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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How easily someone can snip your life.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIANE OSBORNE’S husband died in her arms. ‘After I’d called the ambulance, I begged Bob not to leave me,’ she says.

‘I kept saying, ‘Baby, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me now. Please don’t leave me.’ But he went purple, stopped breathing and died.’

Afterwards she went into deep shock. ‘I had terrible shakes and couldn’t even hold a cup without the liquid pouring out. I’ve been crying a lot and haven’t felt like going from day to day.

‘Each morning I wake up and remember that Bob is dead and I feel sick. I used to eat a lot, now I hardly touch a thing unless somebody forces me. I’ve had terrible nightmares, always the same dream in which Bob is dying and going blue.

‘At first when people spoke to me, the words didn’t even go through my ears to my brain. I couldn’t remember a thing for six weeks – I had to write everything down.

‘Even now I can’t recall things properly. But I can remember everything that happened that night most vividly.’

Robert Osborne, a husband and father of three, was fatally stabbed just before Christmas last year. He was 40 years old.

He was killed by Joseph Elliott, a drugged teenager whom Robert had followed with a hammer when he caught him slashing neighbours’ car tyres for fun. Yesterday an Old Bailey jury allowed the 19-year-old killer to walk free. Diane, 38, is sitting in the kitchen of their rented family home in Streatham being comforted by her sister-in-law Patricia, who lives next door. Diane wears jeans, looks wan, smokes roll-ups and drinks Liebfraumilch. ‘I’m devastated. Justice stinks,’ she says furiously. ‘Elliott admitted taking drugs, slashing tyres and stabbing my husband. But they still said he wasn’t guilty. My husband is now dead and his killer is free.’

She appears alternately distraught and numb. Nothing prepared her for the jury’s verdict. ‘I expected murder or at least manslaughter for that boy,’ she says, looking dazed. (She rarely refers to Elliott by name, generally calling him ‘that boy’.) ‘I don’t have feelings of revenge. But I want a retrial. I’m told I can’t get one because I don’t have any more evidence.’

Elliott’s miserable childhood was used as an excuse in court. ‘But my dad died of cancer when I was 15,’ says Diane. ‘I almost died when I was 12, my mother suffered from mental illness and I was brought up in three foster homes.’

She looks sadly at her two labrador-cross dogs and cat playing nearby. ‘It’s unreal to say that someone doesn’t turn out right because of their childhood.’

She recalls the events of 10 December last year when she was in her garden watching an eclipse of the moon. Robert, a musician and music tutor, was inside decorating.

‘I heard a hissing noise and went out and saw these two guys slashing tyres then trying to break into a pensioner’s house.’

She followed them but fled when they faced her and went back to ring the police. Robert said she shouldn’t bother. ‘We’d called them out before and they hadn’t come. They’re too busy. My car had been done twice before and so had Bob’s. His handbuilt car was his pride and joy.’

Robert grabbed a hammer. ‘He’d had enough of this sort of vandalism. He just wanted to demand an explanation and get their names. He would never ever have used the hammer. He picked the hammer up by its head and just took it for protection.’

He followed the unemployed youth (who was high on LSD, drink and cannabis) to a local council estate, cornered him on a balcony – and was stabbed through the heart.

Diane had followed her husband: ‘Bob ran downstairs to protect me. He collapsed. I tried to stop him kicking Bob while he was dying,’ she says heavily. (In court, Elliott denied kicking his victim as he lay dying.) ‘He punched me around the head and rib cage.’

She holds back tears as she remembers her husband. They’d been together 16 years but she’s shocked and says she cannot remember when they married.’

‘Everybody says they’ve never seen a closer couple. Now it’s been taken away.

‘He was a good father and husband and a just, quiet man. He’s the most gentle man in the world. He used to take spiders out of the bath and put them in the garden to avoid hurting them.

‘He lived for his music and family. He was very clever –and used to teach 13 to 17-year-olds. He also played guitar in pubs with a band or on his own.

‘Our house was derelict when we moved in four years ago – and he did everything from the plumbing to building a pond in the garden. He was so happy that wildlife was thriving in it.’

Diane has coped with life by ‘living for the trial, thinking it would bring justice’.

‘She kept saying her life was over when he was killed,’ explains Patricia. ‘But she kept going so she could see his killer brought to justice.’

How did Diane feel when she saw Elliott? ‘It was very hard. I kept remembering him as I saw him on the night – mad, out of his head, vicious and dangerous.’ After the verdict, Elliott whooped with delight and Diane broke down in tears.

She returned to her ‘broken family’. She has three children – Tarina, 19, Justin, 18, and Lisa, 14. (Yesterday Tarina was on holiday in Spain.) The effect on the children has been devastating. ‘Lisa has done nothing but cry her eyes out. When I told her her father was dead, she went mad.’ They also face the prospect of meeting Elliott because his council flat is 300 yards from Diane’s home. He lives in squalor on an estate littered with cars with missing wheels, syringes on the ground and graffiti. ‘If I bump into him, I don’t know what I’ll do,’ she says, quietly. ‘I suppose I’ll have to do what I did in court and walk by, bite my tongue and hide my tears.

‘I will not move from here,’ she adds, forcefully. ‘It’s my house and Bob did the decorating. If I move somewhere else where there’s no decorating by Bob, my life will be as empty as my heart is now.’

She is also terrified that Lisa will bump into Elliott on her way to school. (Lisa had, in fact, met Elliott before the tragedy. ‘He spoke to me,’ she says. ‘He’s dirty and he always looks like a tramp. I saw inside his home and it’s disgusting.’) The Osborne family is united in their horror at Elliott’s acquittal. ‘When the jury foreman stood up and read out the verdict, I thought another juror was going to stand up and say it was a joke,’ says Justin, a former store security guard.

‘It was bad enough having to go through his death and the funeral, but this really might just finish us off.’

Later, next door, Robert’s brother Mark, a builder, said: ‘How can a peaceful bloke like Robert go out of his house to protect my car, get beaten to death and his killer go free? Those 12 people who let that bastard out should be examining their consciences today.’

Previously Diane had faith in the system of justice. ‘But if I walked into the Queen’s house or didn’t pay my poll tax I’d be locked up tomorrow,’ she says now.

‘We live in a society where people are allowed to slash old ladies’ throats while they’re in bed and rape little girls and get away with it. Now you can’t even go out and protect your car without ending up dead. If that boy had robbed a bank he would have got time.’

Diane’s future is bleak. ‘I’m now trying to survive on income support. I’ve lost his teacher’s salary and have to get by on £70 a week. I’ll scrape through financially. But emotionally I don’t know what I’ll do. I’m knackered. I haven’t got any strength left and nobody can help me.’ She looks down. ‘My husband paid with his life for having a hammer. He died for nothing.’

Self-defence or not? How the judge guided the jury FOR LEGAL reasons, the judge, the prosecutor and the jury in the Robert Osborne murder trial are unable to defend themselves against the mounting tide of public concern.

But, by examining transcripts of the case, it is possible today to throw more light on the way it was handled.

This is an edited version of Mr Justice Kay’s direction to the jury: ‘The only lawful justification for this killing that arises is the question of self-defence.

‘Self-defence is lawful when it is necessary to use force to resist or defend yourself against an attack or threatened attack, and when the amount of force used is reasonable.

‘I emphasise two words: necessary and reasonable.

‘There are, thus, three matters that you have to consider. First and foremost, was the defendant acting in self-defence at all.

‘The defendant tells you he wanted no part in any fighting and if he is or may be right, then clearly his actions were entirely to defend himself. ‘If, however, you accept the evidence of Mr Osborne’s widow, for example, that the defendant shouted down a challenge to Mr Osborne, the prosecution say there is no question of him simply acting in self-defence. ‘Secondly, there is the question whether it was necessary to resort to the use of the knife at all. The defendant says that he was not intending to stab, merely to wave the knife in front of him and that it was Mr Osborne whose momentum carried him on to the knife. Thus he asserts that he was doing no more than was necessary.

‘Thirdly, was the defendant using no more force than was reasonably necessary? What is reasonable depends on all the facts, for example, the nature of the attack or anticipated attack, whether or not a weapon is used and whether or not the attacker was on his own.

Janet Reger, the Queen of Knickers cum Maureen Lipman of the underwear world, is commenting on the storm in a B-cup caused by the Kate Moss underwear pictures in this month’s Vogue. Entitled Under-exposure, the grunge model looks like a 13-year-old. Are the pictures disgusting? Hideous? Tragic? Paedophile?

Kate Moss happened to be wearing a Janet Reger pink lace bra (£100) in the pictures, but it is not a look that Queen Janet usually encourages. ‘We don’t subscribe to that look or find it attractive. I like women to look like women and girls to look like girls.’ Her daughter Aliza, Princess of Knickers, nods approvingly.

Janet Reger has been making slinky bras – and briefs, basques, nightdresses and nightgowns – for the past 26 years, and there is nothing she does not know about what men want.

So what sort of underwear should you wear to get your man? ‘Clean,’ replies Princess Aliza perfunctorily.

‘By the time he gets to your underwear, it’s a question of holding your man, not getting your man,’ interjects the Queen. ‘Men appreciate women who look good. If a woman looks like a slut, men won’t fancy her however kind and loving she is. All men are into black lace and black silk satin.’ Raine Spencer, she of the legendary libido, is a customer and mainly buys silk nightwear. La Contessa is, apparently, not ideally proportioned for mass production. How did she catch her Count? ‘She’s charming and we make her lots of silk nightwear and underwear specially. Sometimes she wants it cut a little higher or slit a little lower. She’s quite tall, of small build and hippy.’ La Contessa netted her Count with couture lingerie, natch. Lord Bath, the Loins of Longleat, visits regularly to kit out his 54 wifelets. ‘He spends lots and lots, and buys outrageous amounts,’ says the Princess, contentedly. ‘Since Christmas, he’s been in three times. He usually buys silk and is well in for a few hundred pounds each time.’ Four sisters from a Saudi royal family spent £53,000 on nightwear and promptly sent it all to the dry cleaners. Fergie always bags a big bag of lingerie. And then there’s Princess Michael of Kent and Princess Diana . . .

Eric Clapton ran up a ‘horrifying’ bill over Christmas. Rod Stewart shops with Rachel. ‘She does a help yourself and goes through all the drawers like a self-service,’ says the Princess. And singing star cum Bosnian relief worker Cher spends £1,000 on each of her visits.

Her business was born in the Sixties in a flurry of silk and lace, spawned a million high street copies and went into voluntary liquidation in 1983. She bounced back and now operates from her Beauchamp Place shop and sells by mail order.

Janet Reger sells a black bra trimmed with marabou feathers (with which you can fish) and glitter for £111; snakeskin Lycra stretch bra and briefs for £122; a beautiful housecoat with hand-appliqued French lace for £499; eau-de-nil chiffon frilly bra, brief and suspenders; a Chinese bustier with brocade and toggles.

‘Men don’t buy that sort of thing,’ she says, twanging a Chinese toggle, ‘because they don’t feel safe with it.’ Currently the most fashionable garment is a Lycra peasant-style body in chenille finish with front lacing. Silk satin bras, briefs and suspender belts with lace are perennially the most popular items with men. They simply don’t buy bodies. And women opt for a greater variety of lingerie, from bodies to camisoles. A standard array of transvestites buy camiknickers and lots of nightwear. ‘One comes in here and spends £800 on his sister,’ intones Queen Janet. So whither Nineties underwear? ‘It’s going stretchy and corsetted,’ she says.

All is not quiet on the lingerie front. There have been strange stirrings amid the famous boned and underpinned negligees, lace G-strings and frothy pink bras. Recently they had a woman in the shop who broke off her engagement because her fiance bought her some Reger underwear. She stormed Beauchamp Place with her ivory silk bra. ‘I presume she was militantly women’s lib,’ says the Queen, drawing dedicatedly on her Silk Cut. ‘She came marching into the shop and screamed, ‘Take this back. I don’t know what he was thinking of. I’ve never been so insulted in my life. What sort of woman do you think I am?’ ‘ Another storm in a B-cup?

Victor Edelstein, one of Princess Diana’s favourite designers, is having a mid-life crisis. He’s 46 years old, has worked in fashion for 32 years and has clients from the Duchess of Kent to Princess Yasmin Aga Khan. Now he’s closing his couture house and starting his second life. ‘I’m going to be very poor for a long time,’ he says. ‘But I don’t mind. I want to be free.’ In 1967, aged 21, Victor was assistant to Barbara Hulanicki at Biba. Next he was assistant designer at Christian Dior. Then in 1977 he started on his own, but went bankrupt. Instead of slinking away and becoming a pattern cutter, he salvaged something out of his liquidation and moved into couture.

At its height in 1989, the turnover was £1 million a year. (His dresses – flattering, elegant and heavenly – start at £2,500.) Now he refuses even to look at his accounts. Couture, he says, is no longer fashionable and he doesn’t have the resources to wait for a revival. ‘I don’t want to get deeper and deeper into debt.’ He intends to spend his time painting watercolours, writing travel articles, illustrating a Cinderella book and designing for the stage.

Victor has an unconventional marriage and lives alone in a one-bedroom flat. He stopped living with Annamaria, his Catholic wife and dealer in old master drawings, 12 years ago after eight years of marriage. They never divorced, remain good friends, still go on holiday, spend four nights a week together when she is in London, and divide their time between four properties in Paris, Spain and London.

‘Now we’re together for more than half the year. A lot of people envy our marriage,’ he says. ‘We both have flats in London. Sometimes we entertain or spend the weekend in the other’s flat. It works marvellously.’ He doesn’t always include Annamaria when he’s entertaining, and isn’t offended if she doesn’t involve him. ‘I don’t feel insecure. She’s like a second self.’ He first met Annamaria at a friend’s party. ‘I saw her and in some weird way just knew that we were going to get married.’ She had a boyfriend at the time, but they met again six months later when she didn’t – and married in 1973.

Why did they break up? ‘She had this job buying works of art and was away half the time. We were apart too much and the whole thing went sour.’ They split but never stopped seeing one another. ‘We’re together now more than ever.’

Are they sexually loyal? ‘It’s not discussed. We do what we like. There are no rules. Whatever happens happens. But what we like is to be together. Whoever we meet, there is a kind of inevitability that we’re going to remain together.’ He says he doesn’t feel sexual jealousy or possessiveness. ‘The way you keep the love of your life is by making that person feel absolutely free.’

They don’t have children. ‘It wasn’t a decision not to. But nothing happened and she felt there was no point investigating and going through hell trying to have them. She felt if it was meant to be we would have them. I’m sorry we didn’t. But it’s too late now.’

Victor is wearing a Ralph Lauren paisley tie and Prince of Wales suit, and has the looks of a Sir Ralph Halpern crossed with a sartorially equipped daddy-longlegs – he’s 6ft 4in with long face, long hands and long legs. He speaks in a mannered way and is charming and courteous. He’s Mr Nice Guy: ‘I’ve never lost my temper in my whole life. I wish I were more confrontational.’

He is a ‘lapsed’ Jew of Russian Polish extraction. (‘I do have a faith. I believe in God.’) His father and grandfather were dressmakers, and his family was close. As a child, he read a lot and played with a toy theatre. ‘School was hell until the last couple of years because one was artistic, sensitive and taller than everybody else.’ He was already more than six foot at the age of 12.

‘I was quite weedy and used to get knocked about. Thank God I didn’t go to boarding school. I’d have been one of the children who hung themselves in the first week.’ He went to the local grammar school and gained six O-levels.

His father died when he was 19. ‘It was horrible. He was a heavy smoker and died of lung cancer.’ His mother then worked as a secretary. ‘Six years of father being ill depleted what money there was.’ Victor was fired from his first job, and then sacked from the following six. ‘I was too dreamy. You imagine yourself throwing lengths of silk over beautiful models and then find yourself chained to a pattern-cutting table.’

He works very hard but is moderate elsewhere in his life. At the age of 21 he got drunk at a Biba party – and has never done so again. Nor has he ever touched a cigarette. And drugs? ‘Well, one’s had the odd joint. But one’s getting old.’

He’s excited to be entering a new era where he’ll be rid of hemlines and deadlines. ‘Lots of people are stuck in jobs and think, ‘God, if only I could do something else’. Well, I can.’ The official reason for the closure is his financial problems. But that is only part of the story. ‘Balenciaga said before he died that a couturier’s life is a dog’s life. It is in many ways. I’ve spent 11 years being polite and constantly watching what I say. I hold an awful lot back. I look at something that’s tight and instead of saying, ‘We’ll let that out’, I have to say, ‘We’ll ease that over the hips’.’ Doesn’t he feel like crawling up the wall? ‘Why do you think I’m stopping?

‘I’m certainly not retiring. I can’t imagine myself staring at the walls or the television from now until the Big Day.’ He thinks of himself as lazy. ‘Like most lazy people I work twice as hard to fight it off. I’ve always had this suspicion that left to my own devices I’d do nothing. Now we’ll see.’ What is he going to live on? ‘That’s my business. Not a lot.’ He’s not materialistic or avaricious. ‘Most of the time I’ve had so little that I count myself as very happy when I know I can pay my bills.’

We return to the subject of his sexuality. Are his inclinations exclusively towards women? He pauses. ‘How are yours?’ he says curtly, before replying in the affirmative. In an industry where many designers are homosexual, he admits he has a feminine side. ‘Maybe she is just getting out in those dresses,’ he says, hamming it up. ‘But I’ve certainly never felt tempted to put them on!’

SHE was snatched off the street, sexually assaulted and mutilated by a convicted killer who left her for dead in a blazing squat.

But only 48 hours after the attacker was jailed for 20 years, she is able to say: ‘I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

The courage that helped the 28-year-old career girl relive her ordeal at the Old Bailey is more evident than ever as she gives her first interview. Her face is expressive and lovely. She is beautifully turned out and talks in a calm, self-assured way.

Of her assailant, Anthony Ferrira, she says: ‘He could have cancelled my life. I don’t believe he deserves to live. I won’t ever forgive him.’ But what she really wants to stress is how lucky she is. The world is mostly full of good, kind and thoughtful people, she says, smiling. She loves her friends and family. She is intensely grateful to those who have helped her overcome the trauma. Every day feels like a bonus. ‘I love my life,’ she says. ‘That’s why I fought so hard for it.’ It was 7.15 on a February morning and the buyer with a top London store was walking through Brixton, South London, to a business meeting when Ferrira lured her into the squat by pretending his pregnant girlfriend needed help. When she resisted, he produced a knife.

‘I can’t describe the fear when I realised there was nobody else in the room and I thought he was going to kill me,’ she says.

He tried to strangle her then attacked her with a knife, cheesewire and a broken bottle. ‘The sexual acts were repulsive, humiliating and degrading, but I thought I’d do anything to stay alive,’ she recalls. `Then this crazed violence started. I fought to stop him killing me.’

The wounds Ferrira inflicted needed 100 stitches and she lost half her blood. `I wanted to lose consciousness,’ she says. `I wanted it to stop, just to stop the pain, even if it meant dying.

`I felt this deep whirling as if I was being spun round faster and faster. Then there was this profound agony, which I presume was unconsciousness. I didn’t even know whether I was dead. I tried not to breathe so he’d think I was dead, but the fire he’d started began burning my leg so I had to move. He began pounding my neck again.’

Eventually he left. `I hoped I’d die before the flames got to me,’ she says. But she was rescued by a neighbour.

In hospital, fear overwhelmed her. `Ferrira had the contents of my bag and my name,’ she says. `I was scared to go to the lavatory alone. My sister and best friend slept with me every night.’

She needed plastic surgery and still has scars, but doesn’t hide them. She has only just regained the use of one hand.

After hospital, she went to stay with relatives in Spain. `I couldn’t live in this country until he was behind bars.’

At present she is staying with her sister. `I loved living alone before,’ she says. `Now I have to live out of a suitcase.’

She had no partner at the time of the attack, but there have been boyfriends since. `I didn’t know if I could have a normal relationship,’ she admits, `but I’m lucky, I don’t think of Ferrira as a man. A partner in a loving relationship is very different.’

Her greatest difficulty is in being alone. `I won’t go anywhere without a mobile phone. If nobody’s at home, I ring someone from the car before I get out and they talk me through going indoors.’

After three months off work, she went back part-time. Her mother died when she was seven and her father three years ago. `To be honest, his death was far worse than any of this,’ she says. `There’s no way I can fill that gap. But I can rebuild my life and do things he’d be proud of.’

The former convent girl still believes in God. `Things happen for a reason,’ she says, `though I’m not quite sure why this happened. Maybe it was to make me stronger.

`I don’t have nightmares. I don’t feel any guilt or shame about what happened. I didn’t ask for this. Now I just have to get on and deal with it.

`The firemen who rescued me are receiving counselling. I went to see them. I don’t want anyone else to be scarred.’

She admits she found the trial terrifying, particularly the discussion before it was decided she could be screened from Ferrira. `In the end I saw him briefly and was surprised I felt nothing. He looked a pathetic character – not big, as I’d built him up to be in my mind.’

Although he is behind bars at last, she knows her troubles are not over. But she is strong enough to say: `I’m so lucky, I should have died. Now I feel today is the first day of the rest of my life.’