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.

DOUBLE-killer Norman Parker, 48, was freed last week after spending more than half his life in jail. In 1963, aged 18, Parker, who is Jewish, shot dead his Nazi girlfriend who was two-timing him. He might have hanged, but pleaded self-defence and was jailed for manslaughter. In 1971, he was convicted of a gangland killing – the sensational Body in a Trunk murder – in which his victim was hammered, shot six times and disposed of in the New Forest.

During 28 years in more than 20 jails, Parker rubbed shoulders with notorious criminals like the Great Train Robbers and the Krays. He was also befriended by tycoon Gerald Ronson in Ford open prison, where Ronson was serving his sentence for his part in the Guinness scandal.

While inside, Parker gained an Open University degree and wrote Parkhurst Tales, a harrowing book about prison life. When Ronson left prison, he got Parker an agent to help him sell the book for television. ‘I’ve seen Gerald three times since he’s been out,’ Parker says in his Cockney accent. ‘I met him in schule (synagogue). We treated each other as equals. We’re both proud men.’

Parker is short with strong features and a prison gym physique. He is tough, lucid, looks you in the eye and never laughs. He wears jeans, and a chain around his neck.

He shot 18-year-old Susan Fitzgerald one afternoon in Notting Hill. She admired Adolf Hitler and kept guns and books on concentration camps. ‘It was strange for a Jewish boy to pick up with a Nazi. Both her brothers were guards to Sir Oswald Mosley and her family was deeply involved in armed robberies. She was a violent and unbalanced girl who slept with a gun under her pillow. It was a tempestuous relationship.

‘One day we had a hideous argument. She pulled out a gun. I thought she was going to shoot me, so I pulled out my gun and fired one shot,’ he says, matter-of-factly. ‘It hit her in the head.’

Parker then talks about his second killing, clenching his wrist with his hand. He was in his office with his co-defendant, David Woods, and Edward Coleman, a violent robber from Glasgow. ‘We had an argument about the way we wanted to hijack a lorry. Edward pulled a gun on me. I struggled for it, David hit him with a hammer, he fell to the ground and I killed him with his own gun. I killed a man who seconds before was trying to kill me. ‘At worst it was manslaughter. (This is the subject of a current judicial review.) That’s what I’ve done 23 years for. I don’t think the public lose much sleep when violent criminals kill one another. I covered up the murder. But we bumped into a policeman when we were trying to dispose of the body, and I assaulted him.’

How does he feel about having terminated two lives? ‘That’s something you can’t put into words. When you’re young and unfeeling, you can’t empathise. Now I’ve had quarter of a century of suffering. I feel diabolical about Susan. I loved her deeply. I visit her grave and pray for forgiveness.’ What drove him to murder? ‘I used to experience intense rages and a deep sense of frustration. I was emotionally unstable. I don’t think the roots were in my childhood, though. I just wasn’t happy with my lot in life.’ (His father was a bookkeeper, his mother a post office worker. He went to grammar school, did well academically and left aged 17.) Was he a psychopath? ‘That’s a catch-all term. I lacked empathy for people, so it was true in that sense.’ His last psychiatric report said he had high self-esteem and a sense of responsibility.

He’s changed in prison. ‘My first prison sentence definitely made my rage worse. But it is a corrosive emotion and I’ve learned to chill out. Things no longer touch me. I’ve become almost totally self-sufficient. I didn’t have any emotional relationships in prison. I pulled up the drawbridge and retreated into the castle.’

His Judaism also grew. ‘It’s rare to have a Jewish murderer. Anything related to crime is frowned on by rabbis more than ministers of any other denomination. I’ve been in jails where the rabbi has refused to talk to me or even shake hands.’

Does he believe in divine retribution and punishment when he dies? ‘I believe in God. So almost certainly.’

He doesn’t know whether he might re-offend. ‘Nobody can know. Emotional violent crimes are unpredictable. I could show you priests and bank managers who have committed or attempted murder. I’m not going to get involved in crime again.’

The world Parker has re-entered is different and shocking. He’s astonished at the dirtiness of London, powerful cars and the number of foreigners. ‘I can’t believe the homeless people on the streets. People actually sleep in cardboard boxes.

‘I’m also shocked by sex and promiscuity. Take these phone lines where people talk dirty to you. If someone had come out with that 23 years ago, he’d have been dragged into a psychiatric hospital.’ (He says when he went into prison he read The Daily Telegraph. ‘Now I’d describe myself as a radical socialist.’) He has returned to his 82-year-old mother. ‘Waiting for me kept her alive. She’s the only person in the world that I’m close to. I’ve had to get to know her again. She’d become a stranger.’

His father has gone into a rest home and his sister, an ex-bunny girl and model, disappeared. ‘She attempted suicide and turned to drink. Nobody’s seen her for 15 years.’

Parker thinks he’ll ‘adapt easily’ to life outside. ‘I’m ready to work for two or three years. I hope I’ll be able to get enough money to buy myself a nice place in Portugal and sit in the sun for a few years. I hope I’ll do something with my writing.’

His book, Parkhurst Tales, bears his pen name ‘Fred Barabbas’. ‘Barabbas was crucified on the cross next to Christ, not just any old criminal. In case that was grandiose, I added Fred …

A SOCIALITE who shrinks from publicity, the beautiful Uruguayan aristocrat and fixer for Hello! magazine who is said to travel the world with a Louis Vuitton suitcase full of money in search of celebrities for the magazine, Marquesa de Varela has opened the doors of her garden in her stunning rented Knightsbridge home to give her first interview. The triumph of Hello! is largely due to the normally mysterious marquesa, its marvellous hit woman. She has formidable contacts with the rich and famous and is a friend of the Duchess of York’s mother, Mrs Susan Barrantes. It was the marquesa, with her jet setting and title, who scooped the world with her 48-page special on the Duke and Duchess of York. She is famed for her exclusive though not penetrating interviews. (At Mandy Smith’s bedside, she asked: ‘Do you cry a lot?’) She never gets too personal, nor does she try to trick anyone in her interviews, nor does she put any indiscretions in print. (The only person she really wants to interview who hasn’t agreed to her request is the Pope!) The glamorous and charming marquesa has carte blanche from her publisher to fly Concorde to her interviews.

The marquesa has also shown great strength of character in the face of tragedy. She has two wrecked marriages, is said to be a social climber and may not be entitled to her title, which she should have relinquished (under Spanish law) when she divorced her husband.

Known to her friends as Naneta (a nickname from her nanny meaning ‘little girl’), her real name is Julia Marin. The marquesa, who admits to being 48, has perfect unruffled poise, cleavage, wonderful chestnut hair and looks devastatingly sexy in a Miss Selfridge dress and Portobello market jewellery.

Marquesa, you put a book on dogs and elephants on the table for our photograph. Why? ‘I hope it’ll teach people to take care of animals. I have 60 stray dogs I have collected in Uruguay. I really love them, I really suffer for them.’

In the first issue of Hello! you had an interview with the Princess Royal at Buckingham Palace. Can you tell us about that? ‘I don’t believe in writing letters to anybody important to ask for an interview. It’s much better that their friends explain what I want. Princess Anne wasn’t funny at all. The first thing I said to her when I arrived was, ‘I’ve come here to do a nice, positive, happy story.’ And she replied, ‘Well, you’ve come to the wrong place.’ It was my first time at Buckingham Palace, my first Royal, and in a different language. She wasn’t at all easy, but she is intelligent and cultured.’

IS IT true that you carry a Louis Vuitton suitcase full of money round the world? ‘No. I hate labels. I travel round the world in my leggings and American knickers.’ American knickers? ‘Yes, like Reebok.’ Ah, American sneakers. ‘Yes. What is knickers?’

You have met so many stars, you must have some interesting stories. ‘We were in Khashoggi’s boat during Ramadan when he was one of the richest men in the world. Suddenly the photographer said there was a lot of blood running down the corridor of the boat. They were killing sheep on board. I couldn’t sleep after that. I was so obsessed about the animals they were killing in the kitchen.’

The world and his wife wanted an interview with Mandy Smith. But you were the one who got it. Why? ‘I got Mandy because I have suffered a lot, really a lot with my second husband. So I could understand Mandy. She is not the blonde bimbo everyone thinks.’

Why have you given me a world exclusive with this interview? ‘I kept saying ‘no’ to everybody, but I have nothing to hide. I’m fed up with people saying I’m frivolous and a social climber. You have been lucky in getting me. You just happened to call when I was fed up with people talking about ‘the mysterious marquesa’.’

You put the rich and famous at their ease. How? ‘Because I live like them. It’s easy for me to understand their mentalities.’

How did you get the interview with the Duke and Duchess of York? ‘Luck. I was never a friend of the Prince’s. I’d only met him briefly. But I was friendly with a friend of his. Prince Andrew is the most charming man I’ve ever met and Fergie is so natural. She often says things that the Press wouldn’t believe. I’m like the diary journalists. I have to keep a lot inside me.’

You are a deeply glamorous person, marquesa. Can you tell us about that? ‘Since I was 13 I had to be glamorous because I was beautiful and I was the daughter of a rich man. I had to be frivolous as well. But deep down I’m not like that. I love my family and I try to be good with people who work. I understand how tough it is to work.’

Who are your famous friends? ‘Fergie’s mother is one of my best friends. She was staying here until yesterday when she went back to Argentina. She always stays with me when she comes to England. I’m also very good friends with the Duke of Northumberland who is very weird and goes out with Barbara Carerra. I have lunch with the Duchess of York and many dukes and duchesses.’ You have worked for Hola! (the original Spanish version of Hello!) for 11 years and have a Midas touch. But why do you still work? Why don’t you find a rich man, marry and go to live in Texas? ‘That’s what I’d ask myself if I were interviewing myself. All my friends have. They’ve all got the richest husbands. It’s easy. If you want to get married, you just do it. ‘But I was brought up in Uruguay (the Switzerland of America) and we were taught in my family never to go with men for money. Not to look for help from outside yourself, but to have pride, honesty and morals, although I’m not a Virgin Mary.’

What would put you off marriage? ‘I couldn’t marry someone if I didn’t like the way he dressed. If someone has bad taste, he has bad taste in everything. He’ll buy the worst car and we’ll disagree on everything.’ You were married first for nine years, then 11 and have since been alone for 10 years. You don’t currently have a boyfriend. How do you manage? ‘It’s difficult. I’ve been alone for years. But not for much longer now because I’ve made up my mind not to be. After my disastrous marriages, I was hurt and upset and didn’t want to know about men. I have not had a lover for years. I have my morals.’

Can you tell us about your marriages? ‘I was crazily in love with two very handsome and very destructive men. First Montenegro, then the Marques de Varela. I didn’t marry because of money. I could have married 10 times better. I was a really beautiful and successful woman. I could have married many famous names.’

You have said you suffered a lot with your husbands. ‘The marques was a very cold personality. I’m the opposite. I was crazily in love with him. But he only looked at me because I was beautiful and like another jewel that he had bought. I suffered horribly emotionally. I was always looking for love and never found it. I’ve told you things about my marriage that I’ve never told anyone.’

How did you meet the Marques de Varela? ‘He asked a friend of mine, ‘Who is the most beautiful and successful girl in Marbella this summer?’ Of course it was me. So we had a blind date. The minute I saw him, I was in love. He is so handsome, intelligent. And he knows how to command a woman.’ Is it true that you aren’t entitled to your title? ‘My husband said I could keep it. Unless I remarry, I’m the Marquesa de Varela.’ Marquesa, you live in the same jet-set way as the stars who grace the pages of Hello! How important is money to you? ‘Money is not important, I swear. But I don’t want to sound phoney. Money is important to everybody. It gives you freedom and you can buy whatever you want. In Uruguay, families depend on me. Families who used to work for my father on a farm. Each month I say I want to fire them, but I can’t do it. I’m not rich by European standards.’

You have homes all over the world. Can you tell us about them? ‘I have a small flat in Madrid and a house in Knightsbridge, but there are builders there. I have a farm in Uruguay, a new house in Montevideo and a farm in Punta del Este.’ (She phones the following day and says: ‘I own more property that I forgot about. I have a flat in Buenos Aires, another farm in Punta del Este and two flats on the port, a farm in San Jose and I’m looking for a house in Miami.’) Is it true that you were so penniless when your first marriage broke up that you lived in a Madrid boarding house? ‘No, with friends. My father said that if I wanted money, I had to come home. But I had failed in my marriages and was considered a disaster. They were always complaining about me, so why go back?’

You have three children: Bruno, 14, who is studying in Uruguay; Valeria, 21, who was one of the top models in Spain; and Natalia, 23. Can you tell us about being a mother? ‘I was a mother and stayed at home and cooked when I was married to Montenegro. I began working for Spanish television when my second marriage was finishing. Now Bruno is looked after by my mother and one of my daughters. I am in South America from December to April.’ You had your first boyfriend when you were 14, didn’t you? ‘That is right. I had lots of boyfriends. When I was 18, I had three at the same time. It was a disaster. I was terrible, I must face it. But having fun was very important to me. I always say ‘yes’ to everything. I never feel depressed.’

How have you made such wonderful friends? You have an address book second to none. ‘I met them socialising when I lived in Greenwich Village. New York is the centre of the world. I met John Kluge, already one of the richest men in America, Al Pacino, Mrs Randolph Hearst…’

You have a warrior spirit and are independent and forceful. How would you describe your character? ‘I’m strong, for self-protection, but not tough. I’m sensitive, very easily hurt. I’ve helped so many people get their positions in work and they never thank me. I’m very disillusioned about human beings.’

You also look as if you have a fiery temper and are the sort of woman one wouldn’t want as an enemy. ‘Yes, if someone crosses me, I’ll never forget. I can explode, but nothing too dangerous.’

Are you ruthless? Will you walk over people? ‘I will never betray anybody. I’ve never had a relationship with a married man if that’s meant walking over his wife. It’s different if a married man comes and says: ‘I love you…’’

CAROLINE PHILLIPS asks TV guru Michael Barratt to help in her quest to become cool on camera and just like a very, very famous weather girl.

SOME are born great, others achieve greatness, and others have it pinned on them through being television presenters. This is why I want to be Tania Bryer and have spent weekends on Learn to be Tania Bryer courses. The media training industry has mushroomed like satellite dishes over the past decade. And when it comes to training, I’m a course-aholic.

I start off in Hillside Studios, Bushey, in front of a camera, surrounded by floor manager, sound technicians, lighting and cameramen. (Hillside started as a place to train clergy to put over their message on television; now it trains everyone from chef Wozza to prison screws.) For this exercise, I’ve been told to think about press intrusion but the voice through my earpiece is nattering about bike trips in Amsterdam.

The cameras are about to roll. Suddenly I remember the recent transport minister on television proclaiming the road behind him utterly safe, just as two cars crashed. And Dan Quayle getting muddled on the box about the Nazi Holocaust. ‘It was,’ Quayle said, ‘an obscene period in our nation’s history, no, not our nation’s but World War II, I mean, we all lived in this century, er, I didn’t live in this century but…’ (People think it’s easy to be on television, until they try it.) ‘Stand by,’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Two to go, one to go, 30, and…’ The floor manager motions as if to cut his own throat. The cameras start to roll. My brain takes a vacation, my smile becomes Sky-high and my mouth feels as if it’s been in the desert for 46 days without water. Nearby is the control room (glad someone around here feels in control) with its bank of monitors.

Now the course leader, science programme presenter Su Ingle, is interviewing me on camera. ‘Have you ripped anybody to shreds of late?’ she asks, sweetly. (Presumeably talking about my work.) Doing this naked would probably be only marginally worse. I try to think myself into being Tania, the girl without whom the launch of a new range of Hermes shoelaces or opening of a (Gucci) plastic bag would be incomplete. To look relentlessly happy, like Tania, the darling of the social circuit.

Unfortunately, I’m wearing a too-shiny-for-television shirt, distracting earrings and clip mike which turns out to be the communications industry equivalent of a ball and chain whenever I move. But I develop a good line in monosyllabic replies. Answers matched only by the length of my Bryer-style skirt. Then we wind up the interview. (Telespeak for turning the cameras off.) Su later tells me that she once did a programme live, with a temperature of 105 degrees and a nurse standing nearby spraying her with water.

Next I’m in solitary confinement in what they call their ‘remote studio’, to give what they call an ‘immediate reaction’ to sticky questions. Ready to turn my brain from Moscow coups to chiropody campaigns. Looking straight at camera, peering into its disconcerting lens. I cannot see my inquisitor, only hear her questions. I do brilliantly. But then we both (the former weather girl and I) have a degree in politics. There’s no question about it, I am Tracey Sunshine, as Tania is known. Time to wind up, again. Now fast forward to another place, another time. Remind yourself of gravelly voiced Michael Barratt, the former Nationwide presenter turned media consultant. Known in the TV world as Grumpy, he is straight-talking and professional. He has nine children, was the first person to expose the Kray twins on air and thinks television is full of giggly girls who have been given their jobs because of their sex appeal. I follow up my training with him. This also gives me a chance to nip into another outfit, like my heroine.

GRUMPY says he wants me to ‘grasp the basics’, and has set up a temporary studio in his office for me to do so. The camera perches precariously over his desk. First of all I have to interview Joyce, who teaches people how to talk on the phone. Telephone voice training she called it. It is clear that (like Tania) I am thus well en route to becoming a pin-up for the troops in Ireland.

Next I have to ad lib to camera for two minutes about election night and five about travelling around Australia on a bus. Then I interview Grumpy. ‘Michael, you were hugely successful. Now you’re stuck in Maidenhead doing corporate videos and training. What happened?’ He says that’s a daft question and I wonder whether I should show him my Tania Bryer legs and Esther Rantzen knees. Lis Howell, former programme director of GMTV, once told me she’d make a feature of my pegs. The Phillips Factor. ‘Excellent eyes, good face, your fingers give away your nervousness,’ encourages Michael. ‘I’m getting excited about you. You’re improving fast.’ Michael was known as Take One Barratt, because he always used his first take. But that’s clearly not going to be my style. ‘In my experience the best performers in television are shy people,’ says Michael, hiding behind his jazzy tie.

I have my home videos of myself on the box, which I was given after the courses; ‘pilots’ I like to call them. So where do I go from here? Just as I’m beginning to despair of being Tania Bryer in this lifetime, I’m summoned for a screen test with producer Vicki Barass, of the hit show The Good Sex Guide. She is looking for a presenter to report from the front line of women’s experience on topics like body hair, family meals and feminine wiles. To look at the big questions of our times, like who gets the worst deal – wife number one or two?

My screen test takes place al fresco in the busy shopping precinct of South Molton Street. This is what you have to do when seeking the giddy stardom of satellite TV meteorology.

‘As women work, are men’s biological impulses going to change to fit this new social trend? Is his first smouldering stare going to assess not the size of your bra cup but your wallet?’ I announce to the camera and passers-by. I’m an exhibitionist, loving it. People stop and stare. The waiters in the cafe congregate at the window. At last I am a Waif (one of the Why am I famous brigade?) THEN I have to do vox pops and ask strangers questions: ‘Are men scared stiff if they think they’re talking to a woman who is cleverer than them?’ I ask. ‘And do you think you’re clever?’ ‘Erm, yep,’ replies a bald artist who is chewing gum. ‘Do men like women to be more stupid than themselves?’ I enquire of three harridans. ‘Sphlunk, vosh splosh yert,’ they say. Presumably they’re not English.1 It’s astonishing how you can accost strangers in the street and they will reveal intimate details about themselves if you’re accompanied by a camera crew. ‘I’m very brilliant,’ confides an Italian psychologist with giraffe eyelashes. That makes two of us…

Anyone want to hire me (no previous experience) to read their weather maps?

MAJOR Bruce Shand, father of Camilla Parker Bowles, is giving his first ever interview. The man who brought up the mistress of the future King of England is talking about marriage, sexual promiscuity, his children, the upper classes, the Queen, the effect of Camillagate on his family, his extraordinary upbringing and being a prisoner of war.

He’s sitting in the conservatory in his home, a former rectory opposite Plumpton race course. It was here that the beleagured Camilla was raised. It has a croquet lawn, beautifully tended English country garden and traditionally decorated rooms filled with antiques.

Shand, 76, is handsome and charming. He has the bronzed and furrowed face of a keen gardener and a cheery smile. He talks with old fashioned pronunciation, often ending his sentences with an upper class snort, what? He’s dressed in moleskins, toning socks and mocassins. Unlike Camilla, who cares little for her appearance, the 6′ 3′ Major looks as if he has walked out of a Ralph Lauren advertisment.

After the publication in January of the Camillagate tapes, it was alleged that he tried to ban Camilla from seeing Prince Charles.(Friends say that the Prince and Camilla have not seen each other since before Christmas for fear of further rocking the Monarchy; that their love is on hold.) It is said he thinks his daughter’s life has been ruined by the Prince. Certainly the affect on her health was visible and the pressure on the family intolerable.

He has said he won’t discuss his daughter. But how does he feel about sexual permissiveness? ‘It’s a pity that the ties of marriage have been so destroyed by it.’What has been the affect of the scandal on his life? ‘Let’s just say highly intrusive.’ Has it been difficult for him? ‘We all survive, what?’ What does he think about the damage done to the Monarchy? ‘I mustn’t say anything about that. You’re very good at putting the knife in the oyster shell.’

Has the country gone to the dogs? ‘There’s been a tremendous deterioration of conduct and respect.’ Does he have regrets? ‘Life is full of regrets. I’d better not say more. I might say something indiscreet,’ he says, typically laughing uproariously. He once worked for the Queen and is a master of discretion.

He spent 16 years in the Queen’s Household, as Clerk of the Cheque and Adjutant of the Yeoman of the Guard. ‘We were always dressed for the Battle of Waterloo.’ His most arduous duty was to carry the standard on State occasions. Once, cramped for room when he was required to lower the Standard to the Queen as she passed through the Royal Gallery he managed to hook the handbag of a French visitor on its butt end. ‘That was dramatic, what? The Queen was very amused by the whole thing.’

We talk then about his extraordinary upbringing. ‘My father had four wives,’ he says. ‘We had a very strange relationship. I never even saw him until I was 38 – apart from at my grandfather’s funeral when I was 18. I don’t think I’d ever have seen him, had my wife not said that the children should meet their grandfather.’

Shand was the only child of his father’s first marriage, raised partly by his mother and stepfather in America, and by his grandparents. ‘My father left my mother when I was very young. Very much later he married Elseth Howe’s mother. There were 17 years between us and I never even saw Elspeth until she was 16.’

Shand married Rosalind, the debutante daughter of Baron Ashcombe, in 1946. They had three children. His other daughter, Annabel Elliott?? sp??has an antiques shop. His explorer son, Mark Shand, wrote Travels on My Elephant.‘Because of my disruptive childhood, I was very keen to see that my own children had an even run. They all had an agreeable time.’ He is close to his offspring and happy with the way they’ve grown up. ‘I’m very proud of them all.’

Were there any particular difficulties in bringing them up? ‘I don’t think we had any more problems than anyone else. They’ve always been quite chatty. There haven’t been any inhibitions in their upbringing that I know of.’

We talk then about his war. Shand, who wrote Previous Engagements, a lively account of his war, has a distinguished army record. He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Lancers and won the MC and Bar for obtaining valuable information about the enemy on patrol. ‘But at grievous cost. Two officers and men were killed… In Belgium I saw a party of lunatics, escorted from an asylum by splendid nuns, being shot by German aeroplanes… We often went three nights without sleep. You began to feel a brick floor was the most seductive place in the world. ‘

He was in the eighth army in 1942 when he was wounded and taken prisoner of war for two years, after the Battle of Alamein. ‘Rather a dreary performance.’ (He has that upper class habit of underplaying things.)‘I ran into a group of German vehicles. Only distinction was that it was said to be Rommel’s HQ,’ he says, roaring with laughter. ‘I got hit in the face (he has the scar beneath his eye) and the leg. The agony came later.’ Is he brave? ‘Don’t think so. There’s no point getting in a flap on these occasions, what?’

He journied in lorries and trains diverted by partisans and blown up lines, sailed from Derna to German occupied Piraeus in a hospital ship that had been the Czar’s Black Sea Yacht and ended up in a Russian hospital. ‘A cynical french doctor said to me, ‘if you don’t get enough food your wounds won’t heal and you’ll probably die.’ A cheerful gallic approach to life, what?’

He went to Spangenberg, a prisoner of war camp. He says gleefully that his Rugby schooldays prepared him for the ‘tedious’ experience. He’d never return. ‘I’ve always found Germans an incredibly depressing, humourless, dull people.’

After the war, he became a partner in a Mayfair wine merchant. But he would have liked to have been a publisher. His grandfather wrote an abstruse book on psychology, called The Foundations of Character. Has he read it? ‘Ach no. I think I’d be hard pushed to, what?’ But Shand edited ‘One Young Soldier, the memoirs of a cavalry man’ (out last month) about his friend the late Tim Bishop, brother of Molly Bishop/Lady Scott, Britain’s grandest society portraitist.

Despite the early knocks to his constitution, he appears robust and spritely. ‘I survive! The health centre nurse the other day said she wanted to talk about the delicate question of drink. As far as I can see, a ‘unit’ is an invisible thing! When I told her what I drank, she said, ‘Terribly sorry, you’re a heavy drinker.’ I’m very glad to be in distinguished company!’ His emotional warmth is surprising in one of his background. He is a also a humourous, honourable, immensely likeable man. ‘A sweet and decent man,’ remarks Nigel Dempster.

THAT fateful Saturday night Heidi read an Agatha Christie thriller before falling asleep. She had always dreamed of living on her own in London and had moved into her rented Shepherd’s Bush flat just the day before. It was on the ground floor but had good security. Yet she awoke at 2am with a strange man standing by her bed. It was the start of a three-hour ordeal.

Heidi is good-looking, her face expressive. She speaks seamlessly and with remarkable self-possession, her constant smoking being the only indication of her nervousness. Yet this composed young professional woman now lives in fear because her assailants, who terrorised her in her own home, have not yet been caught.

That night, on Saturday 3 July, the apartment upstairs was empty and her neighbours were having a noisy party.

Suddenly she awoke. In the darkness she made out a man standing in her bedroom. ‘I screamed like an animal,’ says Heidi, a 25-year-old fashion publicist.

Her intruder was startled. ‘Stop screaming or I’ll kill you,’ he shouted. ‘Put a blanket over your head.

‘I’m going to knock you unconscious. But I won’t rape you,’ he went on. ‘I’ve come to teach you a lesson not to leave the windows open.’ She had left the tiny top bathroom window ajar.

At first Heidi thought she was dreaming. She pulled the blanket over her head (she was wearing a short nightdress) and wondered whether he had a gun. ‘I kept telling myself not to panic and do as he said, so he wouldn’t kill me.’

Her assailant asked why she wasn’t at the party, blindfolded her with a T-shirt and the blanket, and pushed her through the flat to the bathroom, where he wiped off his fingerprints.

‘You have a wonderful body. If I saw you on the street I’d chat you up,’ he said. She could feel him kissing her through the T-shirt. ‘But I’m not here to rape you.’

He pushed her back to the bed. She breathed heavily, trying to stop herself breaking down. He told her to ‘shut up’. Then he took her purse. ‘There’s only £25,’ he said, ‘I should have gone to Knightsbridge.’ Heidi was shaking, terrified. ‘He kept threatening to kill me. But I kept making conversation to make things easier. I felt I had to be truthful with him.’

Her head covered, she led him to her hidden antique ring and bank cash card. She was relieved when he asked for the PIN number, thinking that meant he was going, and gave him the wrong number.

‘It’s all right,’ he said, chillingly. ‘My mate outside will check it.’ Heidi was horrified. Suddenly both men were standing in her bedroom. With astonishing presence of mind, she played for time; she told the second criminal to go to the (distant) Kings Street cash machine.

‘Take a cab back,’ her first assailant ordered his accomplice, handing him Heidi’s money. Then he left.

Heidi sensed the man drop his guard. She grabbed her can of CS tear gas, hidden by her bedside. ‘I knew if he saw me, he’d kill me.’ Suddenly she smelt him standing near her, and sprayed the gas where she guessed he stood. He swore madly.

But the gas was five years old and didn’t work properly. ‘I couldn’t believe it. He should have been lying on the floor.’

The man screamed at her. ‘You fucking bitch. I trusted you and what did you do? Now you deserve to be raped and I am going to kill you.’ Heidi punched and kicked. The man was holding her by the wrists and in the struggle bit a chunk out of her arm.

Then he took a kitchen knife, held it to her neck and, to Heidi’s horror, started to molest her. ‘I thought, ‘Don’t think about it. Block it completely. Don’t feel anything. There’s nothing you can do.’ ‘I kept thinking, ‘This is how people feel when they’re being raped’.’ The knife blade was still sticking into her while he assaulted her. ‘‘Wibble’ your hips,’ he repeated, curiously.

Suddenly the accomplice returned, furious that he’d been given the wrong PIN number. ‘I don’t think he wanted his mate to know what he was doing to me. I gave him another wrong number and he left again.’ (She had £500 in her account, but he never withdrew any money.) Heidi was once again alone with her abuser. He now threatened to tie her up and lock her in a cupboard. (He said he’d then call the police.) ‘I didn’t have any rope. I told him to lock me in my cellar. I was afraid of cellars when I was a kid.’

He pushed her to the cellar, with the shirt over her head. ‘He kept marking places on my back with the knife, saying ‘This is your heart and here’s your liver’,’ she says, in astonishingly measured manner. ‘My legs turned to stone.’

Her body was exposed. ‘It didn’t really matter any more what I looked like. I thought, ‘Just kill me. Let my mind have peace. Free me from this.’ He sprayed tear gas on her gaping wound. ‘Thank God it was empty.’ Then he imprisoned her in the cellar, alone and petrified. She listened for sounds from upstairs. Then in a box in the cellar she found two kitchen knives. She didn’t know whether the villains had gone. ‘I thought now I’ll kill them.’

She threw her body against the door, but it didn’t yield. Then she found a garden spade and smashed at it. Finally she crawled through. ‘I don’t know how. The hole was tiny, just 12 inches across.’

Intrepidly, Heidi went through the flat, brandishing her knives. When she found it was empty, this extraordinarily self-possessed woman sat down and smoked a cigarette.

Heidi is German, has only lived in England for 18 months and couldn’t remember the number for the emergency services. ‘I rang 192 and broke down.’ When the police arrived she cried uncontrollably.

They took her to the Brentford Rape Suite – ‘They apologised that it was a male doctor, but I didn’t mind’ – where she underwent forensic tests and gave her 18-page statement.

‘It’s very strange but I didn’t feel dirty. It didn’t occur to me until 12 hours later to take a shower.’

Today Heidi wears jeans, chic green jacket and bohemian jewellery. University educated and smart, Heidi is lively, open and optimistic. The police say she becomes daily more lighthearted and friendly. She had never before been the victim of even petty crime and her experience has had a profound effect on her. (She had the CS gas, which is legal on the Continent, simply because she felt ‘more secure’ with it.) Her assailants had seen photographs of her on the walls of her flat. ‘I feel really frightened in the street if a black man approaches me. Scared he’ll recognise me.’ She has altered her appearance, but not radically. ‘I refuse to change my life completely.’

She has also changed her behaviour. ‘I used to ride my bike in the middle of the night in Brixton, going from one party to another. Now I always take taxis.’

And she has moved. ‘I’ll never dare live alone again. I’ll have a panic button fixed wherever I live. I don’t care what it costs.’ But she doesn’t feel compelled to return to her homeland. ‘This could have happened anywhere.’

She hasn’t ‘yet’ had counselling. ‘I hope it won’t affect my attitude to men. I don’t think it will.’ Her mother is a teacher and her father died when she was an infant. But her sister, an actress, flew to England and helped her to relive the experience while doing cathartic breathing exercises. ‘She made me imagine he was there again.’

Now she says: ‘I feel like skinning those men alive. ‘The worst part wasn’t the sexual side. It was the feeling that this guy could decide whether I should live or die.

‘How easily someone can snip your life.’

Can you help trap the attackers who dropped a key and stole a ruby ring? THE CRIME took place at 8 Leysfield Road, Shepherds Bush, between 2am and 5am on Sunday 4 July. Police are also interested in anyone using the Midland bank cash machine in Kings Street W6 at that time.

Of the two male attackers, one is definitely black. One is 5ft 10in tall, of medium build with broad shoulders and had short afro hair. He was wearing a white T-shirt, with numbers or writing and black vertical stripes, with blue jeans and a belt with large buckle.

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a fortune must be in want of an alternative therapist. At least that’s the world according to Princess Diana, who has just been seen stepping out of the latest fashionable foot doctor’s surgery, probably en route to Manolo Blahnik via a touch of colonic irrigation. But this is a truth on which the Princess and I agree. Because I am also a therapy junkie.

We’re the A Team – people with analysts, acupuncturists, accountants, architects, allergy therapists and Alexander Technique teachers. Been there, done that, got the green pesticide-free T-shirt. There! It’s out. (But only after major advisory consultations with my shiatsu masseuse, reflexologist and homeopath.) We’re the sensitive types who sit in offices (if we have to work) with an ioniser nearby to purify the air, a lumber roll, stocks of horse-sized vitamin pills and a water purifier from which to drink. Aromatherapy essential oils burn in a dish nearby to overcome our obsessive hatred of Gitanes.

We believe we’re all addicted (whether to chocolate, heroin, shopping or caffeine) and use words like rageaholic. We’re addicted to finding things wrong. We are also, of course, hopelessly self-conscious and obviously self-absorbed.

At home we hide books like Women Who Love Too Much and What Women Want. Almost any book on recovery (a key A Team word) while we wait for a book on self-help recovery. If we thought the neighbours couldn’t hear, we’d play music from Puerto Rican rainforests or New Age dolphin gurgles to help extend relaxation and awareness. We yearn for weekends in Tyringham Naturopathic Clinic eating grapes and soya bean casserole while sitting in a seaweed bath.

I have tried most of these things. I have acupuncture regularly, allowing a practitioner to play voodoo dolls with me and right an imbalanced liver which has a channel flowing up my big toe. I learned Alexander Technique until I almost died of boredom. (For weeks the tutor teaches you how to get out of a chair and sit down again. It was worse than the severe riding accident which got me there.) When I wanted to lose weight, I visited a Chinese kinesiologist (tests muscles to diagnose food allergies). I can’t remember what he said, but I bet I had some.

I’m hooked on Ayurvedic massage (two people massage you) and Indian rope massage (where a man swings from a rope to massage you with his feet). I’ve even been to Balham to have my feet done by a Metamorphic technique practitioner who says the foot from toe to heel corresponds to the pre-natal period from conception to birth.

Alongside Princess Diana, I’ve had reflexology, in which areas of the soles correspond to organs of the body and the feet are probably the key to the entire workings of your mind.

I’ve had colour therapy and gem therapy; pill-popped homeopathic remedies, taking substances so diluted they’re like a drop of liquid in the Baltic Sea; tried Bach Flower Remedies for negative emotional states; and been in a flotation tank with saline solution to stimulate the body’s production of happy hormones.

In Hong Kong, I tried herbalism and daily drank tea probably made of bull’s horn and fish ear, which proved handy for menstrual tension; resident in Sydney, I had iridology, which can diagnose the entire nervous system from the surface of the iris.

It’s easy to laugh. But whether you have spots, tennis elbow or major depression, it’s obvious to me that you need rolfing, past-life reconstruction or hands-on healing. If all else fails, you can have your aura photographed for a tenner or nip off for a self-realisation weekend workshop (another key word that, workshop, in the A Team) in the South of France. We don’t even mind too much if the therapist is unregulated and a former management consultant.

The big question is why? Is it too much money, time, lack of self-worth or guilt that has led the ladies who lunch (or work) to have reflexology instead of pasta in Beauchamp Place?

I’ve had my share of illnesses, operations and emotional traumas. But I suffer no more from physical ailments and psychic malaise than your average citizen. Probably less. I’m not a hypochondriac. But I believe in holistic treatment, in which the patient’s mind, body, diet, lifestyle and emotional state are considered alongside Western medicine.

We live in a society in which orthodox religion has been forgotten (priests no longer have the answers for our troubles). We often have a sense of powerlessness and lack of worth. So we search for answers and ways to fix ourselves, seeking remedies to help us feel in control of our lives. Religion gave us rules. Now there aren’t any rules so people have to find something else to give meaning to their lives. Eastern religion and gurus from America do nicely.

We no longer believe in original sin or spend our lives trying to atone for Adam and Eve’s hash-up. Now the onus is on the individual. Psychotherapy, which is all about realising the self and balancing the opposing forces of good and bad, has replaced religion. But psychotherapy is painful and hard work. Sitting under a purple pyramid is quicker. Instead of original sin, we now have to deal with childhood. Which is something we’ve set up as a false icon, thinking it should have been an idyllic period of innocence. (But ‘They f*** you up your Mum and Dad . . .’) So we’ve all had damaged childhoods and been abused (another key A Team concept). We’re all insecure and have an inner child who’s in a bad way. We need anything to help us get over the drama of having been a child. The problem is that we’ve forgotten that our difficulties are just part of the human condition. Even Princess Diana’s.

DIANA’S GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE THERAPY CHIROPRACTIC
She regularly receives treatment and in 1991 was made patron of the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic.

ACUPUNCTURE
Oonagh Toffolo has visited the Princess since 1989 to stimulate the body’s ‘meridians’ – invisible energy paths on the skin – with needles.

AROMATHERAPY
Receives treatment from Sue Beechey, of Aromatherapy Associates in Fulham, using different oils for different effects – eg citrus oils to stimulate; basil and camomile to relax.

REFLEXOLOGY
Yesterday it was revealed that the Princess has been having her feet massaged, stimulating the blood supply and nerves and relieving tension.

COLONIC IRRIGATION
In September 1992 rumours were rife after she attended the Hale Clinic on a day when colonic irrigation practitioners were offering treatment.

HOLISTIC MASSAGE
Stephen Twigg started providing deep tissue massage in the late Eighties as part of his holistic approach (the belief that the health of mind, body and spirit are co-dependent). Sacked in 1992 after talking to the Press.

ASTROLOGY
Visits Frederick Lyle, who has a reputation for making observations in psychological, rather than astrological, language.