This week a commission of historians will deliver their verdict on the wartime conduct of Kurt Waldheim. For his most ardent supporter, his daughter Christa, there can be only one possible outcome.

‘IF I opened a paper tomorrow and read that my father had killed somebody, it wouldn’t throw me.’ The same woman later says: ‘It’s sometimes hard to keep your sanity and stop yourself going crazy.’ She is Dr Christa Karas-Waldheim, a 28-year-old law graduate and daughter of Dr Kurt Waldheim. The youngest of his three children by 11 years, she is the closest to her father and the most politically motivated.

Her relationship with her father is, she admits rather awkwardly, ‘abnormal’. She talks about him in romantic terms: ‘I always felt he understood me, never felt I couldn’t reach out. If he’s busy we can see each other at midnight.’ When she married last June – her husband is Austria’s most prominent young conservative politician – her father was not displaced. ‘I added his name to my married one because I feel very close to both of them.’ In Karas-Waldheim’s eyes, ‘Papi’, as she calls him, can do no wrong.

When her father decided to run for the Austrian Presidency in 1985 for the conservative People’s Party, after being rejected for a third term as Secretary-General of the United Nations, she left her job at the Austrian Academy of Science to campaign for him. ‘He cares about people and wants to help them. He was the best man for the job.’ Single-handedly and supported exclusively by donations, she enlisted thousands into her ‘people’s movement’. She would sleep four hours a night and speek up to eight times a day in different parts of the country, to crowds of sometimes 5,000 people. ‘I had never addressed more than 10 people before. It was terrifying.’

Then, in March 1986, three months before her father was eventually selected, what she wil only term the ‘smear campaign’ started. The World Jewish Congress (WJC) accused her father of being a member of the Nazi ‘browinshirts’ and later serving in a Wehrmacht unit where he must have been aware of the transporting of more than 40,000 Greek Jews to death camps during the Second World War.

His daughter says that the WJC’s ‘evidence’ came from socialist manipulators and that the allegations were ‘unfair weapons and lies’ employed by a frightened opposition.

Talking volubly and maintaining close eye-contact throughout, she constantly refers to her father as a victim and scapegoat. She was, she says, as astonished as her father by his opponents’ tactics.

The WJC claimed that Waldheim’s autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm, published in 1985, was factually incorrect, particularly in its omission of any reference to military service after 1941. He did see further military service – the issue is where and in what capacity. His daughter says that the only stories she had heard about the war years were things like her sister – who is 14 years her elder – being born on a mountain top when her mother fled after the Russian invassion of Vienna.

And her father? ‘He was just a poor soldier in uniform obeying orders. It wasn’t a nice time. He didn’t like to remember it.’

Last autumn the Austrian government published ‘The White Book’ to rebut the WJC allegations and explain Waldheim’s ‘missing years’. During them, Waldheim claims, he served as a translator, as an officer in German intelligence, continued his legal studies then worked as an interpreter and collator of military information. ‘That was a very boring time,’ his daughter says. ‘I can’t imagine that anyone will want to read it.

She believes that she established such a close relationship with her father through being the youngest in the family. ‘I was spoilt, being the baby. My mother is my best girlfriend.’ She grew up in New York during her father’s terms as ambassador and at the United Nations. (Lycee educated, she now speaks ‘Berlitz American’ with a singing Austrian accent.) Rather than isolate her from his hectic life, Waldheim would take her to cocktail and dinner parties, luncheons and on trips. Despite his unremarkable career in the UN – he is best remembered for his arid and ponderous style – Karas-Waldheim says: ‘I saw that he was respected by the whole world. I was so proud of him.’ She was a trained gold and silversmith; but when Waldheim told her that she should study law, she did.

Karas-Waldheim cannot admit even the possibility that her father could be guilty ‘He never gave me any reason not to trust him or think he was lying.’ The greatest proof for her, if she needed it, was that her father managed to keep ‘cool and smiling’ throughout his presidential campaign. ‘It’s very tough to constantly defend yourself over something that you didn’t do. And difficult to lie, or lie on someone’s behalf, for a long time. If his conscience were not 1,000 per cent clean, he would have cracked.’

I ask whether it is not every daughter’s duty to defent her father? ‘It’s not out of duty,’ she snaps. ‘It is the only thing you can do when you love someone who is being attacked and treated unjustly.’ Her mother, she says, is still ‘madly in love’ with the man she met when they were both studying for law degrees. ‘After 43 years of marriage she is still extremely in love with my father and she wants to help him.’

Has she ever thought, in her darkest moments, that her father might have been associated with murderers? She is as taken aback at the word as she is when I mention Kluas Barbie – ‘Barbie was guilty, so should be punished, even after all these years.’ Then ‘No,’ she says in answer to the question about her father. Even if ‘they’ find something, it will, she says, be a forgery or invention.

Hypothetically, if he were guilty, she would defend him. ‘Being a daughter, the most important thing would be to defend your father. My main concern would be to keep his spirits lifted.’ When I ask her what she will tell her children about their grandfather, she is ruffled. The fact that lies can get out of hand, is the gist of her reply.

Karas-Waldheim regards the WJC, who sowed the seeds of doubt about her father’s military career, as a ‘bunch of radicals’, ‘a small group of baddies’, interested in spreading hatred and yearning to achieve a high profile as Nazi hunters. ‘I don’t think they could give a damn about my father: they just want to defend their good reputation. Of course the WJC have approached me. I don’t want to do anything to do with them.’

She doesn’t think that the children of those Jews who were killed have the right to persecute her father. ‘Particularly since he has proved that he didn’t do anything wrong.’ Jews, she adds, were not the only victims in the war. ‘But the children of these victims are making an innocent victim of my father.’

Waldheim’s supposed misfortunes initially produced a rallying of support and waves of antisemitism in Austria. Karas-Waldheim says she is not antisemitic. She says she has Jewish friends – ‘as does my father’. She receives crank telephone calls and hate mail (her friends are amused at the rapidity with which she changes her telephone number). Has her father received threats? ‘I don’t know if he tells me everything,’ she says in a rare concession.

Waldheim remains on the Watchlist, barred from the US. ‘Who cares?’ she says. with a great deal of care. ‘I wish he weren’t. But I am sure they will soon take him off and apologize.’ The fact that Austria is isolated – his controversial visit to the Pope last June and his trip to Jordon broke a year-long diplomatic quarantine – is not something that she recognizes. ‘He didn’t become President to see the world,’ she says sitting in the government office in which she works out the logistics of Austria joining the EEC.

People, she adds, were not outraged by his audience with the Pope. ‘They were proud. They flew a few people in to be outraged.’ Whether or not Waldheim receives the Pope on the papal visit to Austria this June depends on the findings of Hans Kurz and the other historians investigating the president’s wartime activities. There is no question, according to his daughter, that Waldheim should step down. Wherever she goes with him, she says, they hear cheering. ‘He is the luckiest president. There has never been one that the Austrians have shown their approval of so much.’

Sue Smith first went shooting 20 years ago, when she was seven. Her father, a gun-smith, took her on a duck shoot. At 10, she was giver her first gun, ‘a 28-bore, the next size up from a 410’. She went pigeon shooting.

Then she started deer-stalking. ‘I got my first roebuck at 12,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a picture of it.’ In the following years she shot fallow deer, then red stags. Now she shoots pheasant and rabbits, too.

Smith, who works for a gunsmith as a professional gun finisher, is a crack shot. She is also anti those who are anti-blood sports, although she finds their views acceptable if they are vegetarians.

‘Most of them are just rent-a-gang, student recruits paid Pounds 15 a day to disrupt things.’

To those genuinely concerned about creatures’ suffering, she says: ‘An animal in an abattoir suffers far more because it knows it is going to be killed. When you stalk a deer, for instance, it doesn’t even know you are there.’ Occasionally, she concedes, a bird gets wounded. ‘But it is picked up instantly.’

She never feels upset about killing. ‘What? With the things I have to do as part of my work? Gutting rabits, skinning them, gralloching (gutting) deer and butchering them?’ Her father has started up an oven-ready enterprise.

She derives immense pleasure fom her sports. ‘I love being in the open air and getting exercise.’ Duck shooting is her favourite.

‘It’s the atmosphere out there on the marshes, when there are just three of you shooting in the dark. It’s freezing, and then you come back to a lovely fire.’ As far as pheasant shooting is concerned, she says: ‘It’s a bit naughty, but I suppose it is the thrill of seeing them drop from the sky.’

And rabbits? ‘You sit in clumps of grass or little hollows to get out of the wind and it’s fun because of the element of surprise.

Rosemary Cleverdon, the 49-year-old Joint master of the West Street Hunt, also enjoys the element of surprise. ‘We only get about one in every 25 foxes; they’re terribly crafty.

A former secretary in South Africa, she has been hunting for 15 years. ‘It’s exciting to see a pack work their way through a wood on the line of the fox. When they find a fox, the adrenalin gets going and the chase is rather fun.’ She says it gives her something to look forward to when everyone else is dreading winter.

The haunt takes out approximately 15 1/2 couples of hounds – ‘you talk about hounds in ‘couples’ and always take out an odd number’ – twice weekly from November to mid-March. In season, she probably dedicates about 25 hours a week to hunting.

With the other two Masters, she has to ‘draw covers’ (put the hounds into woods to try to find the fox) and decide where the hunt should go. She also has to obtain permission from the farmers, build a jump occasionally, organize fundraising events, visit the kennels, exercise her horses Mish and Dudley, and go to ‘masses of meetings.’

As Joint Master of the hunt, she maintains charge of the ‘field’ when they ‘move off’ (tells them where to go), and talks their way out of sticky situations if, for example, the hounds chase sheep or go into a garden.

She is not paid for her work; she pays a subscription to the hunt and contributes towards drinks at the meet. She estimates that a season’s hunting in her area costs at least Pounds 1,000.

‘A good coat costs about Pounds 800 and you pay aroung Pounds 250 for handmade leather boots,’ she adds.

The hunt expects to kill ’10 brace of foxes’ in a season. It is, she feels, the fairest and cleanest way to keep the animals down.

‘It’s a way of conservation – it is a service for the farmers – and the fox has an equal chance. Unlike shooting, you cannot just wound the animal.

‘Fortunately,’ she says, ‘we haven’t had too much trouble for the antis.’

Betty McKeever, an 86-year-old great grandmother and Master of the Blean beagles, says she had a ‘helluva’ time with them last season.

One of them – ‘some darned chap called Hey Ho or something’ – apparently gave them an awful ‘pasting’. In the subsequent chase, a policeman broke his ankle and had to be ‘carried off the field of battle.’ One day she was arrested.

As a matter of policy, she says she won’t allow ‘fisticuffs’. One of her fellow beaglers, she explains, disguises himself as a tree and watches out for people who squirt the hounds with acid.

Despite a recent hip replacement and failing eyesight, this season she has followed the hounds, walking for more than one and a half miles and has had a ‘rippling’ time.

McKeever’s mastership dates from 1909, when her father gave her some beagles. She has been in the parish almost all her life – she now lives in a part-13th century farmhouse with a pet bat.

As Master, she is responsible or the hounds’ upkeep. ‘I feed ’em on bibles (bullocks’ stomachs).’ They hunt from September – ‘as soon as we can get on the corn land’ – until March.

mcKeever has a huntsman and two or three amateur whips on a Saturday. On thursdays, a doctor, who is ‘supposed to be the best nuclear physicist in the world or something’, hunts the pack.

It is, says McKeever, an elderly or really young person’s sport. Three gentlemen in their seventies always go out with her.

She explains her enjoyment: ‘For a kick-off, you are in different country every time: Lovely woods, huge arable lands or marsh country.’ Beagling is very social, too, she says. On Boxing Day they meet at the Brewery, ‘all free drinks’.

If beagling is made illegal, she says firmly that she will move with her pack to Ireland. She doesn’t like killing anything unnecessarily but, she says, the hares damage fruit trees and are otherwise hunted by the fox, shot or snared.

‘I never feel guilty about killing them. I don’t think they think the way Beatrix Potter made out.’

The first incident of sales promotion in action, according to lain Arthur, occurred in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and paid the price. In this case the snake was the salesman, the tree was superbly merchandised, with excellent display support material and the price was self doubt. ‘So what part of Eve have to play in this point-of-sale decision to purchase?’

Arthur is the managing director of Kingsland Lloyd Peterson, a sales promotion agency. He was speaking to more than 100 delegates (60 per cent of whom were women) at International Business Communications’ ‘Advertising and Marketing to Women’ two-day conference this week.

Women are important to advertisers; more than 70 per cent of advertising is now aimed at them. (Call it Pounds 350 million to the advertiser, if you will. ) ‘Women are more important than men’, in the laconic words of speaker Carol Reay, management planning director of Jenner Keating Becker Reay advertising agency. In 1987 women have more spending power than ever before. They may be 42 per cent of the labour force, but they account of 80 per cent of consumer expenditure. And research shows that their self-preceptions are changing. Their need for ‘self-identigty’ is growing.

Yet many speakers at the conference maintained that the attentions of advertisers are being misdirected. Kay Scorah, an advertising consultant, spoke particularly of the lost tribe of the post-war generation: the ‘greying’ population, in ad speak. ‘a lot of energy and attention is devoted to young people and yuppies,’ she said, ‘but perhaps because we all refuse to grow old, we have neglected the over-45s. ‘ By the year 2000, more than 23 per cent of the population will be aged between 45 and 64; they will have well in excess of Pounds 18.8 billion of disposable income, and make their own decisions about spending it. Scorah believes it is well worth learning how to, in her words, ‘seduce the older women’.

‘How can it be that there is such a vast amount of out-of-touch advertising around for women?’ asked Reay. She cited the advertisements for Timotei shampoo, with its image of a woman in a poppy field. ‘An ultra-romantic portrayal that stands out for its inappropriateness. ‘ The image-making business ‘had got the image wrong’.

‘To date, the marketeer and advertiser alike have treated women as uniform and as captive – usually at the kitchen sink,’ explained Ann-Marie Dyas, bvoard account director at Boase Massimi Pollitt advertising agency. ‘The minute you describe your target audience as ‘housewives’ or ‘mothers’ or ‘career women’, you are into repression and not expression. ‘ The advertisers repertoire of stereotypes, she said, consist of the glamorous woman (a model) with an ‘interesting’ job and probably a BMW or two in the garage; and the unglamorous woman (a mum) living life at the bottom in a spotless kitchen. ‘Women don’t mind being shown doing domestic things, as long as they are seen to be competent and have outside interests. Just as they don’t object to nudity as long as it is seen to be relevant to the product – like suncream or a shower. ‘

Raising the standards, more research, casting at script stage and generally taking more account of women’s views will help to break the moulds, Increasingly women are buying values rather than products. ‘Philosophy and imagery are the new USPs (unique selling propositions),’ explained Dyas. Equality is what is desired; and equality for women is not about a woman in a bowler hat.

It is about changing fan belts rather than hitching lifts, as the Pretty Polly television commercial. Competent yet retaining her feminity: she wears stockings, but she also knows hwo to use them to replace the fan-belt.

In the world of advertising fantasy, women’s aspiratins rarely match the advertisers conceptions. ‘Women resent our obsession with the young and beautiful,’ Dyas said. ‘They are asking us – loudly – to show more ordinary real women in advertising. ‘

Some have already got there. ‘Both Oxo and Persil, in their different ways, are widely seen as accurate and enjoyable reflections of contemporary life, featuring modern mothers who combine humour, character, warmth and – most important of all – intelligence and individuality,’ explained Judie Lannon of J Walter Thompson. Oxo ads shown a realistic family life, with warts and all sympathetically portrayed. Persil gets away from the traditional washing machine syndrome with its stylish use of a punk and his washing.

But, to return to the Garden of Eden, it is worth remembering that Eve was in fact the deciding influence: the purchaser of the point-of-sale.

If you have not heard of Una-Mary Parker yet, you soon will have. She is currently embroiled in scandals that involve sex, drugs, fraud and embezzlement, and last week she masterminded a hijack and broke down in tears after a friend took an overdose and died. ‘I have experienced some of these things,’ explains the charity queen-turned-novelist, ‘but 90 per cent come from my imagination. ‘ They occur, in fact, in her still unfinished second novel, Scandals (her first, Riches, is due out this summer).

Una-Mary Parker, 55, is named after her aunts Una and Mary. ‘My mother thought she was being clever – but neither of them left me a bean,’ she says in her baritone voice, laughing throatily.

Until this year, Parker was the ‘unrivalled’ organizer of charity balls. She spurns the tabloid label of society queen – ‘that conjures up visions of ladies in pearls, flowered hats and print frocks’ – preferring to be called an events organizer; ‘much more professional,’ she explains. She had been Tatler’s social diarist, attending as many as five fucntions a night and acquiring a contracts book that one imagines needed to be carried on wheels. ‘After 10 years on Tatler, I thought I would have a breakdown if I had to go to another cocktail party. ‘ But film premieres, dances, fashion shows and gala exhibitions for charity were another ball game.

Parker decided to ‘major on decor’ (ballrooms transformed into jungles and deserts), and to become a stickler for detailed organization. By the time Parker hung up her ballgown, she was arranging 19 major events a year, ‘practically each one attended by a member of the Royal Family’.

Such a blue-blooded coterie was familiar to Parker. She was a debutante who did the deb scene’, and had a coming out ball. ‘I came out in 1949 in court – at a drawing-room tea party in Buckingham Palace with the then King and Queen Elizabeth. ‘ Then she married her late husband, society photographer Archie Parker – and had ‘the traditional 1,200-guest wedding reception’.

Archie Parker left Lloyds to become a protrait photographer at a time when, Parker says, it wasn’t the done thing to leave the City to become a snapper. ‘We did all the royals at Windsor and some came to our Knightsbridge studio. ‘ they also photographed showbusiness personalities and celebrities (‘we spent a weekend with Somerset Maugham’).

Parker has no regrets about leaving her charity career. ‘I had gone as far as I could in 15 years, and writing had become an obsession for me. ‘ She ‘felt a bit shy and inhibited’ – understandably since she dubs her first novel, Riches, as being the Dynasty between the sheets. Nevertheless, she sent the half-written Riches – about the different ways enormous wealth affects people – to a New York agent. ‘She said it was terrific. ‘ Parker will not reveal how much money she’ll make, saying only that ‘there are a comfortable number of noughts involved’. Small wonder that she now intends to write a novel every 15 months.

This weekend a ‘chatathon’ will raise money for charity and reveal a new champion talker

Maria Meredith, aged 31, talks non-stop. Her loquaciousness, inspired by an occasional nod, runs smoothly from the subject of holidays to ironing, the media, children, cement and her kitchen fittings. She talks incessantly – she offers a marathon of words. One imagines her builder husband, like some enforced trainee Quaker, coping by placing insulation wadding either in his ears or mouth.

He concedes that he doesn’t talk much when his garrulous wife is around. When he is out, she soliloquizes to the cats: she says she started talking at 15 months and hasn’t stopped since; she is nicknamed ‘The Mouth’ at her work (as a food supervisor for Marks & Spencer).

This week her chatting will make about pounds 220 for charity. The occasion, the LBC Chatathon on Saturday, will give her ample opportunity to talk her way to the title of Taylor’s Conversationalist of the Year, while raising money for the Association For Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus. (Each entrant has to talk friends out of at least pounds 100 worth of sponsorship).

Last year, the fifth year of the competition, 120 contestants, evenly divided between the sexes, entered. And Kate Holmes, a financial consultant, became the first woman to win the title. ‘Who says that women are born talkers?’ asks Sam Kirby, the organizer.

On the first day, competitors have 10 conversations of 50 minutes, changing topics and partners hourly. In the quarter-finals, the contestants will converse with celebrities, chosen for their gift of the gab: ironically, the organizers are remaining tight-lipped about who the celebrities are. The semi-fiinalists and finalists will then talk to each other for an hour. Judges Willie Rushton, Barry Cryer, Claire Rayner, Alan Coren, and Kate Holmes, will preside over each voluble contesting pair.

Last year the subjects ranged from ‘exploration’ – Meredith went into the battle of words with a combined attack ranging from pioneers to the Easter Islands, to he feline friends’ stubborn garden explorations – ‘to what makes news?’ This, Meredith explains, means ‘Royalty, disasters and pop stars’ bed hopping. ‘

The topics are announced at the beginning of the session, and the contestants – all aged over 18 – are awarded points for interest, wit, lucidity and cogency. ‘They are eliminated if they don’t keep up a cogent conversation,’ explains Kirby. Similarly, contestants are penalized for pauses, monolgues, swearing, unintelligability and for droning. Laughter will not be penalized unless unduly prolonged.

Men impose their wishes more. Meredith noted last year that they tend to get a point across in conversation by raising their voices. ‘They think the one with the loudest voice will win. ‘

Dr Sarah Hampson, lecturer in psychology at Birbeck College, University of London, agrees. ‘Men are much more experience at making forceful points verbally,’ she says. ‘The most obvious example is that men interrupt so frequently. ‘

Kate Holmes, 30 had never done any public speaking before she won the Chatathon last year. But, she says, she does a lot of talking in her job.

In last year’s Chatathon, she was astonished by the number of men who didn’t have conversation. ‘They had monologues, using the occasion to get on their soap boxes. They tend to assume they are right and have confidence in their views. Unfortunately, a lot of women talk trivia. ‘

As a judge, she says she will be looking primarily for politeness. ‘Bad manners are a killer to good conversation. The men tended to harp back to the same thing, whatever you were talking about, in order to get their point across. ‘ She will look for people who spark off the imagination of their partner. ‘That is when you are really communicating properly and exchanging ideas. ‘ And she will mark down for what she calls meanness. ‘Last year a lot of the men would intentionally choose subjects they thought you would not know a thing about. ‘ Holmes, however, felt at home. Who says that women aren’t born talkers?

Janet Morgan’s business is other people’s business techniques – and how to make them more effective

When Dr Janet Morgan talks, corporations and governments listen. ‘Vaguely 40’, she is described ‘rather grandly’ (no formal training) as a management consultant. ‘I am just asked in as myself, to notice things. ‘ In a recent edition of the BBC’s staff newspaper she wrote an article that showed exactly what she had noticed during her four-year stint as special adviser to the then director-general, Alasdair Milne.

The gist of it was that intelligent people frequently run round in circles tripping each other up. ‘People had started to feel paranoid and ground down. I told them to get on with the job and keep their nerve. ‘ She also suggested how they might go about it.

The BBC, she says, is implementing her master plan. ‘The ‘upward referral’ system, whereby difficult decisions are passed to superiors, has been disbanded; meetings have been halved; minutes are shorter; and people have been requested to take the ‘No Entry’ signs off their doors ‘and replace them with more friendly notices’.

Unfortunately, Morgan has not been there to see it all happen, having moved on to become adviser to the board at Granada Television.

She is a glowing example of her own belief that ‘women are good at thinking about lots of things at once’. Apart from exercising the theories of organization learnt as a political historian (she worked in the Cabinet Office and lectured in politics at Oxford University), she has also written a biography of Agatha Christie, edited the diaries of her former employer and mentor Dick Crossman and, according to her entry in Who’s Who, finds time to enjoy making ice-cream. Her tiny stature believes vast stamina and a towering intellect. She has only failed once – when, in 1966, she did not become the first woman president of the Oxford Union Society.

Despite her own dazzling ability to organize, she has no time for the theory that women, by the very nature of their many-stranded lives, are better managers than men. There are, she says, hopeless male managers and hopeless female ones.

‘The sort of woman one tends to see in a senior position is probably excellent or she wouldn’t have got there, because it has been such a hard struggle. So we tend to think of women as being somehow better at it. But really we are not comparing averages.

‘It’s not so much because it is a male-dominated structure that the BBC has got into this organizationally ossified state,’ she says. ‘It is because those who should have been thinking about the way the BBC runs as an organization have been too busy and distracted to do that. ‘

Morgan concedes that women are more inclined to realize that a problem cannot always be solved by the application of a theory pulled from a filing cabinet: ‘They are very good at making judgements by feeling and hunch. And anyone who has looked at how scientific discoveries are made realizes how important that is.

They are also adept at simultaneously thinking of several jobs and the baby at home – ‘they have lots of antennae out’ – and have terrific stamina. ‘All that stuff about women going barmy every three and a half weeks is rot. ‘ She is surprised, she says, by how feeble men can be.

On the down side, she refers to what she calls the Queen Bee syndrome: the type of woman who devours any competing female. She also says some women fail to make the most of themselves – ‘sometimes because they feel sorry for men’. Women also tend to feel guilty. ‘They carry other people as passengers and often feel it is not worth being insistent or making a fuss. ‘

Naturally, Morgan has conquered her own difficulties. She has never been on an assertiveness training course (‘Do you think I should?’ seems a disingenuous response). She admits she may be unable to reach high shelves – ‘but I can always get a ladder. ‘ Somehow, one feels there will always be a tall man standing nearby, or at least someone to pass her a ladder.

Seven years ago, when I was a politics student, I attended a weekend seminar – one which, offering instant enlightenment, promised to change one’s life. Students who had attended it glowed with confidence, displaying an enviable clarity of purpose, and enhanced ability to communicate. The course had its biggest impact at Bristol University. It was not run under the aegis of the university, but rather of oner Robert D’Aubigny a former actor and son of a meat salesman. It was called Exegesis and folded in 1984.

The seminar, which employed a range of heavily-confrontational, psychological techniques in the name of self-development, had a liberating effect on my mind and pocket. Something that was based so much on fear and authoritarian leadership patterns was reprehensible. But it offered some valuable insights and perspectives which have had a lasting, beneficial effect.

Exegesis wasn’t a cult: there was no religious worship and no devotion to a person. Participants were not brainwashed although, as a malleable teenager, I was probably soemwhat indoctrinated. There were no signs, at that time, of Serious Money on the same scale as the fleet of Rolls-Royces owned by Rajneesh, guru of the Orange People, although it became clear later that D’Aubigny had strong material and political ambitions. And there were no Scientology-type billion-year contracts (affirming a belief in reincarnation) on offer. Yet Exegesis constituted the very extreme end of the enlightenment kick.

Many other self-development programmes are not as sinister as generally believed. Insight, for instance, is a gentle, distant cousin of Exegesis, founded in the United States in 1978. ‘American cult courses alarm TV-am staff’, ran a recent headline in a national paper. For TV-am’s managing director Bruce Gynell had encouraged staff to attend Insight self-awareness courses. ‘Insight is about being caring, compassionate and concerned about other people,’ Gyngell is quoted as saying. It is not inconceivable that this outlook could have advantageous business applications.

Insight courses – six days with about 150 participants – involve an initial outlay of pounds 75 and a post-seminar ‘donation’. ‘The largest contributions have been over pounds 20,000, most pay pounds 300 and about 5 per cent have been dissatisfied and had refunds,’ says the ebullient, 30-year-old UK director, Ruth Lederman. She says 40,000 people have taken part in Insight worldwide and 1,500 in the UK since it started regularly in 1985. A prominent Harley Street doctor recommends it to his patients – ‘I have only gained benefit from it’ – but nevetheless wishes to remain anonymous.

The course combines a variety of techniques from ‘mini lectures’ and guided meditation to group interactions. They will not give specific examples: ‘that would be like giving away the punchline to a joke,’ says Lederman. ‘The seminar is about bringing out excellence in individuals. ‘

In the United States, whole companies have undergone the training; here, chunks of companies have taken part. Designer/supplier Janet Reger took the Insight course two years ago, while adjusting to her company’s liquidation and an unhappy marriage. ‘Insight is the best thing that every happened to me,’ she said. Two of her seven employees have now taken the course. ‘We make decisions more easily and express ourselves more clearly,’ says Reger. ‘Business is now very good. ‘

Judy Tame, 33, a financial consultant to Allied Dunbar, went on the seminar in 1984. Now 12 people from her department of 50 have taken her lead. ‘It creates a happy, positive atmosphere,’ she said. ‘Tensions are solved more easily, and we have a clearer vision for pulling ourselves out of difficult patches. ‘

The claims for Transcendental Meditation (TM) are equally startling. TM, which started in 1958, is a self-help technique popularized by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, former guru to the Beatles. Teachers now wear business suits and intense looks. They claim to be able to fly: ‘We are in the early stages of levitation and call it ‘hopping’,’ says conference administrator and TM teacher Richard Johnson.

TM is a simple, mental technique, practised while sitting twice daily for 20 minutes and using a sound from an available selection of mantras. Its teachers say it induces a state of deep rest during which the metabolic rate drops by 16 per cent and the body rids itself of accumulated tensions, emerging deeply refreshed. Fees are on a sliding scale according to income, and range from pounds 65 to pounds 245 for six hours of instruction in four sittings.

Johnson claims that TM improves mental clarity and also believes it reduces stress and the likelihood of illness. Dr Roger Chalmers, president of the British Association for the Medical Application of TM, says that more than 350 scientific studies conducted over the past 15 years support such assertions.

TM says some 3 1/2 million people have taken part in its courses, including 150,000 in this country, 600 of whom, it claims, are doctors. A recent symposium held for the Society of Occupational Medicine ‘was greeted with enthusiasm,’ Johnson says.

Gordon Crompton, 32, managing director of Crompton Machine Company, did TM two years ago – ‘feeling unwell after a stressful period in business’. Sceptical, he feared it might be mad and mystical. ‘But my well-being and health improved. The tension has gone and I am able to cope much better. ‘ So he introduced it to his factory; and 35 per cent of the 50 employees now meditate. ‘Now they approach new projects positively, he says, ‘and we seem to be getting higher pfoduction figures for less effort. ‘

Life Training is another programme that promises positive results. It claims 20,000 people have taken it worldwide since 1981; 1,200 in England since starting in 1984. The training, which costs pounds 240, takes place over an intensive weekend, or over six evenings (pounds 60). The brainchild of two US Episcopalian priests, both trained therapists, Life Training is similar to Exegesis and Insight, and teacher David Templer dubs it ‘an experimental workshop. ‘ Using discussion, meditation, improvized theatre and games, the course is a synthesis of a range of psychological, philosophical and spiritual traditions.

Templer. who also works as a freelance marketing consultant, has found it helps him in the business world. ‘I am less combative and find I co-operate more easily. ‘

Robert Stephens, 43, vice-president of Mellon-Picet International Management, did the training three years ago. ‘I was feeling pretty sorry for myself at a personal and business level,’ he said. Initially he thought they were ‘a bunch of weirdos’. Now he says he sees that the format is a catalyst for a more open and honest way of relating.

Not everyone, however, is convinced. Hans Eysenck, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at London University, says: ‘There is no evidence that such courses do any good and there are certain, albeit infrequent, cases when people have been harmed. So-called self-knowledge can be dangerous, particularly when it awakens neurotic fears, anxieties and stresses, as often happens.

‘Many claims are made for these self-awareness programmes, none of which is substantiated by the evidence. They are cults in the same way as many forms of psycho-therapy, such as scream therapy, are – and claims for these have not been substantiated either. ‘

Somebody has just died. The straw strewn on the pavement and the cobbled lane outside the house signify as much. Meanwhile the gas lamp flickers above the door, and a wooden handstick indicates that this is a weaver’s house. The house is dark inside, except for a few candles, and a Cockney expresses his concern for my safety – before driving his taxi on to Liverpool Street Station.

At 7.30pm, the door opens to reveal a Californian in jeans. This is Dennis Severs in his unique Georgian home in Folgate Street, Spitalfields. It is not open to the public, unless your manner appeals to him when you phone to book, and he also has a reputation for throwing people out if their attitude displeases him – even though they are paying Pounds 20 a head for the evening.

On arrival, Severs tells us that he gave up years ago trying to explain the purpose of the visit; but that does not deter this madcap American from talking about his house and its elusive inhabitants as if he had to make up for centuries of silence.

‘We’re not here to see a house or its pictures, furniture or porcelain. And we’re certainly not here to learn anything,’ he lectures the eight people now huddled in his candlelit kitchen – a kitchen, like the rest of the house, that is decorated and lived in as it was in the 18th and 19th centuries.

‘We’re hear to dream and get the 20th century out of our heads,’ he informs the assembled company, before locking us in his dark and dank 18th-century cellar to facilitate the process. Thus starts a three-hour tour. ‘Weird,’ exhales the American woman spilling out of the chair next to mine.

Severs lives in his 1723 home in proxy for a mythical 18th-century Huguenot family of his own extraordinary creation, called the Jervises.

The walk round his authentically detailed home is accompanied by entertaining chat by Severs and cleverly hidden cassette recordings. Entirely believable comments about the illusory family, their lifestyle and relationships are interspersed with intentionally incorrect historical detail and endless trivia.

Severs’s technique is to put his visitors into an atmosphere and bombard them with things that filled the hearts and minds of the Jervises, ‘so in the end you haven’t just had a glimpse of the past, you have been there’.

We stand in the kitchen in front of an open fire, a chicken turning on the spit; and it does not seem self-conscious because that is how Severs cooks every day. While he enthuses about the quirky life beneath the stairs, regaling us with stories of the cheeky maid Rebecca, one begins to feel as if his 18th-century servants have just left the room. The house retains its original atmosphere not just because of the material objects, but because of the magical environment he creates and its authentic temperatures and smells.

We go upstairs to the dining room, hushed and in mock excitement, like children looking for fairies they only half believe in. It is like walking on to a stage set for 1724: the pomegranate and half-empty wine glasses scattered on the table, and Mr Jervis’s wig left behind on a chair.

From there we move forward to 1760 and the smoking room where Mr Jervis holds his assemblies and organizes his business. He burns market palletts in the fire, and dust fills the room. We follow into the drawing room, where on dark evenings they listen to stories, just as we are doing. The smell of orange oil hangs in the air, mingling with the lavender flowers that are swept to the edge of the room. Then Mrs Jervis’s fan falls off the chair to the floor, and we hear her riotous party leaving downstairs.

Next is the bedroom, an intimate room containing Mrs Jervis’s messy make-up and sentimental knick-knacks. Here the carpet is cleaned every day with damp tea leaves, to restore the colour and pile. Just as everything in the house is faithfully dusted with rags steamed in cedar oil.

In the dressing room, the fire is burning and tea is steaming in cups on the table.

Upstairs the Dickensian attic represents 1835 and the Industrial Society. An entire family called the Laceaux live there. (William Jervis got Mrs Laceaux pregnant, so it was his Christian duty to bring the family into the house, one understands. ) The room shocks, for it is stark, with peeling paint and dripping water. It is freezing and one of our company complains. ‘They lived through it and so will you,’ retorts Severs curtly.

It is pleasurable then to move on to the second drawing room – and 1840. The room is the antithesis of those upstairs and represents the cosy bourgeois reaction to them with its gas lamps, well-dressed furniture, swathes of material and acres of ornaments.

The trip is not for those without imagination and a sense of irony. ‘Pernickity intellectuals who come always end up looking like char-women wearing tiaras,’ explains Severs.

Dennis Severs, 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, London E1 (01-247 4013), by appointment only. Eight people at a time, three evenings a week at 7.30pm, £20 a head. (c) Times Newspapers Ltd, 1987