian soldiers going on rest and recreation leave, so we don’t manage to turn around for a full eight minutes.

The Canadians have been there for three months. What’s it like? Squaddie Guy, 20, smiles and looks puzzled. ‘I hope it’ll never be like that again.’ Tim Gunter is horrified. ‘There are little kids stepping on mines and people skinny and with fear in their eyes.’

Sergeant Renaud Marc asks: ‘Any news on that little girl? Nice of your PM to do that.’

In the body of the aircraft, eight racks for stretchers are pinned at the back, ready for the following day.

Azure lakes, ravines and hills blue in the morning mist of former Yugoslavia stretch beneath us. ‘They should be lying on the beaches bathing,’ says Flight Sergeant Steve Askey, with a bewildered expression. A UN Tornado buzzes underneath us in the opposite direction. ‘Why are the Press all here now?’ asks another crew member ingenuously. ‘Where have you been for the last 15 months?’

Back in Ancona, the doctors and those they teasingly call ‘just nurses’ are preparing themselves. They’re learning useful phrases like ‘are you thirsty or in pain?’ from the Red Cross phrasebook. ‘What’s Serbo-Croat for ‘I want to see a proper doctor?” jests one.

‘How about ‘are you private?’ or ‘I want a second opinion?” ‘Or ‘wait’. After all, they are going to the NHS.’

They are working intensely, lightening their load with humour. You couldn’t meet a nicer, better-meaning bunch. One doctor talks sensitively about the effects on his psyche of dealing with emergency cases. ‘It’s OK while I’m doing the job, because I’m plugged in. But afterwards I can’t sleep for thinking about it.’

They mind about the added load their absence forces on their colleagues at home. And they care deeply about the well-being of those to be evacuated. To many of them, the ages of the evacuees are immaterial: Their health is more important.

They express fear at inadvertently saying to journalists something construed as politically inflammatory. Their leader, Tony Redmond, has worked so hard to achieve these mercy missions and is paranoid about the Press.

By Saturday afternoon, the medical team has been forbidden to speak to journalists. The instruction came from ‘very high up’, they say. Information is scant, but Operation Irma, they think, is becoming very political.

The question of whether Bosnian soldiers are to be evacuated is denied by officials. And the international slanging match about who to evacuate is hotting up between UN officials and cynical politicians keen to score political advantage.

You sense the doctors’ acute awareness of being used as pawns by politicians. They seem to want to mutiny against their enforced silence. You point out that they are only there because of the media and you note grateful recognition and a wish to help on their faces.

They are here simply because they want this to be the start of many humanitarian operations to rescue the sick and injured from a war zone. But they know they are simply putting a plaster on the gaping wound that is the medical problem of Sarajevo.

You find yourself thinking, simplistically, that children deserve priority in evacuations in this increasingly shambolicly organised public relations exercise with a media circus, photo opportunities and allegations of soldiers being rescued.

Now the medical team, which has divided into teams with specific duties, is preparing the field hospital on the civilian and military airbase of Ancona. It is set up in a cargo hangar next to three army tents – one with a Union Jack, one with a French flag and one with a Sky satellite dish. ‘’‘’‘’

There are canteen and toilet facilities and another area for walking wounded. And stretchers, toys, blankets, boiled sweets and fizzy drinks. Huge plastic bags filled with drugs hang on the walls. And hand-coloured nursery pictures of animals – a mouse carrying a breakfast tray on his head reads, ‘a little love makes a lot of difference’.

Information on the number and ages of evacuees and time of airlift changes frequently. As does the appallingly coordinated Ministry of Defence list of journalists allowed to accompany the flight.

I beg a place on a German plane going to Sarajevo, in an effort to see the casualties being loaded. ‘Welkom to zer Germunn airforce,’ they say, beaming. But a little MoD hiccup puts paid to that. So I secure a place on a Canadian flight and maybe it is the Overseas Development Administration which sees an end to that.

At 1.40 local time on Sunday, the tail of the Hercules carrying out Operation Irma opens. Three ambulances, assorted military and a Red Cross representative in fluorescent green jacket stand by. There are 21 people including seven children, plus 16 relatives. Some of the children the RAF team saw as priorities stayed behind.

A doctor stands by the hangar door, keeping telephone contact. The first through the tailgate is chronic meningitis sufferer Belma Salaka, three, with a breathing tube taped to her mouth. Seven people, mostly soldiers, carry her stretcher, careful not to jog her. It was her plight that prompted John Major to demand the number of children on the flight be increased. They bring out nine-month-old Eldar Kalamujic, a nurse shielding his face from the sun. He has liver disease. The TV crews and photographers fight for space, pushing through the restraining rope. The media throng becomes more unmanageable as time goes on and the police offer to make arrests. Now there are some relatives and walking wounded with bandaged eyes – clean but thin. They look tired but relieved. Then a third emaciated boy is carried out. There is 11-year-old Edhen Dedovic, denim-clad, with his right cheekbone eaten away by a mortar wound and his left eye gouged out by shrapnel, walking off, waving delightedly to the crowd.

There are nine on stretchers and walking wounded of military age. One man on a stretcher sticks up his fingers in a Bosnian army victory salute. Curiously there is only one woman, 44-year-old Branka Franic. Then they start to load them on the chartered Russian Tupulev 154 jet, a blue striped plane beneath a blue sky. It made the Red Cross ODA trip to Banja Luka last year.

It is five years old with torn carpets and seats folded down to accommodate stretchers. The doctors dub it a flying intensive care ward, saying its equipment is comparable to a ground hospital.

Professor David Southall, the only consultant paediatrician in the team, said: ‘The mission is orientated to moving children from the war zone. That’s what we’re hoping for if the Bosnian doctors and parents agree. Otherwise they have no hope. They are in a war zone which is getting worse.’

GEORGE Iain Murray, who refuses to use the name George and is the 10th Duke of Atholl, lives in Blair Castle, Perthshire. The castle has white-painted pebble dash on it and was started in 1269. ‘The Earl of Atholl owned the land then. He was on a crusade when a local gentleman called Mr Cumming decided this was a nice place to build a house and started doing so,’ says the Duke. ‘The Earl returned and was somewhat annoyed to find a house in the middle of his grounds. So he turfed Mr Cumming out and took over.’ The Duke, whose father was killed in action in 1945, was evacuated to Blair Atholl during the war. (Before then, the castle was let to an American married to a Dutch diamond millionaire. ‘They used to play bicycle polo in the ballroom. When they left, they gave a new floor.’) He came to the title aged 26, through a third cousin three times removed. He doesn’t have a son and heir.

He is the only man in Britain permitted to have a private army, an honour awarded by Queen Victoria after she stayed in Blair Atholl in 1844. His army has never been to war, it is purely ceremonial and soldiers are drawn from his estate.

The Duke, who is vice-president of the National Trust for Scotland, recently retired as chairman of Westminster Press and now comes rarely to London. He wanders round his 135,000-acre estate with a Purdey 12-bore side-by-side shotgun and Ben the black labrador. He’s wearing brown brogues, tweed jacket and a ‘genuine’ Fair Isle sweater. He has a good head of hair and significant nose.

Tomorrow is the 12th when grouse shooting starts. ‘The Glorious 12th is not going to be glorious,’ he says, crossly. ‘In fact, nothing is going to happen.’ The grouse were killed by bad weather in May and he doesn’t intend to shoot them until Glorious September. In 1977, they had their ‘best year’ and shot 400 brace.

The castle has 120 rooms. ‘Mostly attics, five flats and archives for family papers.’ Since 1269, the castle, which was the last building in Britain to be besieged, has been altered every century. His changes have been ‘insignificant and cosmetic. Last year I rewired’. He hasn’t touched the main castle, 32 rooms of which are open to the public.

He lives in 20 rooms which were originally butlers’ and dairy maids’ houses. ‘It’s known as the South End and was added in 1750.’ His drive and entrance are well hidden from the 165,000 annual visitors to the castle. (He says he wouldn’t ever serve teas to Americans. ‘Not if I can help it.’) HE moved to this end of the castle in 1946 with his mother and lived there in discomfort. ‘The sitting-room fire smoked like mad, so if the wind was in the south-east you had to do everything in the bathroom, including a lot of paperwork. It was the only warm room in the house.’ They then made their own electricity. ‘It wasn’t a great success. We weren’t ever able to make enough to run more than one bar of an electric fire.’

The Duke’s home has Murray tartan carpets in the corridors. Downstairs are the gun room and reception rooms. He breakfasts on fishcakes or kippers in the powder-blue Adam-style dining room. He also eats lots of game off the estate. He changes, often into black tie, even when dining alone. He rarely wears a kilt. ‘It makes one look too much like a Scottish nationalist.’ He is immensely rich, despite the cushion in his creamy peppermint-coloured sitting room which reads: ‘To be rich is no longer a sin, it’s a miracle.’ ‘I’m rich in assets but poor in cash,’ says the Duke, whose only addition to the family collection in six years has been a silver cream jug. All the good 18th century cabinet-makers are represented in his furniture. His favourite treasure is a Zoffany painting of the third Duke and family.

Upstairs is the Long Corridor, 70 yards long and with walls covered in deer antlers. ‘That was how originally you got to your bedroom from the main part of the castle. According to my mother, if you were in the dining room and forgot your handkerchief in 1933, it was a five-minute trek to get it from your bedroom.’

Off the Long Corridor are the bedrooms, ‘grander than the reception rooms’, with their four-posters. ‘The beds have been here since 1750. They’re pretty comfortable.’ The Duke of Kent and Prince Philip have both slept here. He takes his jacket off to sit on the bed. ‘I expect I’ll die of cold, even in August.’

The bedrooms are numbered, not named. ‘This is ‘Second Best Guest’,’ he says, pointing to number eight with its double bed. ‘It’s all right if you have a couple staying, but if you have one person it’s unnecessarily large from the sheets point of view.’

The bed head in room 10, the eighth Duke’s bedroom, is decorated with a savage. It is his coat of arms. ‘It’s a wild man with a key in one hand and a dagger in the other.’ His motto is ‘Furth Fortune and Fill the Fetters’, which urges him to go forth and capture his enemies and shackle them. ‘Unlike most mottoes, it’s not a very good one.’

If he had to be confined to one room, which would he choose? ‘I think one’s bedroom is the most important room. One needs a comfortable bed.’ He has a single bed, presumably to be economical with sheets.

Finally there is the attic room. It is extremely cold in the winter, since it has four outside walls ‘and it was too expensive to bring central heating up here’. Luckily, the bath tub is in the bedroom itself. The Duke, who is 6ft 3in, has to sit with his knees up in his bath.