She’s engaged to Will Carling, England’s rugby captain, and is busy planning their wedding this summer. But she’s also lived with rock star Jeff Beck and sepped out with Eric Clapton. In her first interview on her own, Julia Smith talks about past loves and her romance with the nation’s most eligible sporting hero.

JULIA Smith, 29, is marrying sport’s most eligible bachelor, England’s rugby union captain, Will Carling. She’s also dated Eric Clapton. And, at 18 years old, she dropped out of university to live with the then 39-year-old veteran guitarist and millionaire Jeff Beck, erstwhile lover of fabled Sixties model Celia Hammond.

It’s Julia, the ravishing blonde in a see-through skimpy dress, that you see at post-rugby match dinners. (‘It wasn’t see-through. The photographers made it look like that with high-powered flash,’ she laughs later.) And public relations girl Julia, now publicising Right Said Fred, Aswad and Vanessa Paradis through her company Hands On PR.

She’s not photogenic and is far prettier in the flesh. Slim, with big brown eyes, gentle features, fluid changes of expression, she’s wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, clumpy, adolescent shoes which she takes off to curl her feet underneath her, and a school pinafore-style dress. She’s instantly likeable, with a lovely friendly voice and easy, enchanting and direct manner.

She’s getting married on 18 June in Northamptonshire, with 300 guests and a marquee. ‘A bit of a bun fight. I’d imagined a small wedding. But I’m the only daughter and the youngest,’ she says. The couple have turned down a reputed £20,000 from Hello! to avoid falling victim to its curse. ‘I wouldn’t want to be caught on somebody’s coffee table, no way!’ This week they’ve been choosing hymns. On Sunday night she was with Will at a business conference where everybody had big clipboards and folders and Will sang a good hymn very flatly. This was actually a dream. ‘Will has to endure a diabolical 10 minutes every morning when I recall my weird dreams. He’d probably just like to say ‘shut up’.’ So far family arguments (‘we’re both from very close families’) have been confined to disagreements about the flowers.

The wedding has been a long time coming, as they got engaged in May 1993. ‘It’s the first Saturday he’s had free of rugby commitments to get married.’ Last year Will went on tour to New Zealand for two months. ‘We promised to call each other every day, but it ended up being five times a day. A lot of money from New Zealand. Each call was a good 20 minutes.’ She coped badly and had to join him after three weeks.

She met him first at a dinner party in 1989. ‘I didn’t think an awful lot of him. He didn’t say a word. He was obviously very shy. I felt sorry for him more than anything.’ But they became friends (she had just broken up with Jeff) and would call each other when they were depressed. SHE says: ‘I used to get very low. It’s a typical Piscean trait, very emotional and up and down like a yo-yo. I was very much the loner and would exaggerate things in my mind. Like, ‘Oh God, work was awful today … so I’m going to lose my job.”

Will took her on her first date only last year, a month after they’d both broken up with their respective partners, she says with a big sigh. A month later, he proposed to her in bed. Initially she declined, because she thought he was joking.

Why did it take them four years to get together? ‘We didn’t tell each other that we liked one other. We’re both very shy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and need encouragement,’ she elaborates. ‘If people are supportive, I’ll feel better about myself. If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll shy away into a hovel.

‘I’m not a party goer. I don’t like going out and would rather stay in in the evening. If I go out, I’ve got to be with people I know really well. Otherwise I’ll close up and daydream, which is my favourite pastime. ‘If someone is talking, I’ll be a million miles away, travelling to countries in my head or dreaming about my wedding day. I’m chirpy and happy on the phone. But if someone says let’s go out for a drink tonight or mix with journalists, I’ll run a mile.’ Her lack of confidence is totally unapparent. Her mother considers her a very good actress; even her body language is relaxed.

Julia’s country childhood was idyllic. She had ponies and her two elder brothers and father, now a retired chartered accountant, doted on her. ‘I was very spoilt and probably still am. I’ve grown out of the stamping my feet syndrome, but I did that until I was about 11. ‘I was a horror at primary school, a real tomboy and always the gang leader. I used to beat up little girls. I used to get in a panic when they went off crying to teacher and bribe them to stop them snitching on me.’ She grins.

She ‘grew up rapidly’ at Oakham Boarding School, Leicestershire. ‘It was fantastic. It was a mixed school but there were a lot more boys.’ She showed early signs of being a man’s woman. ‘I get on better with guys and find it easier to talk to them. I always spoke to my brothers about everything and was my father’s little girl.’ She worked hard to get eight O and three A-levels – ‘I wouldn’t say I’m stupid. I’m just average.’

WHAT happened when she became sexually aware? Aged 18, she lost her virginity to Jeff and left her history degree at Goldsmiths after a term to co-habit. (‘I hated university, standing around stupid bars drinking pints of beer.’) There was a 21-year age discrepancy and they were together for six years. ‘My parents were very laid back about it.’

But the relationship made her very isolated. ‘I lost contact with my friends. There was no one of my age group around me. I was on my own a lot and lonely. It toughened me up.’ She cuddles herself. ‘He wasn’t a father figure. I learned a lot from him, but he wanted me to be a mother to him. I just wasn’t strong enough for that.’ They broke up in 1989.

She had two ‘serious’ relationships before Will, neither with well-known men. ‘I haven’t had that many boyfriends to be quite honest.’ What about Eric Clapton? ‘We just had a laugh and the media immediately thought …’ Did she have an affair with him? ‘No, he was just a mate.’ Why not? ‘I didn’t particularly want to. I didn’t see it as that important.’ She says she wasn’t his confidante, that they don’t keep in touch and she doesn’t want to talk about him.

So, back to Will. She says, exhaling deeply, that it’s difficult to say what makes him tick. ‘He has tremendous drive and ambition. If he wants something, you know damn sure he’s going to get it. He’s less arrogant now, very kind, and thoughtful.’

She sees marriage as a partnership, requiring lashings of trust and honesty. Sexual fidelity is ‘one hundred per cent’ important to them both; she doesn’t have a problem with only ever sleeping with him for the rest of her life; and she has ‘not a clue’ why The Sunday Times asked Will whether he was a repressed homosexual. She has a ‘one per cent’ doubt over committing for life, her anxiety over her own ability to make the marriage work. ‘If I start being stupid then I’ll lose the relationship. If I don’t pay enough attention to it, work takes over or I start looking elsewhere, for other men, that’s my own fault. But that’s a pretty silly thing to do if you’re going to commit to marriage.

‘Because of my lack of confidence, I think maybe he’ll go off me.’ She hugs herself tightly. ‘So I want to make sure that I’m going to be perfect for him for the rest of my life.’ Does she fear divorce? ‘I wouldn’t go into marriage fearing divorce. I can’t see a marriage working if you’re thinking on that level.’

AT THE moment they’re living in rented accommodation, house-hunting in west London and hope eventually to move to the country. She wants to travel before having children. Will, she says, will certainly see his job through until the World Cup next year.

IT WAS one of the most bizarre trials ever heard at the Old Bailey. Susan Whybrow and her lover Dennis Saunders were sent to prison for plotting to murder her husband by tying him to a sit-on lawnmower and aiming it towards the garden lake. This week, after serving three years, a retrial at the Old Bailey found them not guilty of conspiracy to murder and they were freed. Today, for the first time, Saunders talks about that extraordinary affair and why he has returned home and not to his lover.

DENNIS SAUNDERS is, he says, bitter, vindictive and full of revenge towards his ex-lover.

It is a tale of sex, passion, betrayal and near tragedy between the rural affluent and the man they considered a bit of rough.

Saunders, 57, a former flying instructor, and his ex-lover, Susan Whybrow, were convicted three years ago of conspiring to murder her barrister husband, Christopher Whybrow.

They were sentenced to 10 years and eight years respectively. On Monday, they were cleared of the same charge at a retrial at the Old Bailey. The prosecution alleged the couple planned to kill Whybrow after luring him into a sex trap. She backed her husband into Saunders’ arms; he trussed, gagged and blindfolded him, then frogmarched him to the garden where Whybrow broke free and fought with Saunders. The couple, who are no longer lovers, have always admitted conspiracy to cause Whybrow actual bodily harm. But they insisted the plan was to beat him up to teach him a lesson for hitting her. Murder was never in their minds, they said.

The sitting room in Saunders’ modern detached Colchester house is gleamingly clean with a painting of sword-wielding soldiers and four guns on the wall.

He asks whether I’ve bought a minder, then says I should have bought him some gin. He is spruce, full lipped with a beer tummy, steel-rimmed specs and the back of his tie tucked into his pink shirt.

He fancies himself and is wily and talks self protectively. His eyes look glazed and when he talks, he moves his feet shiftily.

What was it like on that fateful day pretending to be a burglar and beating up Whybrow?

‘The adrenaline … it was like being on a drug. It was bravado on my part. I didn’t want to go too far.’

How do you cope with people who don’t believe you didn’t intend to murder Whybrow? ‘To begin with it was hard, now it doesn’t bother me,’ he says, unconsciously rolling up his sleeves. Do you hate Susan? ‘I’m very bitter towards her.’

Saunders left prison two months ago, having served three years. He’ll do voluntary work and plans to market a device he invented. ‘Prison was sheer hell to begin with. I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I’d only been in Parkhurst six months when the governor let me out unaccompanied to see Maria – his wife. The first man to go down for 10 years and go out alone after six months.’

He ended up in a ‘semi open’ prison. ‘At weekends I used to ride round Kent on my bike. Just like a health farm. I used to go into the pub at lunch time.’

Originally from Walthamstow, Saunders had three siblings. He can’t remember his father, a roof tiler, who died in the war. There was never a man at home.

‘There wasn’t much money and never much to eat,’ he said. ‘My sister looked after us because mother worked as a tailoress.’

Saunders was the leader of a school gang – ‘We used to nick things to eat’ – but has no recollection of ever fighting,’ he said. He left grammar school, aged 15, with no qualifications and became a lorry driver. At 22, he married Italian-born Maria by whom he has four grown-up sons and is keen now to repair his marriage.

They are together, working at reconciliation, but she does not appear during our talk.

His relationship with Susan started after he gave her 10 flying lessons. He seems reluctant to talk about her. She was ‘bubbly’ and they talked about their ‘rocky’ marriages and were ‘mutually obsessed. I’d never felt like that about anybody.’ He is macho, half Italian and the sort of man who’d like to brag about his conquests. He was dubbed a Romeo, accused of other affairs.

Tales of their making wild love in the car and on his flying club bar are also untrue. But he boasted to Maria of the affair. ‘I was just being nasty at the time,’ he said.

He last saw Susan at the retrial and wants no further contact and only met Whybrow only once.

MERLYN Nuttall, 29, today uses her real name and has her picture printed for the first time. Formerly known only as Miss X, she was snatched off a Brixton street in February 1992 by Anthony Ferrira, a convicted killer, viciously raped, brutally attacked, set on fire and left for dead. ‘I’m going public because I want to help people who’ve had similar experiences,’ she says. ‘I want them to have someone to relate to who looks well and is getting on with her life.’

She gave up her work as a fashion designer a year ago to write a book about her rape and fight for reform to help victims. She wants women doctors to attend rape victims, guidance on the Crown Prosecution Service and advice on criminal injuries compensation. In February, she addressed the Home Affairs Committee at the House of Commons, ‘lobbying for changes so the victim isn’t victimised by the system’.

She’s motivated by rising statistics on violence against women and by a need to find answers. ‘My work seemed so trivial compared with the issues which now dominate my life. Nobody tells you how to rehabilitate your life.’ She’s one of the campaigners de nos jours: the women who have turned adversity to advantage, transformed personal tragedy into something positive and found in their own catastrophe a cause. Open any newspaper and there they are – raising funds and awareness, presenting cheques, lobbying politicians and plugging away at injustices and anomalies in the law. These past few days have been typical for this high-profile, admirable band of tirelessly campaigning female fighters. Jill Saward, victim of the Ealing vicarage rape eight years ago, launched a £150,000 appeal for her brainchild HURT (Help Untwist Rape Trauma charity). Jayne Zito, whose husband Jonathan was murdered 14 months ago by a schizophrenic, appeared on television campaigning for improvements in mental health care on behalf of MIND and ‘holding Mrs Bottomley accountable for Jonathan’s murder’. Fran Davies, whose five-year-old daughter Laura died last year after a series of transplant operations, accepted a £200,000 cheque for the World Transplant Games.

Such behaviour is a predominantly female phenomenon. Fran Davies, although distressed, was determined to appear in public this week and did so with composure; but her husband Les left her five weeks ago, unable to cope any longer. Equally it was Diana Lamplugh, not her husband, who launched the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, named after their daughter who was abducted in 1986. From the moment Suzy disappeared and Diana stepped dramatically on to centre stage at the press conference, she has toiled hard to prevent further abductions.

The late Baroness Ewart-Biggs became an indefatigable proponent of reconciliation in Ireland and a staunch defender of the downtrodden after her husband was murdered by the IRA in 1976, and there are women like the three members of Women Against Pit Closures who did a sit-in at Parkside Colliery with Anne Scargill. But most recent campaigning women are middle class, with concomitant education.

Men playing a similar role are a strange breed: sometimes hysteria-led, other times obsessed by their grief. Consider the odd behaviour of so-called ‘tug-of-love father’ Peter Malkin who dealt with his sense of personal loss by abducting his 12-year-old son Oliver from his ex-wife’s home in France and leading him on a merry Egyptian dance. Or Ron Smith, father of Helen who died at an illegal drinks party in Jedda in 1979; still he pursues an obsessive quest to find out how she died and keeps her much forensically examined body, vital evidence to him that she was murdered, in a cask in a Leeds mortuary.

THEN there’s Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed at Lockerbie and who, motivated by outrage, has worked – again obsessively – to represent the victims. Or hotelier Peter Ward – father of Julie who was brutally murdered in the Masai Mara game reserve – who has been driven by a rankling sense of injustice and spent five years and £400,000 trying to prove misconduct. There are, of course, male campaigners who prove the exception. Take Colin Parry, father of the Warrington bomb victim Tim, who became an articulate spokesman about the unconscionable act. Or Senator Gordon Wilson, whose daughter Marie was killed by an IRA bomb in Eniskillen on Remembrance Sunday 1987, who met members of the IRA to try to persuade them to lay down their arms.

Dr Dorothy Rowe, psychologist and writer, says: ‘People behave like this because if you can put your experience to some good, then you can comfort yourself that it hasn’t been wasted. It’s easier for women, many of whom have worked in some voluntary capacity, to turn such experiences around and put them into a caring context.’

One can posit that women want conclusions and refuse to fade into obscurity or grieving despair; that they know that out of pain comes strength; realise such campaigning lends an enviable power and purpose to their lives; and find sweetness in the uses of adversity.

Jayne Zito, who works tirelessly to ensure her tragedy was not in vain, analyses her behaviour thus: ‘When Jon died, my life stopped. It’s about trying to take control of something you have no control over.’ She’s driven primarily by love for Jon but her media profile has been a way of dealing with grief. ‘Every time I go on television, I think Christ, they’re analysing me and saying, ‘Here’s Jayne Zito dealing with her grief.’ Taking control is a way of dealing with grief. But it’s just avoiding the inevitable – I’m never going to be satisfied because Jon’s not going to come home.’

Merlyn Nuttall recognises gender differences in campaigning behaviour: ‘Men get angry and want to hit out,’ she concludes. ‘Women are carers, and more logical about rebuilding things to make them better.’

Annie Leibovitz is the star who photographs the stars. Yet she doesn’t come out from behind her lens happily, CAROLINE PHILLIPS discovers.

ANNIE Leibovitz has fixed the look of American popular culture for two decades. She is reputed to earn £1million a year. Annie finds it hard to talk, struggles with her work, worries she’s lost her touch and nearly cried when she walked into her exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Annie, 44, has shot heavily pregnant Demi Moore, Whoopi Goldberg in a bath of milk, John Cleese hanging upside down in a tree pretending to be a bat and Joan Collins, who pushed her cleavage up with gaffer tape. For magazines from Rolling Stone to Vanity Fair, she’s spent the past two decades on the road with Mick Jagger, at the White House for Richard Nixon’s departure and with John Lennon, pictured curled foetally round Yoko, hours before he was murdered. Recently, she left Sarajevo to shoot Sylvester Stallone in Los Angeles.

She’s tall and imposing, dressed all in black, with manly looks and long, highlighted hair. Observing is her life – being observed is uncomfortable, talking about her work is difficult and talking about herself is even worse. ‘Talking is relatively new to me. I only started last year,’ she laughs, holding herself protectively and avoiding eye contact. ‘Working with people was a problem, too. It was making me angry. I didn’t like explaining. I don’t think I’m articulate.’

She keeps on the sidelines in her personal life as well. ‘It’s a battle to stay involved. I like to be there, but I don’t like to participate.’ She never married or had children. ‘It’s just something that slipped by. I didn’t notice if people were attracted to me or not. It’s not something I know how to deal with. Anyway, it’s not over completely yet.’ She adds that she has lots of supportive friends, an extended family and a full life. Has she ever lived with anyone? ‘No. Well, maybe my first boyfriend for a few minutes. Even if I met somebody I wanted to be with, I think we’d live in separate houses, perhaps with a bridge.’

When was the last time she had a relationship? ‘I’m not answering these questions,’ she says, spikily. Is she self-sufficient and scared of intimacy? ‘Next question.’ Her best friend is Susan Sontag, who encouraged her professionally when she didn’t feel strong five years ago. Annie joked once about buying children. ‘That was definitely a joke,’ she says. ‘But I might adopt eventually. I’ll have to decide in the next few years. I love Chinese babies, Oriental babies, their eyes are so beautiful.” One of six children, she was the daughter of an air force colonel. She developed a drive, which, like her drug-taking during the Stones era, seems obsessive.

‘After my childhood, it’s funny you call it my ‘drive’,’ she laughs. ‘Because I was raised in a car. At least, that’s what it felt like. We travelled all over. I thought changing your environment and keeping on the move could solve all your problems.’

When she first worked, she says she ‘didn’t know who I was’. Her push and itinerant lifestyle kept such feelings at bay. ‘Keeping moving is necessary for me. I find it hard to stay still. I’m just starting to slow down.’ Her success has been hard earned. ‘I worked in a vacuum for many years, not noticing that people were noticing me. I was scared of not working. It’s been a sacrifice.’ She is spirited and strong, but she suffers from lack of confidence.

‘Sure, all the time. If I hadn’t taken a good picture, I used to be miserable until I did. And I used to make the people around me miserable, too. It doesn’t get any easier. I’m only just learning to enjoy it.’ SHE talks me round her exhibition, past witty and imaginative Vanity Fair pictures, on to new directions. There are striking images of HIV-positive women who use body paint as therapy. ‘That’s what those women feel like when they walk down the street. As if their insides are painted on their outsides.’

Landscapes of Monument Valley. ‘Often when I take location photographs, I regret having to put the person in the picture later.’ And images of Sarajevo where she went on her own, twice, for 11 days. ‘Unlike Lebanon, you can’t leave the front and drive away. Sure I was scared, but it’s like being in a bowl, you have a false sense of security.”

She won’t talk about the millions her photographs reputedly bring her. Because people might envy her? ‘Money isn’t important. The money I make pays for the overheads.’ So she’s not rich? ‘I’m not. Believe me, it surprises me.’

But she will talk about her fame. ‘I found it unsettling walking the streets of Washington doing the presidential inauguration and being recognised.’ The corollary is that she gets work (like photographing the Olympic hopefuls) because she’s well known.

‘I’d be stupid to say I wasn’t totally enjoying this, the National Portrait Gallery. I’m so surprised, I came to the door and felt like crying. But I think their recognition has come a little early. I know this sounds corny, but I feel like I’m just starting. The best work is ahead.’ It’ll be worth the drive…

A BRIDE GROOM who killed himself 19 days after his wedding attempted suicide with his former lover hours before he ended his life. An inquest on 16 February heard how Stephen Hartwell, 46, had an emotional reunion with his ex-lover Nicola Cordrey, 22, when she discovered he’d remarried. In a bizarre suicide pact, they put a hose from the exhaust into his car. Nicola said she’d never intended them to die and pulled him, semi-conscious, on to the passenger seat. Shortly after, he drove her home. Then Stephen, a divorced father of two with a printing business, drove off, re-attached the hosepipe and killed himself. The inquest, attended by his first and second wives and ex-lover, heard how he’d split up with Nicola last year just a month before meeting Rosemary King, 45, whom he married three months later.

Rosemary, a nurse, has a drawn face, dead eyes and a smoker’s voice. Sometimes she wenches her fingers when she talks, other times her voice cracks and she breaks down crying. She tortures herself with questions. Was Stephen still in love with Nicola? Did he regret his marriage to her? If he wanted to be with Nicola, why did he kill himself?

Rosemary went on a blind date with Stephen last June. They had both divorced after long marriages and she found him attractive. ‘He was clever, liked classical music and wore odd socks.’ Stephen told her then how his brother had shot a man and then killed himself.

Next date, he said his old girlfriend, Nicola, lived with him and his sons. ‘He slept in his son’s room. He said she was living with him because she had nowhere else to go.’ Two months later, he moved into a new flat with just his son.

In September, Stephen proposed. They wanted to marry immediately, but had to wait six weeks for his decree absolute. Why the rush? ‘After his divorce he felt, ‘Do you ever really know anybody?’ We decided to grow together.’ THEY married in a register office, Rosemary wearing a lace wedding dress. ‘I put it in with him in his coffin,’ she says, crying. ‘It didn’t make sense to keep it.’ With chilling prescience, the couple aren’t smiling in their wedding photos.

They made love for the first time that night. ‘He’d kept saying, ‘I don’t want to sleep with you until I marry you.” She laughs. They didn’t have a honeymoon: business, which had been patchy, was now brisk.

Their 19-day marriage was blissful. ‘We looked at Anglo-Saxon architecture, had all-day breakfasts and talked and talked.’ His family had never seen him so happy, says Rosemary, crying, and she didn’t notice in him any sign of anxiety.

On the day of his death, she drove him to work. ‘I phoned, as usual, to say, ‘I love you.’ He wasn’t there.’

His mother, who phoned Stephen twice daily, immediately rang his brothers. ‘Only his family knew he’d been suicidal over the years.’ They opened his office and found a note saying, ‘To all those who love me, thank you.’

‘The bloody bastrd’s left me,’ Rosemary screamed. ‘He’s run off with another woman.’ It didn’t make sense; he’d been desperate to marry her. That night the police searched her house then sat in the kitchen with the wedding cake. ‘We hadn’t yet posted it to people.’ At 9.30am, six police cars arrived… there was a bomb scare. Then two policemen approached her, unsmiling.

‘An emotional bomb exploded inside me. ‘You’ve found Stephen. Has he robbed a bank?’ I joked. I thought, ‘Has he murdered somebody?” They told her, they’d found a man answering Stephen’s description. His children identified him.

‘I went to see him three times before I could believe he was dead.’ Rosemary screws her face in anguish. ‘‘What have you been doing to yourself?’ I asked. Here was this wonderful man I’d just married, lying dead.

‘I wanted to scream but there were no screams inside me. Just this terrible vacuum.’ She lost her voice for days and wept for three weeks until she became dehydrated. She left her job of eight years.

A policeman then told her Stephen had left a note for her. ‘Well love, I haven’t done very well,’ it read. ‘I’m sorry I’m taking the easy way. I’m going for peace (or not, who knows?) I love you, Stephen.’ Then the policeman told her about Nicola. How she’d gone to the police after Stephen died and said they’d spent the day together and had a suicide pact. The police, Rosemary felt, treated her like a murder suspect. They thought Stephen had been deceiving her; but Stephen’s mother said he only saw Nicola, an anorexic who worked at Tesco, because she had nobody else to confide in.

Things became daily more complicated. Stephen’s first wife claimed his watch. ‘I took my marriage certificate to the police station and said, ‘I’m the authentic Mrs Hartwell,” says Rosemary, laughing absurdly. ‘But I didn’t want anything. It was such a mess.’ His relations got everything. Rosemary saw Nicola for the first time at the inquest. ‘This kid recited how they chose the tubes together as if describing making a cake.’ Th emotion in the room was palpable. ‘His mother kept calling out, ‘You bitch,’ to her.’ For Rosemary, the facts didn’t act up. But the police told her they had no proof to charge Nicola with aiding and abetting.

After Stephen’s death, one of his brothers slit his wrists unsuccessfully. Stephen’s first wife told Rosemary how Stephen would sulk for months, had a vile temper and could never be faithful. And his family told her that Nicola threatened suicide each time he attempted to give her up.

Was Rosemary’s life with Stephen a lie? Was Stephen such a good actor? Did she overlook things?

Now Rosemary is picking up the pieces with help from counsellors, friends, her priest and the Samaritans. ‘I just don’t know who the hell I am,” she says. “I have to ask people.’

THESE are true stories of everyday happenings in the genteel suburbs. An obsessive woman looked after a multiple sclerosis sufferer for years and every day scrubbed him in the bath with a Brillo pad. A bearded man attacked his wife brutally and then confided to the police he was a practising transvestite. ‘I’m trying to give it up,’ he explained. ‘As you may appreciate, a beard and dress don’t go well together.’

A woman was put in a stranglehold by her ex-husband and raped each time he visited their child. Another wouldn’t scream for fear of causing her handicapped child distress each time her partner beat her. And an 84-year-old endured emotional abuse and intimidation from her husband – he’d urinate on her washing and let down the tyres on her car – for 50 years. This last woman now has an injunction and an ouster order and is happy. For some of the others, the horror continues.

These are the tales one hears as Zero Tolerance, the campaign launched to publicise the prevalence of domestic violenc, continues (you’ve probably seen the posters: ‘He gave her flowers, chocolates and multiple bruising’). The aim is to emphasise that violence in the home is a crime, is grave, should be reported and that early intervention can prevent further abuse. It hopes also to heighten awareness that broken bones mend and bruises heal, but emotional damage can blight a victim for ever.

The figures are shocking, and the more harrowing since they may simply represent the rumblings of a volcano. On average a woman has been attacked 35 times before she calls the police. In London alone, 100,000 women a year seek treatment for violent injuries received in the home and a quarter of all murders in the capital are domestic.

ABUSERS and victims come from all classes, ethnic groups and ages. ‘Abusers are monsters behind closed doors. Everyone from judges and policemen to refuse collectors,’ says Inspector Shirley Tulloch, who co-ordinates the 62 Metropolitan Police Domestic Violence Units set up to inform and support victims.

The first Domestic Violence Unit began in 1987 in north London. DVUs now employ 126 officers – all with at least two years of police experience and a week of specialist training – two-thirds of whom are women. ‘We choose the best person for the job,’ she says. ‘Some women may actually be less sympathetic than men, finding it hard to understand why the victim doesn’t leave the situation.’

After emergency measures – sometimes an arrest or removal of the abuser – have been taken, the DVUs follow up cases. They inform the victim of her options, offer legal protection, get her medical attention, assist with court appearances and offer advice and support: everything from finding her a solicitor to a space in a refuge.

Sgt Sue Reed, 34, and Pc Ann Snowden-Thomas, 33, run the Cheshunt Domestic Violence Unit. Started in March 1992, they cover 40 square miles and have seen 1,628 victims. All the case histories mentioned are their clients. To date, one of their victims and two aggressors have committed suiide.

Their police station room is filled with office paraphernalia, a poster saying ‘Scars of domestic violence aren’t always visible’, a fish tank, soft toys and nappies. Victims often come here with their babies. But the officers – who wear their own smart office clothes and are warm and energetic – also meet their clients everywhere from Wimpy bars to car parks. The latter was the meeting place for one victim who was forced to tell her husband exactly where she was going each time she left the house and was then timed on every occasion.

It can be difficult for victims to speak out. Eight per cent of (reported) victims are male – not necessarily the victims of female violence – and it may be harder for men to admit their problem. Men or women with professional partners may also face particular difficulties – the fear of social stigma and the loss of her husband’s job and company flat, for example. And so too ethnic women, who may have a language barrier, arranged marriage or immigration difficulties.

‘Hundreds of my clients tell their parents first and are admonished with ‘I told you you shouldn’t have married him’,’ says Reed. ‘If they tell their friends, their friends may just say ‘Get rid of him’.’ In addition, lawyers, policemen and journalists have exacerbated the difficulty by sometimes treating domestic crime dismissively.

Reed and Snowden-Thomas do not sit in judgment of their clients. ‘We’re supportive and validate their feelings,’ says Reed. ‘I say, ‘I know you still have feelings for this person.’ You can’t be sexually intimate with a partner, have a history and children and then not have feelings.’ Many people (including some colleagues and social workers, notes Reed) fail to understand why a victim doesn’t leave a worsening violent situation. The current sluggish property market means that divorced couples can be stuck under the same roof, with horrendous results. But the majority of women being battered want the violence to stop and to be able to stay in the relationship.

An abser uses physical and emotional strategies to control his victim. After years of criticism (of her as a mother, her looks, her performance in bed) a victim feels useless. ‘The abuser may then control her by not allowing her money and with the threat of physical violence,’ says Reed. ‘At other times the relationship is good. Then there’s another build-up of tension and another explosion of violence after which the abuser is remorseful, begs forgiveness and promises he’ll never do it again. It’s what the victim knows and is comfortable with and it may be someone she loves.’ But then the cycle of violence repeats itself. ‘The time between incidents becomes shorter and the abuse gets worse. Frequently when a woman believes she’s going to be killed, she tries to escape – which is often the most dangerous time.’ Reed doesn’t find it dispiriting that women may leave a violent relationship and end up in another. ‘People are human. Just as an alcoholic is always an alcoholic, you can always be a potential victim.’ She believes the law should be changed. ‘The legislation doesn’t take into account the circumstances of a woman who has been battered for 10 or 20 years and ends up killing her partner. She’s nearly always charged with murder rather than manslaughter.’

A PIONEERING charity is claiming success against the spiralling problem of drug crime by treating prison inmates for drug and alcohol abuse. The Addictive Diseases Trust rehabilitation programme is the first to establish itself full-time in a British penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey, and has rehabilitated a third of the people it has treated. The work comes at a time of growing public concern about the links between crime and drugs. Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair said drug-related crime cost £2 billion a year, half of all property crime was drug related and the number of notified addicts had risen five fold since 1982. The ADT programme began in 1991. It is modelled on 200 such programmes in American prisons, most of which now have drugs-free wings. The reoffending rate among ‘graduates’ of one course in Arkansas is down from 65 per cent to 20 per cent.

The ADT programme, which has been followed by 127 people, involves complete abstention from mood-altering substances plus group and individual therapy. ‘Over a third of those who have completed our 72-day treatment programme are clean and sober today,’ says Jonathan Wallace, its director. In England and Wales there are more than 45,000 people in prison, of whom over half have addiction problems. There are only 14 places on the ADT course, which receives no statutory funding and is struggling for financial survival. I sat in an ADT therapy group in Downview Prison with 14 men – from murderers to thieves.

Their crimes, committed in the grips of addiction, were harrowing. To send a man on an ADT course costs £1,000; to keep him in prison costs over £19,000 annually.

The men talked about how one landing shared a needle for a couple of months; how they maintained drug habits of up to £100 a day (people get hurt when debts are unpaid); and how a desperate addict will go to any lengths – including stabbing an inmate – for his drugs.

Johnny, 31, pimp, burglar, drug dealer and addict completed the ADT programme. He has spent a third of his life in prison and this month was released for the 12th time. Now he intends, sincerely, never to reoffend. He started smoking marijuana at the age of nine, did 30 burglaries when he was 13, lived off immoral earnings at 16 and carried guns for protection when dealing in drugs.

His cousin was a prostitute. ‘She told me to take money off the hookers and have sex with them. I didn’t know what to do with all the money. I didn’t have any hopes or aims. ‘

Today things are very different. He has lost contact with his two children from different women but intends to settle down, have a family and become a counsellor. ‘I want to be honest.’

His mother was 17 when he was born and he was sent to live with his grandmother. His mother was a prostitute, which brutalised him. ‘When I was seven I saw her having sex with her clients.’ He played truant from school from 13 and was then sent to approved school. Johnny started taking drugs when he was nine and his habit eventually cost him £300 a day. ‘For several years I did four burglaries a day to feed my habit.’ Each time he was released from prison, he would reoffend within two weeks. ‘I’d even go on home leave and commit burglaries, sometimes taking stolen property back to prison.’

Prison made him feel resentful towards authority and the criminal justice system. ‘There’s nothing to do apart from listening to music or taking drugs. I saw myself as a lost cause.’

He decided to change last year when, hallucinating on Ecstasy and running from the police, he fell from a roof and broke his neck. ‘I wanted to do something constructive while I was locked up. The programme taught me to accept the things I didn’t like about myself and confront my past. It made me want a drugs-free lifestyle. It wasn’t prison that changed me. It was the ADT programme.’

TOMORROW Romaine Hart, the woman behind London’s most successful independent cinemas, goes to the palace to collect her OBE for services to the British film industry. For the past two decades she has enticed discerning cinemagoers to her picture houses all over London and the Home Counties, from the hip Screen on the Green, Islington, to the modish Screen on the Hill, Hampstead.

Romaine lives part-time in a Georgian house in north London with the through-traffi soon sniffed oc of distant relations, and decamps for much of the week to work in ‘London with fresh air’ her Fifties-style American home, a bungalow overlooking the Sussex Downs.

The Hart family boasts cinema owners dating back to the turn of the century. Romaine, the third generation to earn a living from the cinema, and her daughter Nicky, a film producer, take computers and fax machines to their metropolitan-style country retreat to do their London film deals overlooking fields.

The house was built in 1958 by a Scottish farmer who had a hut on the site, which is a protected area. In 1970 he rushed out to chase a cow, had a heart attack and never came home. Romaine bought the house even before the particulars were typed up.

‘They said it was a bungalow and I said ‘ugh’.’ She had been looking for a period cottage with dovecot and picture-postcard thatch. But the agent insisted she saw it. She made an offer on the spot. ‘The position was so fantastic.’ The Harts soon put the house through its urban-awareness training.

One visiting granny, then a gentle lady in her seventies, insisted on trying her first joint there; since the house is of open-ish plan, her grandchildren soon sniffied out her secret.

Another time John, her then husband, thought he heard burglars and rushed out with a loaded rifle. He fired his gun, barely missed his foot and caught the tail end of a cow. Nicky and her sister Sarah were taught to drive in the field, using the cows as roundabouts.

The neighbours have always considered it a house of nudity. It is a local joke that the Scouts who have an open invitation to use the pool are frequently greeted by people in birthday suits. The word spread, and aircraft from nearby Shoreham airport now fly low in summer. There have also been lots of wild parties in this outpost of liberal Hampstead. John held the reception there for his marriage to his second wife. As 150 people trooped through, Romaine sat greeting the guests of wife number two, then realised that most of them had been at her wedding too.

The house was pretty rough when they bought it. It had sheep in the sitting room and a naff Fifties wooden beam. The Harts took over and turned it into a Seventies pad with brown hessian everywhere. In the sitting room they had a Le Corbusier arc light and Le Corbusier chair with pony skin. It was like a trendy bachelor pad with groovy Oscar Woollens furniture. (When they divorced, John removed the LCs but left a Seventies brown corduroy chair.) They were determined to take London into the country. The hessian came down in the Eighties and they went minimalist in the Nineties, with a new kitchen, new bathroom and Swedish windows. The kitchen is designed by London architect Seth Stein. A modern room with clean lines, it has a beech plank floor, curved marble bar, Danish double cooker and large industrial sink.

‘I love his style and wanted to do something interesting and modern,’ says Romaine, a keen cook. On the wall is a frontal nude by their friend John Swarbroke: to turn on the lights, you press the nipples. The sitting room has white walls, sea-grass floor matting and massive creamy sofas. There’s an Adirondak, a beechwood Californian seaside chair which looks like a combination of UFO and flying deck chair. Like much of the art in the house, a friend made it in their garage.

On a side table is a book by Betty Balcombe, psychic healer, counsellor and close family friend. ‘She’s been a wonderful help and influence on my life and career,’ says Romaine, smiling. ‘When I first introduced Betty to Sarah, my daughter was living in a squat in Hackney with black walls. Betty changed her life and she came home and stopped rebelling.’ The bathroom is also a Stein affair with pebbledash ‘liquid stone’ on the floor, power shower, beech slat blinds and limestone surfaces that Romaine saw in a smart restaurant during the Santa Monica film market last year. They have two bedrooms, but have slept up to 12, utilising the sitting-room floor. They have further Stein plans for a minimal-style bedroom and a bathroom with glass all round, ‘so that you feel as if you’re in the garden’.

So back to films. Romaine is known to buck the film establishment, take risks and back outsiders. She sees 90 per cent of the films they screen and goes to all the film markets. How does she view the role she has played in the British film industry?

‘I started the Screens because I wanted the sort of cinemas that showed the kind of films I was interested in seeing,’ she says, curling her feet feet up on the sofa. ‘We try not to show films that aren’t of quality. We’re like a book club which vets the books first.’

TODAY, Valentine’s Day, divorcée Richard Fleet will propose to divorcée Gina, just as he has every day for the last six months. He’ll arrive from work a say: ‘Hullo love, marry me.’ If she says no and starts arguing, he’ll call and propose later. Sometimes he proposes on one knee, often he begs her, and other times tears of supplication splash down his cheeks.

Some men might hesitate to marry a woman who divorced just 18 months ago. A woman on the rebound from an acrimonious break-up. One that was horrific for Gina, who cried incessantly and was really nervous and ill. But Richard knows the score… because Gina divorced him. They were married for 25 years and have three grown-up children.

After one row, early in the marriage, Gina went to stay with her mother. Gina remembers the day, 9 February 1969. She was pregnant and was driven through the night and thick snow by her Uncle Jo in his Consul. Suddenly she gave birth in the car to Kim, her second daughter, delivered by Nigel, a friendly policeman outside the Co-op in Rye Lane, Peckham.

Gina, 44, was born on Friday the 13th, which ‘explains everything’. Richard, 46, believes God put him on earth to see how much Man could handle: big ears, nohair and putting up with Gina, he says, for starters. We’re sitting in the marital home in south London, a compact semi which they share with a giant poodle clipped like a topiary bush. Gina, who looks timid, wears leggings and baggy shirt. Richard, a scaffolder, is in jeans and ear stud.

They met first when Gina was 13 years old, in the block of Peckham flats where she lived. He used to hang around there with his friends. Was it love at first sight? ‘I fancied her from the off, but didn’t think I had much chance. I wasn’t the best looking of people,’ says Richard. He dated other girls and they didn’t see each other again until she was 16. Then he asked her repeatedly to go out with him. Finally they went to see Dr Zhivago and held hands. Did they kiss? ‘No, she was prudish and my hands were sweating.’ That night Gina asked her mother: ‘How will I know when I’ve met the right person?’ Her mother said: ‘You’ll know.’ And Gina replied: ‘I’ve met the right person.’

In fact, Richard proposed to her after Dr Zhivago. On their very first date. Did he kneel? ‘Nah,’ he replies. ‘I was a bit embarrassed. I just said, ‘Can we get married? I love you and all that.” Gina said she was too young but he asked her (‘loads of times’) over the following months. ‘She kept knocking me back. I don’t think she fancied me.’ ‘No, not at first,’ she agrees.

Gina was a virgin when she met Richard and had only ever dated one other boy. ‘Richard was different,’ she says, firmly. ‘He could drive.’ Six months after Dr Zhivago, she accepted his proposal. They became engaged on her birthday.

They married in 1966 at St John’s, Peckham. Did they believe in the vows? ‘Oh yes,’ says Richard.

‘Come on,’ remonstrates Gina.

‘Well, I believe in the vows but when you go through a sticky bit you think,‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of paper.”

They didn’t have a honeymoon because they were broke. They spent their wedding night at Gina’s mother’s.

‘That night I went to bed and mother told Richard he couldn’t. She told him when he was allowed to go. It all went wrong from the beginning,’ says Gina.

They then lived in a house furnished with only one chair. Thereafter they argued frequently and sometimes Gina didn’t talk to him for weeks. ‘She used to tell the kids, ‘Tell him his dinner’s here.”

Was the sex good? ‘No, because I married too young and had been too sheltered. I’d missed out,’ says Gina.

‘She’s not experimental,’ adds Richard. ‘She’s very prudish and even refuses to undress in front of me. That bugs me rotten. But our sex life was good.

‘Well you said it wasn’t and I didn’t know any different.’

EIGHTEEN years after they married, Richard started an affair. ‘She was a mistress,’ hisses Gina. It took a while before Gina became suspicious. Her friends disagreed, saying Richard was too nice.

One evening, Richard didn’t come home and Gina discovered his car outside the Other Woman’s flat. ‘I stood outside in the pouring rain. He was my world.’ Later, Gina went to the pub where Richard’s mistress worked. ‘I was so naive I asked the Other Woman, ‘Do you have sex with my hsband?’ and she said, ‘Well of course I do. Hasn’t he told you?” Another time Gina went to the pub and hit her rival. Richard adds that the relationship was based on nothing more than sex. ‘He thinks he’s a conservative,’ says Gina.

Gina filed for divorce on legal aid and cited the Other Woman (who admitted adultery) as co-respondent. Gina lost two stone, sobbed incessantly, went to marriage guidance counselling (‘rubbish,’ she says) and lost confidence. Was the divorce painful for Richard? ‘No, because I never even read what I signed.’

‘Twice since, I’ve caught him trying to burn the paper.’

Gina dealt with divorce by finding a job in a canteen on a building site of 300 men. She started an affair with a 27-year-old bricklayer. When Richard found out, he thought: ‘I’m not having that.’ He looks at his hands. ‘She was my Gina, my little virgin waiting for me to come home every day.’ So he knocked at her door with his suitcase in hand and said he was back. They’d been apart nearly a year. ‘I lost a stone when I found out he was younger than me,’ explains Richard.

THE Marchioness of Worcester, former actress Tracy Ward, is a woman obsessed. She lives on the Duke of Beaufort’s Badminton House estate and believes in organic farms fertilised with human manure. She cycles around the countryside wearing a Rajisthani skirt and fiddles with Ladakh prayer beads. To save water, she doesn’t flush the loo after she pees. Her life makes gossip columnists gleeful. She was expelled from school after smacking the deputy headmistress, did a sexy cabaret act, stripping to black camisole, in rough London pubs, posed nude for Norman Parkinson and dated heroin-addicted Etonians. Tracy’s sister is the actress Rachel, her mother is married to Lord ‘call girl’ Lambton and Tracy married Harry ‘Bunter’ Worcester, heir to the Duke of Beaufort’s fortune. Phew! In the past few years, Tracy has metamorphosed. She’s now Mother Tracy, the tireless charity worker and Green person. She’s a trustee of Friends of the Earth, The Gaia Foundation (works with indigenous people in forest areas), Transport 2000 (to reverse the Government’s £23 billion road programme, improve public transport and cut down pollution) and the Schumacher Society (lectures by eminent environmentalists).

She agreed to be interviewed only if we talked about Gatt, the EC, cost benefit analyses in our economic system, unbridled capitalism and suchlike. I’d just returned from a trip to Venezuela. ‘Did you stay with many tribal people?’ she asked, hopefully.

Now we meet. She should live in a grass hut, but wants to work within the system so resides in upper-class splendour in a lodge with oil paintings. Outside, her A-reg BMW sports anti-nuke stickers. She walks with amazing grace, is ethereal and wears that Rajisthani skirt (originally her protest vote against the plight of Ethiopian cotton workers, she won’t buy things that undermine other communities’ health) and a large emerald ring and Rolex watch. She’s beautiful, sexy, pouty and speaks with a just-woken-up breathlessness.

She offers coffee or ginger, then nips off to collect her daughter Bella on her bike, telling me, big-heartedly, to eat an apple or raid the fridge. Now we talk in the peaceful, grand sitting room. She’s just sent 2,000 (‘to everybody I know’) Friends of the Earth application forms, out of her own money and time. ‘They’ve all told me they’re really concerned with the environment. So I’ve made it easy for them.’

She’s happily married, but her husband doesn’t share her views and the relationship isn’t very Green. What makes her marriage work? ‘I guess we love each other,’ she says simply. ‘There’s mutual respect, independence and we share a lot too. My being an ecologist, caring about trees, African people, Gatt and the way that we consume doesn’t interfere with that.’ She speaks characteristically with a faraway look in her eyes, as if she’s in her own world.

SO ASK her, say, what she’d like to do one day with Badminton. ‘My vision of it is irrelevant. Forget it! It’s his. We live in a patriarchal society and all the decisions about money and property rest with the man.’ Or about children: Bobby, five, and Bella, two; surely an ideal number in terms of population explosion? ‘Don’t let’s go into this … I’d like two and Harry would like three. So we’ll have three. But I don’t want to make the article a battle between …’

Bella was born on the NHS. ‘If you have money and are spoilt, you pay through the nose for something which is well supplied by the NHS. Also I didn’t want just to be among people who can afford to be in an expensive hospital. I wanted to give the money I’d have spent at the Portland to the Gaia Foundation,’ she says.

‘But you could have done that anyway.’

‘Yuh, I could have. But I do as well. It was just that ideally I wanted Harry to give what he would’ve paid for the Portland. But it didn’t work that way,’ she says. ‘I never asked him.’

Her children are educated privately. ‘But I want them to understand there is more to life than making money and satisfying shareholders.’ And if Bobby so desires, she’ll take him hunting. Isn’t there a contradiction here? ‘No. Because I don’t see how we can get people who work in the cities and make decisions about property and motorways to really love the countryside unless they are out in it. Most of these people don’t come to the countryside unless they’re hunting.’

Her environmentalism is an obsession. Why? She tortures her hair. She says she doesn’t feel the spiritual emptiness that she thinks many in the West suffer. ‘I just feel I have a real craving for learning, maybe because I didn’t work hard enough as a child.’

She finds it tricky to talk about her childhood. ‘In the past I’ve had my nanny and mother ring up in tears.’ She was bought up in an Oxfordshire manor by her nanny in a nursery, saw her parents rarely, and went to boarding school aged 11. ‘I was always being chucked out. I’d had enough of discipline at home. I didn’t work very hard, or concentrate. I couldn’t take people telling me what to do.

‘You should have guidance and love from your immediate family or community. My mother was off doing her own thing, it was the fashion then. I don’t feel my parents and nanny gave me any direction,’ she says, slowly. ‘At school you’re just one of 300 people and don’t have enough identity.’ She might have discovered her identity in acting, but found it egotistical and self-obsessive. ‘Also I felt vulnerable having started so late.’ It’s hard now to imagine her as the raunchy cabaret stripper. An easy target, the alternative Marchioness is commonly dismissed as an old hippy and accused of being ineffectual. She maintains that money and title are not important, but knows both make it easier for her to hold her opinions. She can be naive (idealised visions of spiritually happy tribal people) but she’s hard-working and her intentions are extremely good. She seems to have found herself through helping other people and if she’s worthy, why the hell not!

THE secret of human sexual attraction has been solved and scientists have found a way to bottle sex appeal. Professor George Dodd of Warwick University has developed The Pheromone Factor, a synthetic version of the chemicals (pheromones) secreted by the body to attract others. Your pheromone-enhanced smell, he claims, will hook a sexual partner by acting on his subconscious.

The Pheromone Factor (TPF) comes in a nasty 15ml plastic bottle and at £29.99 plus £3 P&P costs roughly the same as a bottle of Bollinger Grande Annee. Since TPF smells like hair spray, Bollinger seems the more likely aphrodisiac.

‘The formulation will not automatically put people under your spell,’ says the blurb on the bottle of sexual success. ‘But it will kindle any sparks of attraction that may be present. It is urged that you use it responsibly.’ The instructions tell me to add 10 drops of TPF to 30ml of my own favourite fragrance. Chanel 19 only comes in 50ml bottles, so I have to add 16.6 drops. I plough on with enthusiasm because I know from women’s magazines that I need sex to stay trim and keep my wrinkles at bay. Then I go to Harrods to enhance my own sexuality, stimulate sexual responses and improve my chances of finding a partner. After all, this is the hot spot where Richard Gere was kissed by Miss UK Amanda Johnson before he ventured into the bed department where a brass bed almost collapsed under the weight of females trying to get near the greying heart throb. I’m wearing office purdah – my body covered from high necked jumper to ankles – so it won’t be my tantalising clothes that pull the men. But they will sniff and be uncontrollably drawn to me. No male shopper will be safe. Before the eyes of the startled throng, I’ll be passionately entwined. I hose myself with Chanel 19 and TPF in the Harrods perfumerie then stand and wait. It’s mostly women in there and there’s more than a smell of hormones in this sales rush. Modern standards of hygiene mean that normally I disguise my natural body odours and sexual pheromones. But now I’ve replaced mine, I can sense the hordes of ravenous males herding in my direction.

I stand and I wait. And still I stand and wait. Researchers think an organ in the nose specialises in sexual smells. When you lose your sense of smell, your libido nosedives. I presume the men in the perfumerie have lost their sense of smell.

I go to the food halls. The scents in TPF each have an almost exact molecular counterpart in classic aphrodisiac foods. Dodd’s ingredients include oysters to caviar, ripe stilton and champagne – but they are all subliminal, so I don’t smell like a larder. En route a man starts to flash at me. But it’s only a Harrods model policeman with his flashing light. I WAFT expectantly by a row of men in the delicatessen who remain with their backs firmly planted to my face. A man at the fish bar tells me I smell too floral – but only after some prompting and my burying his nose in my brain. I’d have more success if I buried my head in a bowl of oysters. I go upstairs where in desperation I sit on a brass bed. I move a male customer’s bag in order to sit. ‘Do you want to buy it?’ he asks, snappily. ‘I work for the Evening Standard and I’m wearing sex pheromones,’ I tell him. ‘I smell nothing,’ he replies, walking off.

I call the chairman Mohammed Al Fayed to ask if he’d like to smell me. I’m assured he’d have been charmed but he’s out.

Back in the street the Harrods head doorman treats me courteously. He’s been there for donkey’s years and never sniffed a customer before. But even a green man isn’t turned on.

Suddenly two stallions loom into view. Pauke and Vechter, the 16-hand Harrods horses. Pauke, six years old, is a toyboy and shows great interest in me.

But it turns out to be the smell of mints that he’s pursuing. TRACEY in Barkers’ perfume department already knew all about pheromones. ‘My mum sold a bottle in her boutique in Reading to the man from the martial arts shop next door,’ she confided. So did it work? ‘I don’t think he got any girls,’ she said, ‘but his dog jumped on him.’ He should have read the small print – it warns that The Pheromone Factor is ‘not tested on animals’.

I was hoping for better luck as I mixed the required number of drops of my neutral-smelling colourless pheromone liquid with Obsession For Men eau de toilette – Tracey’s personal recommendation as the sexiest male scent – and splashed it on. Tracey somehow managed to restrain herself and I strode out into the streets of Kensington, confident that women’s heads would turn wherever I went and mindful of the warning on the bottle to ‘act responsibly’.

No one on the street seemed to notice that they were walking past a sex god. I hailed a cab and headed for an appointment at a Mayfair hotel. My taxi driver, who was a man, managed to keep his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel despite the overpowering whiff in the back of his cab. At the hotel my interviewee, the country singer John Denver, also managed to control himself, although there were occasions when he leaned towards me to emphasise certain points. We didn’t exchange numbers.

It was only as I was bidding farewell to the glamorous publicist that I got the first glimmer that the pheromones might be taking effect. She suddenly started talking about sex videos, apropos of nothing in particular, and I revealed my secret. Suddenly she looked very flustered: her cheeks went bright red, she clasped her hands to her face and stifled some laughter. For a moment it seemed as if it might be the start of a beautiful relationship. Then she explained the joke: ‘I wondered what it was – I was feeling a little sick.’

The next appointment was lunch with a couple of PR girls at a trendy restaurant. As I waited on my own for them to arrive an attractive waitress bumped into me and apologised with a charming smile: could it have been intentional? I may never know.

WHEN the girls arrived they gave no outward signs of wanting to consummate lunch. Any fantasies of what some newspapers might call a ‘three-in-a-bed romp’ were fading fast as I agonised over when to spill the beans about my sexy secret. I waited until the end of the main course to reveal all. The girls were apologetic for not having exhibited more passion but confessed that they were unmoved. They hadn’t even noticed the smell.