LIONA is 12 and has never smiled. She is physically handicapped, doesn’t speak and doesn’t play. Then she was taken to Thorpe Park on an outing. Suddenly her classmates gathered round her excitedly. Liona was smiling. This was Kids Out, an event involving thousands of boys and girls, including 2,300 from London. As Liona gave her first smile, other disabled and deprived children elsewhere were at 100 similar events.

This was an annual day out for children with special needs, started in 1990, organised by Rotary clubs and Littlewoods and funded with money from race nights, raffles and bands to sponsorship.

Putney Rotary Club President Alan Davies talked 150 businessmen into taking the day off work to drive 300 local children, with police escorts and orange balloons, to Thorpe Park. And the Metropolitan Police provided the lunch boxes they have when they go on uptown demonstrations: egg or corned beef sandwich, juice, Twix and apple.

I meet Alan at 9am at Paddock School, Roehampton. A girl sits in a wheelchair, head dropped backwards. ‘You are a pretty girl,’ says headmistress Nora Evans, affectionately. Another child stops and hugs Nora and strokes her hair. ‘Smooth hair,’ she intones. ‘Yes, very smooth,’ replies Nora. The child is autistic and suffers obsessions, the latest for smooth hair.

‘Where’s your hearing aid? We’re going on a picnic today,’ a teacher tells a youngster, in sign language. The child jumps, exuberantly. Nearby another is strapped into a wheelchair, his tongue lolling and his wrists bound loosely together. His face lights up with pleasure at the news. Four classes, ages 7 to 16, with severe learning difficulties and profound and multiple disabilities are coming on Kids Out.

In the car park by the windmill on Wimbledon Common we meet the others. Hundreds of youngsters, blind children from Linden Lodge, and disadvantaged ones chattering animatedly. A Rotarian clown squawks amid the parked cars and the mayor of Wandsworth looks on with her chain of office over her raincoat.

Eleven-year-olds Paul and Cally are in our black Audi coupe when I return. ‘This yours?’ demands Paul, cheerfully. ‘Well I gotta tell yer, you’re sitting in the back.’ Then he plays happily with the electric windows. ‘Put your head in the window. I promise I won’t chop it off.’ Paul looks at my fiance, Adrian. ‘So who’s this Adrian? You love him? You been to bed with him?’

These boys are from Chartfield School, Putney, a school for maladjusted children. (A ‘delicate’ school, says one teacher.) Cally is sensitive, gentle featured and reticent about his illness. But Paul is bullish about being dyslexic and asthmatic.

Three schoolmates in another car chip in. One has cystic fibrosis, another severe learning difficulties. ‘I was bullied at school,’ says the third, dolefully.

PAUL sings ‘Hit the road, Jack,’ as we set off. I say he is a groovy guy. ‘I ain’t gay,’ he responds, heatedly. Do they want crisps and chocolate? ‘I don’t have colourings, I’m allergic,’ he says. For miles up the A3 we can see nothing but cars with purple streamers and Kids Out balloons. Cally says that he wants to be a doctor, to save people’s lives. ‘Don’t,’ implores Paul. ‘You’re too short and won’t be able to reach the bed.’ They discover Adrian works in a bank. ‘Why don’t you rob it? I won’t tell anyone,’ says Paul, waggishly. ‘That’s bad,’ says Cally.

All the children are let into Thorpe Park for free. Their £10 ticket charge is waived and adult helpers pay less than half price. Thorpe Park is buzzing with children in wheelchairs, walking unsteadily, running chaotically and beaming genially. We go rowing, sit in a spinning tea cup, hazard a dinghy on the Depth Charge daredevil water slide, eat from the Sweet Palace and watch virtual reality. They scream with the thrill and the fear. Then they stand mesmerised by two ducklings. The Rotarians began in Britain in 1911, solid citizens and prominent businessmen dedicated to worthy causes. Normally straight laced, they have a fuddy-duddy image. The battle over female membership lasted seven years in the States. But they raised £67 million to immunise children worldwide against polio. And now Paul and Cally are standing joshing in front of me. Paul says he wants to drive home in a BMW or Mercedes. A jolly Rotarian offers his, ‘clapped out Peugeot with bank burgling equipment in it.’ The children look gleeful.

RICHARD Briers has plenty to be sad about. The star of The Good Life and Ever Decreasing Circles watched his mother die slowly over 12 years, diabetic, blind and with her leg amputated. And he stood by helplessly for a decade as his father perished painfully from lung cancer. Unsurprisingly, Richard, 60, who was brought up in genteel poverty and fears financial insecurity, dreads old age and dying.

He’s driven ‘through a monsoon’ to meet me and now we repair to his Bath Spa hotel bedroom. He jokes with the staff, signing his ‘autograph’ in the guest register, being infectiously funny, habitually saying ‘becosh’ and ‘sho’ in that Tony Bennish voice of his, twiddling his eyebrows when he’s rattled, rolling his own with Virginia tobacco and exuding bonhomie and charm. He looks like a country golfer in his tartan tie and casual trousers, but he has impossibly sad eyes.

He’s touring with Paul Eddington in Home, David Storey’s play about disillusionment, first produced at The Royal Court with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. ‘We play two old boys who can’t cope and live in a mental hospital,’ says Richard. ‘We’ve had terrible marital breakdowns and live in a fantasy world to protect ourselves from reality.’

There was an early production difficulty when Richard refused to work opposite actress Liz Smith because he thought her too old. So she was sacked six weeks after she was contracted (No More Mr Nice Guy, screamed a tabloid).

‘We had casting approval but the director went to Tokyo and forgot that,’ Richard replies, commenting for the first time. ‘She’s a super actress but wrong for the part. I wrote to her and said how very sorry I was that she wasn’t right and had been badly treated by me and I regretted the hurt caused.’ She didn’t write back.

Sadly, the health of Paul, his great friend and co-star, might now be a problem. He suffers from diabetes and a rare skin cancer. ‘It spreads, poor thing. I remember when we were doing a play 40 years ago he had this red thing on his stomach. Now it’s on his face. He has ultra-violet therapy, like going on a sun bed, so he looks as if he’s been in Malta on holiday for 10 years.’ Might Paul collapse as he did on stage last year? ‘He fell over once in a Pinter play because of his diabetes. He hadn’t eaten properly. He got up again immediately, so naturally everyone thought he was going to die.’ He speaks sardonically.

Richard knows much about diabetes. His only sibling, Jane, suffers. As did his late mother, Morna, who died in 1992. ‘It was terrible when my mother had her leg amputated and went blind. Bloody awful watching her deterioration, particularly dreadful the last two years. It was obscene the way her luck ran out.’ He’s a firm believer in luck and refers often to his own fortune.

Jane, an unlucky actress, moved home when she divorced to live with and tend her mother for 12 years. Richard visited weekly. ‘Poor old thing mother, couldn’t die, clung on and had a cruel, rotten life. She had that extraordinary bravery which only females have. I was lucky and didn’t sink because I was busy working and have a strong private life. I wasn’t broken up when she died because she was released from her suffering.’ Does he support euthanasia? He looks nonplussed. Would he have liked to have given her a pill to end her misery? ‘I couldn’t have, no. I’m too much of a coward.’ Dismissing any legal implications, could he have coped with it emotionally? ‘I suppose so, yes.’ Before his mother’s demise, he watched his father die 12 years ago. ‘He had a horrendous time towards the end.’ Richard says the family had been close. ‘I grew up in Raynes Park during the Blitz. Your family unites very tightly when you’re being bombed.’ Were they genuinely fond of one another or was it a closeness born of circumtances? ‘I think it was real. But we had our spats because we’re all highly strung.’ His father – ‘He had about 75 jobs, one as progress chaser for GEC’ – was feckless. Consequently, money was always tight. ‘When I was a child, things were run on the basis that if the rich uncle sent a fiver at Christmas, my father could go to the off-licence. He was a good-time guy.’ Richard’s education was erratic and he left school at 16 without taking any exams. An indication of emotional disturbance? ‘I just wasn’t interested, didn’t listen and loathed school.’

He became hungry and ambitious. A workaholic who would rehearse a series by day, act a play at night and record a TV episode on Sundays for months on end. Now he says such driven feelings have dissipated and he denies a tabloid report that he suffered breakdowns. ‘If you don’t get frightened on first nights, you’re nuts.’ (‘I didn’t know you’d had nervous breakdowns, dear,’ said his mother, sweetly, after the article appeared.) He began acting four decades ago, playing Hamlet, ‘like a demented typewriter’, in the words of WA Darlington, The Daily Telegraph’s redoubtable critic. ‘I took 25 minutes off the running time. I was the only Hamlet in the world who gave the audience half an hour in the pub afterwards.’ Four years ago he returned to serious parts with Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, when Branagh cast him as King Lear. He’s only ever had two years out of work, never made it in films – ‘I’m hardly the film-star type. I did dreadful films and was dreadful in them’ – and doesn’t anticipate work drying up. ‘I can play great roles and grandfathers now. If I start losing my memory, I’ll do radio. If we really get past it, my wife (actress Ann Davies) and I are going to pool all our enormous resources and influence to get two small parts in The Archers.’ His next part is in Down to Earth, a sitcom by Esmonde and Larbey who wrote The Good Life. He plays a 60-year-old who falls from grace, losing a job in a banana republic and returning penniless to England. Richard fears nemesis. When we talk he says, often, what goes up must come down. ‘The worst thing for me is not not making money, but having it and losing it. The nightmare scenario would be Lloyd’s.’

WHEN Barbara Kaczmarowska Hamilton drew the Duchess of York, she discovered her sitter was an artist. First the Duchess photographed the initial sketch by Basha, as she’s known to her friends. Then the Duchess revealed that she daubs cityscapes, has a painting teacher, and hangs her work on the walls at Romenda Lodge. Basha had a quick private view of the Duchess’s watercolours and thought them exceedingly good.

Later they spoke to the director of the Accademia Italiana, and the Duchess was told that the Accademia wants to exhibit her work when she’s completed a few more paintings. ‘The Duchess doesn’t talk about her paintings because she doesn’t think they’re very good,’ says Basha enthusiastically, in her Polish accent.

Basha is the society portrait pasteller de nos jours and divides her working time between Palm Beach, Jamaica and London. Her sitters include Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, Norman Parkinson, the Marchioness of Salisbury, Mohammed Al Fayed, the Sultan of Brunei, Denis and Carol Thatcher, the Marquess of Bath, Professor Norman Stone and Sir Peregrine Worsthorne. Her finished subjects have enormous eyes with faraway looks in them, flattering cheekbones, swirly hair and romantic airs. Even Sir Clive Sinclair looks attractive.

RECENTLY Basha had an Accademia Italiana exhibition in which a study of the Duchess and a conversation piece with her daughters made the headlines. The newspapers claimed the Duchess intended to give the latter to her estranged husband to commemorate their first meeting at Royal Ascot nine years ago. ‘It’s not for Andrew,’ says Basha. ‘Why should she give it to him when she likes it?’ The paintings were a gift – normally she charges £3,500 a portrait – from Basha to the Duchess.

She often dashes her portraits off in two and half hours – ‘If I’m in a good mood, I’m all excited like a tiger …’ And she has a facility for likeness, according to fellow artist, the Marquess of Bath. ‘In Polish we have an expression for that. We say I have ‘monkey ability’.’ She’s a delightful, exuberant ingenue, and speaks in parentheses, her conversation darting everywhere excitedly. Life imitates art because she looks a decade younger than her 45 years, and she wears a classic pistachio suit, glasses and an antique gold link bracelet.

She had a subject who loved her portrait so much that she went to the bank, got out all her jewellery and told Basha to choose whatever she wanted. Basha selected the link bracelet.

We’re talking in her South Kensington studio where she comes three days a week and prefers her sitters to sit. There are gilt-framed portraits everywhere, pop music playing and a photograph signed ‘with all good wishes’ from Lady Thatcher on the mantelpiece. A jocular portrait of Norman Parkinson hangs in the bathroom. ‘I met him at a ball and in his jacket he had a silver book of photographs. I thought, ‘How funny, he’s a famous photographer and he’s still showing his work around and needing compliments.”

Basha has captured Prince Michael as well. ‘I had an exhibition two years ago in the Polish Club and he saw a magazine picture of one of the portraits, of someone he knew,’ she says. ‘So he went off to the Polish Club by himself. Nobody recognised him, nobody said ‘hello’, nobody took his coat, that’s terribly funny, no? Then his secretary called me and said he needed a Masonic portrait. So they commissioned me to do him in Masonic clothes and he liked it so much that he sent it out printed on his Christmas cards.’ What was the Prince like to draw? ‘He has an exceptionally good face to paint, he’s like a Czar and very jolly and good humoured.’ Basha became a society portrait painter unintentionally. She was born in Sopot, went to the Academy of Art in Gdansk and left Poland when she was 24 to study in Venice.

‘It’s not a fantastic story about defecting and being tortured. I just left on holiday and didn’t return.’ In Italy she held an exhibition of her abstract paintings and one portrait. ‘Everybody came to the portrait and said, ‘Gosh, if you can paint like that, why do you do those?” NOWADAYS she doesn’t lead a socially strenuous life and is surprised to find herself in the newspapers. She married late, aged 37, to Ian Hamilton, whose great uncle was the general Sir Ian Hamilton of Gallipoli fame. She had her first child when she was 38 and they live in a 1950s house overlooking Watership Down where Ian, she says, is rich and Scottish, wears a cap, wellies, plants trees and doesn’t work. They spend much of the year in Jamaica where Ian’s family used to have sugar plantations. And they go to Palm Beach. ‘I hadn’t even heard of it before.’ She laughs and creases her nose. ‘In Poland, Palm Beach isn’t very popular.’

I look around the studio again. There hangs Sir Peregrine Worsthorne: ‘One of the most classical heads one can see nowadays and a picturesque character.’ And a picture of Rula Lenska: ‘Usually she hangs in the Polish Club. It’s nice that people can sit and have lunch under pictures of themselves.’

Nearby is a dashing one of the Marquess of Bath: ‘One of London’s most extraordinary characters.’ And one of the Duke of Kent: ‘I don’t think I got him quite right. He’s not someone you can easily get to know. He’s composed, closed and charming.’

It’s sad the walls don’t have ears. Basha says she’s like a shrink to her sitters. ‘I’m always surprised. It’s like an hour of truth,’ she explains. ‘They have big trust, tell me everything and then I forget. Often extremely personal things. A pose is like a marriage for life, it’s very psychological and special.’ Did the Duchess talk to her about her personal problems? ‘I can’t say anything.’ But Basha, who imagined the Duchess as a ‘crazy bully and careless character’ before she met her, found her a sensitive, wonderful and powerful personality.

WHEN Deborah Moggach’s partner of 10 years died in February, they stopped the film at the Empire Cinema. The paramedics leapt on him like athletes, attempted resuscitation, the theatre emptied in a flash, and the police cleared Leicester Square. He was the cartoonist Mel Calman and he had a fatal heart attack as somebody’s throat was being cut on screen. His death was no more extraordinary than the life of Deborah, 45, the popular novelist.

In 1981, Deborah agreed to have a baby for her infertile sister Alex, offering to borrow her man, Brian, for a few nights. Deborah said she didn’t fancy Brian and was doing it out of noblesse: this was reproduction not adultery. She thought artificial insemination too cold and official. But would Tony (now Deborah’s ex husband) be upset? Or Alex jealous? Or one of the lovers fall for the other? Deborah never found out because Alex and Brian separated; but she put her experiences into a novel, To Have And To Hold.

Or go back another decade. Then Debraless, as she was known, was at Bristol University: a middle-class gel living with a bus conductor, trying LSD and pot and visiting a shrink to talk about her rebellious penchant for rough trade. She’s always had a predilection for butchers’ boys, men covered in plaster and is, she says, the sort of woman who hyperventilates when she sees a skip.

We meet in her Camden Town home (colourful, surreal and messy) with Jocasta Innes splodge painted walls, a dinosaur skull in the sitting room (it turns out to be a hippo’s; she bought it for £4 when she was six) Penguin books and Ella Fitzgerald to Brahms tapes. Two characters converse in a Calman cartoon: “Do you realise we’re stuck in a frame we can’t sell.” Deborah offers wine and freshly ground coffee – her voice rich but tremulous – then poses revealingly for the photos in her shredded Indian chiffon skirt. She has forcible features, tumbling hair, ink writing on her wrists and smokes roll-ups. She laughs to hide her pain and is witty, observant and shrewd. Lovely.

And she understands the game. Next week The Ex-Wives – about a boozy, sweaty, superannuated actor and his exes – appears in paperback and features Penny, a journalist: ‘From strangers she had extracted humiliating personal confessions…’ it reads.

Deborah writes lying on her bed, Pentel spilling on the counterpane, doodling naked women when it’s going badly. She’s adapting Moll Flanders for TV and writing a kidnap novel. But she’s found it hard to work since Mel died.

She fell in love with Mel when she walked into his larder and discovered he’d pencilled a face around every wall tack. They never married or lived together; she says she didn’t want to inflict her adolescent children on him, and loved the schizophrenic life of visiting him in Soho. ‘I’d come back in the morning wearing my high red heels and everybody would think I was a hooker. Then I’d change into my horrible baggy working trousers.’ Mel died when he was writing a radio play about a man who has a heart attack. Deborah’s only previous experience of death was years ago when she watched her grandmother die in bed. That didn’t really bother her. But Mel’s death was traumatic. His funeral was grim and freezing. Grief was a foreign country. ‘I couldn’t cope. I was always putting things in the wrong place, like keys in the washing machine. You’re not yourself. You’re ill. I felt raw and only wanted to eat nursery food, undemanding things like mashed potato and leek soup. I became terribly working class and wanted lots of roll-ups and sweet tea, which I hate. I was pole-axed by the loss. ‘I went through my answerphone tape hoping to hear him talking about normal things. But he wasn’t on it.’ She looks forlorn. ‘I miss the long conversation we had which lasted 10 years and was just interrupted from time to time.’

People, says Deborah, don’t realise it’s necessary to be much alone in grief, to think about the deceased. ‘The nearest equivalent is having a baby. When you give birth, you need to concentrate on the pain to get through it. With death, you need to be undistracted. You don’t want to go anywhere. Even crossing the street you feel vulnerable and naked.’ SHE says she didn’t turn to drink or tranquillisers. ‘I love drink but I’m not a great drunk.’ And she managed to write a poignant account of Mel’s death just days later. She feared it a terrible invasion, a cathartic plundering of his death. ‘But I’m glad I did it. I wanted to record this terrible moment from the front line.’

She feels ‘normal’ now. ‘The recovery process was revved up because we didn’t have any unfinished business. We didn’t have anything left which we hadn’t said,’ she says, shaking slightly. She can conceive of a relationship with another man. ‘I won’t find anybody like Mel. But I can imagine a future with somebody else.’

But she doesn’t see herself as sexually attractive. ‘I do if I’m tarted up. But underneath I’m a mess,’ she says, bringing her knees up foetally under her chin. ‘Often I feel that I’m a pretend woman and underneath I don’t really know how to do it, sex or being a woman, and that I’m going to get found out.’ She recognises that such self deprecation requires some self confidence and may simply be an elaborate self deception.

We talk then about her ex-husband, Tony, a publisher whom she left in 1985 for Mel. The divorce was traumatic and she lost weight badly. Now relations are friendly and he lives in the next street for the children’s sake. (Tom, 18, and Lottie, 17.) ‘You are parents until you die,’ she says. Deborah, third of four daughters of writer parents, is laissez faire with her offspring. How would she react if they took drugs? ‘I only took acid because it was the Sixties and to give myself street cred with my children,’ she says, unconvincingly. ‘I wouldn’t like them to, but everyone smokes pot. I don’t have strong feelings about that.’

Had Deborah had that surrogate baby, it might now be friends with her children. ‘I’ve never talked to them about it. But I’m terribly glad I didn’t do it,’ she says. ‘It would have opened a can of worms. One jumps into things in a flood of emotional warm feelings, generosity, sexual desire or whatever. But it would be fantastically difficult to see your child being brought up by somebody else.’

And what would it have been like to have slept with her sister’s boyfriend? ‘Technically it would have been adultery. But it’s when it gets to be adultery emotionally that it becomes interesting.’ Was it not a taboo? Something perilously close to incest? Perhaps an extreme manifestation of sibling rivalry? She replies with waffle. Deborah is normally searingly honest.

Her frankness, she admits, is a strategy to distract people from asking her things she doesn’t want to talk about…

THIS attractive woman spends much of her time with 30 cavorting naked men. She goes out on special occasions with blood and mud on her clothes. She rubs hot stuff on men’s thighs and keeps a bed in the middle of her drawing room. And she enjoys standing in front of 60,000 chaps, some jeering and asking her to strap them up. Sounds odd? She’s Fiona Phillips, physiotherapist to Bath Rugby Football Club and one of the club’s four Deep Heat-wielding dames.

Fiona, 33, had her most recent big break during Bath’s win in the Pilkington Cup at Twickenham. The 1st XV’s chief physio was off with a broken leg, so Fiona was the one ogled by thousands of male spectators and starring on television bandaging sinewy legs and sponging steaming physiques. ‘Hardly a break,’ she quips, smiling sunnily in her egg-yolk kitchen in her converted West Country old school house where there are Gladiator pin-ups on the fridge and a clock reading ‘time flies’, with a fly stuck to its hands.

She’s been with Bath RFC for three seasons and rubs down some of the most fancied men in Britain. There’s Ben Clarke, 24-year-old Mercedes-driving son of a stud farmer who’s known as The Prince of Darkness because when he goes out at night girls disappear with him. (‘I don’t know anything about that,’ laughs Fiona.) Philip de Glanville, the 25-year-old who claims heart-throbbingly that he has no agent because he’s too ugly to market. Plus Jeremy Guscott, 28-year-old part-time catwalk model, glitzy London Fashion Show guest and star of glossy magazine covers.

Fiona, 33, wearing navy cardigan and tracksuit work clothes, is a good egg with blonde hair, fresh-faced boarding-schoolgirl’s looks and a body sportif. Which brings me to the stories of panting sportsmen falling in love with their physios. Of broken hearts and awkward situations. ‘All rubbish,’ Fiona answers gaily, although it’s clear to the untrained eye that there’s far more romantic potential in her, this physio fatale, than in a man with a bucket and sponge.

She’s often in the changing room when it’s full of men with no clothes on. ‘Oh yes, they’re totally naked.’ Is being with 30 nude men en masse amusing? ‘Well, different from being with women getting ready for hockey.’ Does she feel abashed or find it daunting or difficult? ‘No, no, no. But they try their best to embarrass you sometimes. Particularly when you arrive first at the club.’ She giggles. ‘They like the shock value of striding around naked and walking up to you with no clothes on to ask you to strap them. It happens all the time.’

Naturally, it behoves me then to ask her who has the best body. ‘They’re all a bit different. But Ben Clarke is quite well proportioned.’ Huge laugh. Does she mean well endowed? Another laugh. No, she means what she says. ‘But some of the black players are the best…’ Our following discourse is unprintable.

WHO is the sexiest? ‘Nigel Redmond is one of the nicest and kindest, always very courteous. Ben Clarke is good-looking. Stuart Barnes is the sexiest and best fun. I don’t think of Jeremy Guscott as a sex symbol although lots of people say he is.’ And Philip de Glanville? ‘He’s just very nice, courteous and quiet.’

So what’s it like for her, when she thinks a man is sexy and then has to rub him professionally? ‘I think I’m probably very lucky,’ she laughs. But Fiona says she doesn’t really think about the men in those terms. ‘They don’t see you as a woman. You’re a physio. You just get on with your job and let them get on with theirs.’

She has had in-depth training for such naked forays. In anatomy lessons, she practised on unclothed students. ‘We were always stripping down to underwear on courses.’ And she recognises that players probably aren’t really trying to unsettle their physios fatales. ‘If Victor Ubogu comes up to you with no clothes on, he’s not doing it to embarrass you. It’s just that you’re in their environment, in their changing roomIf Victor Ubogu comes up to you with no clothes on, he’s not doing it to embarrass you. It’s just that you’re in their environment, in their changing room. It would be totally inappropriate to start laughing or giggling.’

Fiona keeps confidences and maintains a professional distance. ‘You have supper with them, then leave them to play cards and drink. You don’t overstep the mark.’ But there isn’t an unwritten rule that physios don’t step out with players. And there’s a story, on the rugby vine, that one physio fatale at a leading London club is dating the team captain or somebody. But we are in the business of facts.

Surprisingly, she says sexism is not an issue. It was something she noticed at Liverpool last year. ‘The changing room was at the back of the members’ bar and they didn’t allow women there. The president of the club had to come over and give me special permission to walk through the bar to the changing room.’ And of course the physios fatales don’t have special changing or showering facilities. ‘We just go to the men’s loos then go home covered with blood, mud and hot rub.’

During the game, the players can mete out abuse. ‘They’re psyched up, often don’t want to come off when they’re injured and swear at you madly.’ She’s also in line for spectators’ scurrilous remarks. ‘At Twickenham, you feel as if 60,000 men are looking at you. You get a lot of wolf whistles, men saying ‘rub me down love’ and spectators limping saying they’ve got bad backs.’

Fiona takes it all with a pinch of Deep Heat. Fiona, you see, isn’t really a physio fatale. She’s a professional and a dab hand at her job. A middle-class daughter of a naval officer, she’s a gel who’s keen on tennis, riding and windsurfing. She feels overwhelmed when she’s in a coach with 30 men with police outriders and chaps waving to them from the other coaches. She never wears make-up or jewellery. The bed in her drawing room is for treating her patients. And she’s dedicatedly and happily married. Oh, and in case I misled you, the Gladiator pin-ups on her fridge are her children’s.

Fiona Phillips has the sort of job that most women can only dream of – looking after the bodies of a top rugby team Walking wounded: Fiona escorts Andy Robinson from the fray THIS attractive woman spends much of her time with 30 cavorting naked men. She goes out on special occasions with blood and mud on her clothes. She rubs hot stuff on men’s thighs and keeps a bed in the middle of her drawing room. And she enjoys standing in front of 60,000 chaps, some jeering and asking her to strap them up. Sounds odd? She’s Fiona Phillips, physiotherapist to Bath Rugby Football Club and one of the club’s four Deep Heat-wielding dames.

Fiona, 33, had her most recent big break during Bath’s win in the Pilkington Cup at Twickenham. The 1st XV’s chief physio was off with a broken leg, so Fiona was the one ogled by thousands of male spectators and starring on television bandaging sinewy legs and sponging steaming physiques. ‘Hardly a break,’ she quips, smiling sunnily in her egg-yolk kitchen in her converted West Country old school house where there are Gladiator pin-ups on the fridge and a clock reading ‘time flies’, with a fly stuck to its hands.

She’s been with Bath RFC for three seasons and rubs down some of the most fancied men in Britain. There’s Ben Clarke, 24-year-old Mercedes-driving son of a stud farmer who’s known as The Prince of Darkness because when he goes out at night girls disappear with him. (‘I don’t know anything about that,’ laughs Fiona.) Philip de Glanville, the 25-year-old who claims heart-throbbingly that he has no agent because he’s too ugly to market. Plus Jeremy Guscott, 28-year-old part-time catwalk model, glitzy London Fashion Show guest and star of glossy magazine covers.

Fiona, 33, wearing navy cardigan and tracksuit work clothes, is a good egg with blonde hair, fresh-faced boarding-schoolgirl’s looks and a body sportif. Which brings me to the stories of panting sportsmen falling in love with their physios. Of broken hearts and awkward situations. ‘All rubbish,’ Fiona answers gaily, although it’s clear to the untrained eye that there’s far more romantic potential in her, this physio fatale, than in a man with a bucket and sponge.

She’s often in the changing room when it’s full of men with no clothes on. ‘Oh yes, they’re totally naked.’ Is being with 30 nude men en masse amusing? ‘Well, different from being with women getting ready for hockey.’ Does she feel abashed or find it daunting or difficult? ‘No, no, no. But they try their best to embarrass you sometimes. Particularly when you arrive first at the club.’ She giggles. ‘They like the shock value of striding around naked and walking up to you with no clothes on to ask you to strap them. It happens all the time.’

Naturally, it behoves me then to ask her who has the best body. ‘They’re all a bit different. But Ben Clarke is quite well proportioned.’ Huge laugh. Does she mean well endowed? Another laugh. No, she means what she says. ‘But some of the black players are the best…’ Our following discourse is unprintable.

WHO is the sexiest? ‘Nigel Redmond is one of the nicest and kindest, always very courteous. Ben Clarke is good-looking. Stuart Barnes is the sexiest and best fun. I don’t think of Jeremy Guscott as a sex symbol although lots of people say he is.’ And Philip de Glanville? ‘He’s just very nice, courteous and quiet.’

So what’s it like for her, when she thinks a man is sexy and then has to rub him professionally? ‘I think I’m probably very lucky,’ she laughs. But Fiona says she doesn’t really think about the men in those terms. ‘They don’t see you as a woman. You’re a physio. You just get on with your job and let them get on with theirs.’

She has had in-depth training for such naked forays. In anatomy lessons, she practised on unclothed students. ‘We were always stripping down to underwear on courses.’ And she recognises that players probably aren’t really trying to unsettle their physios fatales. ‘If Victor Ubogu comes up to you with no clothes on, he’s not doing it to embarrass you. It’s just that you’re in their environment, in their changing room. It would be totally inappropriate to start laughing or giggling.’

Fiona keeps confidences and maintains a professional distance. ‘You have supper with them, then leave them to play cards and drink. You don’t overstep the mark.’ But there isn’t an unwritten rule that physios don’t step out with players. And there’s a story, on the rugby vine, that one physio fatale at a leading London club is dating the team captain or somebody. But we are in the business of facts.

Surprisingly, she says sexism is not an issue. It was something she noticed at Liverpool last year. ‘The changing room was at the back of the members’ bar and they didn’t allow women there. The president of the club had to come over and give me special permission to walk through the bar to the changing room.’ And of course the physios fatales don’t have special changing or showering facilities. ‘We just go to the men’s loos then go home covered with blood, mud and hot rub.’

During the game, the players can mete out abuse. ‘They’re psyched up, often don’t want to come off when they’re injured and swear at you madly.’ She’s also in line for spectators’ scurrilous remarks. ‘At Twickenham, you feel as if 60,000 men are looking at you. You get a lot of wolf whistles, men saying ‘rub me down love’ and spectators limping saying they’ve got bad backs.’

BALLERINA Bryony Brind is talking for the first time about her relationship with Prince Michael of Kent and of the death in a climbing accident of the man she planned to marry. About being violently mugged in London last week and about her psychic abilities and plans to marry on a cliff top. And of her youth when she was the Royal Ballet’s youngest star, Rudolph Nureyev’s partner and hailed as the new Margot Fonteyn.

But she won’t elaborate on the house she wants to build, constructed of water.

When I arrive at Glyndebourne, where she’s rehearsing for the principal role in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, she’s walking the dogs with her mother. Bryony, ‘roughly’ 33 years old, in baggy track suit and leg warmers, 5ft 5in and with wrist-sized hips, picks her way balletically across the mud. Then she sits on the grass in elegant yoga-cum-ballet position.

Not so long ago she was reported to have sought comfort in the company of Prince Michael of Kent, 51, who took her out to exclusive restaurants while Princess Michael, known for her marital rows and tendresses for foreign men, was in the Bahamas working on her new book. The Prince and Bryony were oft spotted sharing a quiet table in Julies Restaurant in Holland Park, sometimes until 1am.

‘I met the Prince at the house of a friend, another dancer, one evening,’ says Bryony, answering reluctantly. ‘He’s the most charming man, has got time for everybody and the smallest things excite him. That’s really special. It would be so easy to take things for granted.’ What does he appreciate in her? ‘I’ve no idea,’ she says, stumbling. ‘He’s just a casual acquaintance really.’ And one with whom she dined four times in just one month? ‘Who’s counting?’ (Unamused laugh.) Can she describe her relationship with him? ‘Can I describe our relationship? Excuse me sucking away on this thing here (a Thermos flask). Oh, we’re purely friends.’ Did Princess Michael laugh off the press coverage or stop Bryony seeing her husband? ‘She was the one who suggested he call me up because she was away at the time.’ Why? ‘I’ve no idea. Maybe different sort of company from what he’s used to.’

DIDN’T Bryony think there would be problems about intimate but public dinners with a married Royal? ‘No, because I really believe it’s possible to be friends with a man. He’s in no way after me and I’m not after him. He’s married, apart from anything else.’ Has she ever had an affair with a married man? She laughs. ‘Not yet.’

Poor Bryony was also linked in the Press with Nick Allott, 36, the estranged husband of Anneka Rice, when Anneka wanted a reconciliation. ‘But I’ve known Nick for years and years.’ So it wasn’t a romance? ‘I don’t think so, no.’ And she laughs again.

Once voted one of the most beautiful women in London, Bryony has natural red hair, a wide mouth, troubled brown eyes and exerts a strange fascination over men. Her face often looks heavy. ‘I suppose I’m sad. I feel like a tumble drier inside.’

In fact, she’s remained resolutely single since the tragic death of Jonathan, a landscape gardener she’d hoped to marry and who died in a fall in the Alps in 1989. ‘He was like a soul mate. We were childhood friends and went out for two years. I called him my ‘ray of sunshine’ because of his wonderful blond hair and fantastic joie de vivre. I think I was in love with him.

‘Then he went on an activity holiday while I collapsed in the sun. When I got back, his father rang and said in a terribly blunt, matter-of-fact way that he’d died. I still don’t believe he’s not here, because he is here. I still talk to him. There’s always a seat for him at table. I’m always saying things to him like, ‘You were right,” she laughs. ‘It’s a totally different relationship now. It’s almost got better, if that doesn’t sound terribly callous. I think we’re closer now than we were. I keep finding little notes from him which mean so much more now.’

She was profoundly affected by his death and dealt ‘badly’ with it. ‘I cut off from his family. I started socialising with people much older than me who I didn’t identify with. I just wanted to get out and see as many people as I could but wasn’t looking for anyone to have a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with. Now it’s changed and I’m back in the running. I’ve got my feelers out.’

But things have gone badly. Last Thursday she was waiting outside for her dinner date at Julies when she was mugged by a teenager, dragged 20 yards along the pavement on her coccyx and badly bruised. He took the £700 she had for a season ticket. ‘Not a lot of money to pay for my life.’ But she’s traumatised. ‘I keep seeing him, keep reliving it, keep thinking if only … I’m nervy and jumpy. I can’t lie on my back because it’s so painful. But dancing hurts only marginally more than it would anyway.’

Bryony, who is superstitious and tends to see signs and portents in things, has discarded the outfit she was wearing. ‘You start thinking, did that have something to do with it …’ And her pearls. ‘They signify tears. I never normally wear them.’ Instead she’s wearing a crystal her mother (around whom she sees a white aura) gave her. Last week she tried to see a fortune teller. She appears to want to find answers and an order and meaning in things, to make sense of her emotional turmoil.

Her mother, an artist who teaches yoga, joined her over the weekend to look after her and is driving her the four hours a day to and from rehearsals. Why doesn’t she stay in Sussex? ‘I have two cats I can’t leave in London.’

Bryony was once the chosen partner of Rudolph Nureyev. ‘He was one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. Originally I was terrified of him, but he became a mentor, supporter and friend.’ But the late Sir Kenneth MacMillan by-passed her, the roles dried up and she left the Royal Ballet in 1991, diversifying her career into acting and modelling. It has been tough parting from a company in which she’d become institutionalised – ‘You just work as hard as you possibly can and they tell you what to do’ – and where people had known her since she was 11. ‘My self-confidence has always been low. I was like a little girl. Now I have to be somebody else.’ She’s now dancing in opera for the first time.

She’s intensely self-critical (‘At ballet school you were never told you were any good’); has tunnel vision (‘I blank out my problems. That’s how I handle them’); and is a perfectionist, meeting the inexorable demands of her job and seeing her body as ‘a vehicle, an instrument’. She denies being bulimic or anorexic but dislikes her physique, thinking she has a double chin and saying: ‘Dancing, you have to look at your body every day, which is bad enough at the best of times.’

SHE pretends to be more vulnerable than she is, is eager to please, astute and delightful company. We return to her love life. Is she unhappy not having a romance? ‘I suppose I am. I’m waiting, I’m waiting. It will happen, I’m sure.’

Is she lonely? “No, I’m hardly ever at home, always going out.” She wants to marry, eventually, in a Cornish clifftop church. “Before, I wanted to marry outside on the rocks.” And she wants to have children before she is 41. “Dancers seem to be able to have them much later.”

IF YOU want a rabbi to live with you for a week or so, at a charge of £1,000 plus expenses for seven days, Rabbi Martin Felt is your man. In America, the personal nutritionist has replaced the fitness trainer as the ultimate status symbol, and Madonna, Cher and Michael Jackson take theirs on tour. Now Martin, a 40-year-old American kabbalistic rabbi turned nutritionist, has brought the practice to London.

Frequently he lives with clients, whether individuals or families, for two intensive weeks. Sometimes he goes on holiday or business trips with them, as far afield as Los Angeles. Other times he flies to Bahrain or Kuwait to offer advice or rejuvenation programmes.

Martin is, for example, live-in personal nutritionist to businessman Avi Nissanni and his family in Hampstead. ‘I’ve lived with them for a week or two four times in the last six months. I’ve changed his body chemistry, massaged them, cooked for them, taught his family how to prepare food, looked after his wife, exercised with them, and taught them how to stretch, breathe and meditate.’ Martin, who is soon to accompany the family on a trip to America, has two dozen such ‘very wealthy’ private clients. Many of his clients (‘mostly women from SW1 and SW3′) simply lack a feeling of general well-being. Others suffer from chronic tiredness, anxiety or depression. But he specialises in degenerative diseases, and has worked extensively with cancer, arthritis and Aids. He believes food is the best medicine.

He has just published a book, Eat Yourself Fit with the Felt Formula, to help you ‘discover the food plan to change your life’, and promising immediate and extraordinary results. A questionnaire helps you interpret your symptoms and find your individual Felt formula for eating, to bring your body back into balance. But he prefers to meet clients, preferably for four hour-and-a-half consultations, at a cost of £70 each. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people over the years,’ he claims.

He came to Britain eight years ago to escape American health radicalism. He doesn’t believe in extreme diets or megadoses of vitamins, smokes ‘10 cigars a year and the occasional cigarette’, and eats his share of junk food. ‘I’m not a phoney food faddist.’

He sees outpatients in his one-bedroom, student digs-style flat, with posters of Indian deities on the wall, amid the alternative books and dirty crockery in the kitchen. He diagnoses with a conventional blood test (£59) and extensive questions. ‘Have you had any infection over the last few weeks? Any specific pain? Any gas, belching or flatulence? Are you short-fused, irritable or volatile?’ He is efficient and his diagnosis very precise.

He tells me not to mix proteins and carbohydrates (to aid digestion), cut down on acid-forming foods (the body stores toxins, which acid exacerbates), not to eat bread (yeast ferments in the stomach), and to take Solgar and BioCare supplements (food capsules represent a third of his treatment). MARTIN is dressed in dark colours, and has an intense face and curly hair. He’s extremely knowledgeable but weird and controlling. He talks, sometimes with his hands in the air, with his loud voice rising, saying things like: ‘You have the institutionalisation of the mythological basis of a culture anthropologically manifested in a country with a psychic nature phenomena.’ The phone rings incessantly and he talks at leisure: ‘Not a disturbance, nice to hear from you…’

His method is a sensible integration of Western and Eastern medicine. Later I followed some of his advice and found it made a positive difference. Atmospheric pollution and stress, he says, affect the chemical balances of our bodies, changing the genetic basis of health: everything is bio-chemical; most physical and mental ailments can be attributed to the food we eat; and eating yourself fit, alert and energetic, and to the correct body weight, is simply a matter of knowing what to eat and when. ‘The foods fuelling the body must be accurately and metabolically precise for whatever disease or stress imbalance is going on.’

Martin was brought up in Philadelphia where his father sold insurance and his mother was a university administrator; a ‘just above working-class’ family. He gained a degree in law, political science and history. Thereafter, none of his dietary research was carried out in an institution or university.

His system, which has taken 10 years to develop, stems from his training with his ‘mentor’ Dr Kaushik, an Indian medical doctor, ‘a Hindu and Buddhist’, who taught him Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, meditation, homeopathy and yoga. ‘I lived and studied with this man for six years in the Seventies.’

In addition, he’s studied herbalism, re-birthing, clinical nutrition, naturopathy, and body work from osteopathy to Rolfing. ‘I experienced all these things myself.’ There is, he says, nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades.

His work culminated in 1987 in a doctorate of divinity at Shiloh seminary in America, where he studied mysticism and the link between science and spirituality. He calls himself an ordained kabbalistic ‘rabbi’, ‘an esoteric and non-pulpit position’. This isn’t a rabbinical ordination recognised by Orthodox Jews, who compare it to a divinity graduate calling himself a ‘mystical vicar’.

Martin has three young children, all living abroad, by three different women. He’s not married to any of them, has already been married twice and supports the children. ‘My work has always been a priority.’ What’s he like? ‘I’m tempestuous, volatile, cataclysmic and mercurial.’ Can’t he transform himself with his food? ‘I am. Things don’t change overnight.’ Aren’t things meant to change radically and swiftly? ‘On different levels. I’m not holding myself up as a guru.’

BRITT Ekland, a lover with stamina, once stayed in bed with her soon to be ex-husband drummer Jim McDonnell for two days and nights. Before him, she slept with Peter Sellers (whom she married), Lou Adler, Rod Stewart, Warren Beatty, Ryan O’Neal, Lord Lichfield and George Hamilton. Now she’s written a bonkbuster, Sweet Life, which echoes her own life and is about a Swedish air hostess who marries an English Lord who dies and leaves her penniless and ready for adventure… But Britt’s real life story is of a beautiful woman who protects her vulnerability with an iron will and compulsive need to control.

Britt, 51, is a consummate professional, posing expertly in nearly fluorescent green Versace jacket, tiny skirt, high heels and smiling winningly with enormous eyes and shining capped teeth. She’s a perfectionist, an obsessive and a former bulimic. ‘Almost everyone in the Seventies was,’ she says. ‘They’d eat loads of sweets and throw up or have a huge dinner and go, ‘aaaggghhh, this is disgusting’, and chuck it up.’ These days she never eats breakfast or lunch. ‘I can go for days without food.’ She’s now an exercise-aholic. ‘It’s like my security blanket,’ she says. ‘Last year I was running four miles a day then doing three hours of Polates exercises, then weightlifting.’ Her watch is set 20 minutes fast – as, apparently, are all the clocks in her home – which makes her ruthlessly efficient. If she comes in the door and an object is an inch out of place, she cannot take her coat off until she’s ordered it.

She looks tremendous, although she stays awake at night thinking she should be thinner. She’s chopped her hair, to stick up two fingers (which she does, literally) at people’s expectations. She hasn’t had plastic surgery for 12 years, since she did the bags under her eyes. She’s no fluffy blonde, no fool, has a sharp sense of humour and at the beginning of the interview interlocks her fingers tensely, shakes almost imperceptibly and crosses her arms and legs tightly. She’s ornamental and wears a ring even on her thumb. I notice it when she flicks her hand dismissively at the waiter.

But say ‘Britt’ and people think ‘sex’. ‘I enjoy sex and I’ve had wonderful sex,’ she says. ‘But it’s more difficult for me, Britt Ekland, to have a fling than for anybody else. The media would never leave me alone.’ She’s a firm believer in the Myth of Britt, is this actress who’s done an exercise video and has a chat show on Swedish television. She promotes herself, endearingly I think, in Californian style.

She split up from Peter Sellers, whom she married ‘about 10 days after meeting him’, when she was 25. ‘It was a manic marriage. I was madly in love with him but never knew whether he was going to kiss me or give me the cold shoulder. He abused me mentally, which is as bad as physical abuse. I tried to commit suicide with his Mogadon. I didn’t really want to kill myself.’ She had a ‘transatlantic relationship’ (and a baby) with Lou Adler. Rod Stewart, she says, broke her heart. ‘I trusted and loved him and he had affairs.’ And Warren Beatty? Is he the great lover he’s made out to be? ‘No’ – surprised – ‘I’ve had better.’

In Sweet Life the heroine has a lesbian affair. ‘I’ve never had one ever. Never really wanted to.’ What draws men to her? ‘God, I think after dark probably I draw them more,’ she laughs, dirtily.

‘It’s because I’m an enigma. One of the problems with you young women is that however gorgeous your body is, you’re still very insecure about what to do and how to do it, the etiquette of lovemaking and the whole package of before and after.’

As a woman becomes older, Britt says, she’s prepared for all eventualities. ‘You’re nice-smelling, clean, have soothing candles and you’re more inventive.”

Britt has three children: six-year-old Thomas Jefferson by Jim, Nicholai, 20, by Lou and Victoria Sellers, 28. She had TJ when she was 45, says she’s an ‘incredible’ older mother and is ‘fine and not at all guilty’ about the fact that none of her children had two parents who stuck together. In 1986 her daughter Victoria was involved in a drugs-related felony and recently she emerged as a high-class prostitute with the notorious Hollywood madame Heidi Fleiss. ‘I won’t talk about that.’

‘But what are your feelings, as a mother, about your daughter’s drug addiction and prostitution?’ I ask.

‘She tells me it’s all lies and that she is suing the paper.’ ‘And do you believe her?’

‘As a mother, yes, that is what I choose to believe,’ she says, frostily.

‘If the allegations were true, how would you feel and behave?” ‘I’m a mother. Whatever she’s done, she has my 100 per cent support and I love her as much as I ever did. I mean it.’ Britt believes in God and ‘talks to Him every night’, asking Him to look after her children and get her acting parts.

Her own mother contracted cancer aged 49, recovered and then got Alzheimer’s. She’s been in an institution for 10 years. ‘She’s like a vegetable. I said recently I’d kill her if the law allowed it. That made huge headlines – ‘Britt Ekland Would Like To Kill Her Mother’ – in the streets of Sweden. It was devastating… It’s too hard for me to see her alone, so I go with my three brothers.’ This is the only time Britt shows a chink in her emotional armour.

But I liked her. Outwardly she’s great fun, ‘a very social animal’, and has made herself unafraid. ‘A lot of women are frightened of losing their looks, jobs, husband, children or reputation. I wouldn’t be fazed by any of these.’ She protects herself with bullishness. She’s honest and open, but doesn’t trust people or let anybody close. ‘I don’t let people in. Not even Jim my ex got in there. I’m very guarded.’

She’s built a bastion around herself so that she can be completely in control and unhurt by people. ‘Inside me there’s like a door which is shut. Whatever is in there has to stay where it is. If I open that door, I’ll bring back feelings I haven’t had for a long time.’

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

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

She’s getting married on June 18 in Northamptonshire, with 300 guests and a marquee. `A bit of a bun fight. I’d imagined a small wedding, but I’m the only daughter and the youngest,’ she says. The couple have turned down a reputed £20,000 from Hello! to avoid falling victim to its curse – `I wouldn’t want to be caught on somebody’s coffee table, no way!’ So far, family arguments (`we’re both from very close families’) have been confined to disagreements about the flowers.

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

Julia met him first at a dinner party in 1989. `I didn’t think a lot of him. He didn’t say a word. He was obviously very shy. I felt sorry for him.’ But they became friends (she had just broken up with Jeff), and would call each other when they were depressed.

She says: `I used to get very low. It’s a typical Piscean trait, very emotional and up and down like a yo-yo. I was very much the loner, and would exaggerate things in my mind. Like: `Oh God, work was awful today . . . so I’m going to lose my job’.’

Will took her on their first date only last year, a month after they’d both broken up with their respective partners. A month later, he proposed to her in bed. Initially, she declined because she thought he was joking. Why did it take them four years to get together? `We didn’t tell each other that we liked one other. We’re both very shy. I don’t have enough confidence in myself and need encouragement,’ she elaborates. `If people are supportive, I’ll feel better about myself. If I’m left to my own devices, I’ll shy away into a hovel.

`I’m not a party-goer. I don’t like going out, and would rather stay in for the evening. If I go out, I’ve got to be with people I know really well. Otherwise, I’ll close up and daydream, which is my favourite pastime. `If someone is talking, I’ll be a million miles away, travelling to countries in my head or dreaming about my wedding day.’

Her lack of confidence is totally unapparent. Her mother considers her a very good actress; even her body language is relaxed.

Julia’s country childhood was idyllic. She had ponies, and her two elder brothers and father – now a retired chartered accountant – doted on her. `I was very spoilt, and probably still am. I’ve grown out of the stamping my feet syndrome, but I did that until I was about 11.

`I was a horror at primary school, a real tomboy. I used to beat up little girls. I used to get in a panic when they went off crying to teacher, and had to bribe them to stop them snitching on me.’ She grins. Julia `grew up rapidly’ at Oakham Boarding School in Leicestershire. `It was fantastic. It was a mixed school, but there were a lot more boys.’ She showed early signs of being a man’s woman: `I get on better with guys and find it easier to talk to them.’

She worked hard to get eight O-levels and three A-levels: `I wouldn’t say I’m stupid. I’m just average.’

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

But the relationship made her very isolated. `I lost contact with my friends. There was no one of my own age group around me. I was on my own a lot and lonely. It toughened me up.’ She hugs herself. `He wasn’t a father figure. I learned a lot from him, but he wanted me to be a mother to him. I just wasn’t strong enough for that.’ They eventually broke up in 1989. Julia had two serious relationships before Will, neither with well-known men. `I haven’t had that many boyfriends to be quite honest.’ What about Eric Clapton? `We just had a laugh and the media immediately thought . . .’ But did she have an affair with him? `No, he was just a mate.’ Why not? `I didn’t particularly want to.’ She says she wasn’t his confidante, that they don’t keep in touch and she doesn’t want to talk about him. So, back to Will. She says, exhaling deeply, that it’s difficult to say what makes him tick. `He has tremendous drive and ambition. If he wants something, you know damn sure he’s going to get it. He’s less arrogant now, very kind, and thoughtful.’

She sees marriage as a partnership, requiring lashings of trust and honesty. Sexual fidelity is `100 per cent important’ to them both; she doesn’t have a problem with only ever sleeping with him for the rest of her life.

However, she has a `one per cent doubt’ over committing for life – her anxiety is over her own ability to make the marriage work. `If I start being stupid then I’ll lose the relationship. If I don’t pay enough attention to it, work takes over or I start looking elsewhere, for other men, that’s my own fault. But that’s a pretty silly thing to do if you’re going to commit to marriage.

`Because of my lack of confidence, I think maybe he’ll go off me. So I want to make sure that I’m going to be perfect for him for the rest of my life.’

Does she fear divorce? `I can’t see a marriage working if you’re thinking on that level.’

At the moment, they’re living in rented accommodation and house-hunting in west London. She wants to travel before having children. Will, she says, will certainly see his job through until the World Cup next year. They currently appear together in a TV advertisement for Quorn, part of a £5 million campaign for the veggie substitute for meat. The problem is, media sceptics suspect he’s a carnivore. Is he a vegetarian? `No, no, no,’ she says. `But I am. I’ve never liked meat, fish, eggs, cheese or milk. I have an appalling diet. I just eat sweets all day.’

She loathes being categorised as a blonde bimbo, and is annoyed at being known only as the woman who’s marrying Will Carling. Why, then, does she like relationships with celebrities? `There are people who do that on purpose. Dear God, I hope I don’t. Jeff was a celebrity when I was wetting my nappies, not when I went out with him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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