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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age: 55.

Family background: won’t say.

Marital status: single.

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

On The Great Crisps Issue: won’t say.

JAMES BAKER, Director of Programmes, Nickelodeon.

Age: 29.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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