AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.

The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.

She had a three-year love affair with Prince Michael of Kent. At the time, she was married to the late Sir Eric de la Rue, a man 36 years her senior, and the Prince was a bachelor. Christine, 53, talking for the first time about the relationship which ended in 1975, looks worried. Prince Michael is still a friend. And Christine is loath to jump on to the kiss-a-Royal-and-tell bandwagon.

This expert horsewoman and Captain of the Ayton Castle polo team laughs, remembering the Prince’s reaction when first she invited him to stay in Scotland. ‘I don’t like horsy people,’ he complained. ‘Their houses are so dirty.’ Now he rides with her. And her Gothic-revival schloss, where the Prince, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia and Christopher Lee have stayed, is as spotless as a Zurich hospital.

Christine, a blonde Norwegian, lives with David Liddell-Grainger, the father of two of her children. She has been providing the Borders with society gossip for years, and has just finished writing what promises to be a compelling autobiography.

Her first marriage at the age of 19, to a Greek lawyer, was annulled after two years because of non-consummation.

‘I wasn’t in love with him,’ she says girlishly, with nervous speed. ‘I married to run away from my mother who told me I was ugly and stupid.’ With the approval of her next husband, the elderly Sir Eric, Christine scandalised local puritans by having a publicised affair with David, who was married to Anne, a cousin of the Queen. ‘Eric was spritely and a father figure but he wasn’t interested in sex after our son St George was born.’ She divided her time between the two men in what was seen – erroneously – to be a bizarre love triangle, and after Sir Eric had a mild stroke he moved into the castle with them. When Christine and David’s son David Henry was born, Sir Eric and David were at the christening.

Christine is not the hard-boiled woman oft portrayed. She’s special – delightful, shrewd, forthright and exuberantly energetic. The warmth of the castle reflects her personality.

FOLLOWING the Norman invasion, a formidable fortress was built at Ayton. When it burned down in 1836, James Gillespie Graham built the present turreted red monster which Henry Liddell, David’s grandfather, bought in 1888.

Until David was eight years old – when his father died and his mother shut up the castle – he lived here with 40 servants. It was used during the war as a girls’ school.

In the Fifties, David camped occasionally in the master bedroom, looked after by one Miss Denham. ‘She mended his long johns and cooked for him.’ After his grand marriage, with a reception at Windsor Castle, he took tons of his furniture out of storage (all had been stored easily in the castle drawing room, natch) and returned to live in the castle. David crammed his fine collection of Chippendale furniture and Staffordshire figurines alongside buys from country house sales.

When Christine moved in, the rooms were gloomy and pigeons roosted in the towers. ‘Ayton was mortgaged. No, I mean morgue-ish.’ For 12 years, Christine has been restoring the interior to its original baronial splendour. ‘David’s wife had put up dishcloth curtains.’ She has worked to a tight budget. ‘I’ve used remnant wallpaper and chosen colours to last 100 years. The dining-room round table cloths are made from old bedcovers.’ In 1990 they decided to take paying guests for £120 a night. The castle sleeps 25 comfortably and visitors can shoot and fish. They also open to the public on summer Sundays.

We do a quick tour of the castle, in less than an hour. When David is upstairs and Christine down, she rings him on her portable phone. ‘It caused great problems at the phone shop when I said I needed a model that worked inside six-foot walls.’ They probably receive long-distance bills. We speed through the dining room with its Adamesque wedding cake ceiling, table to seat an army and picture by society portraitist Barbara ‘Basha’ Hamilton. Into the drawing room which had a trampoline in it when David was young, was then turned into a shop selling cashmeres to visiting Americans, and finally decorated in 1985 for a Victor Edelstein charity dress show. Now it has overflowing bowls of hydrangeas, a grand piano and serious curtain poles. Into the library, with books piled high, family photographs and table set for a cosy dinner.

THEN a 10-minute walk to the family wing. ‘For when the revolution comes and 25 other families move in.’ Up to her second, or perhaps third sitting room where currently she’s hanging her ballgowns. ‘That’s a Victor (Edelstein), that’s Catherine (Walker).’ Into David Henry’s room with a bed for their other son Maximillian. ‘Max has his own room as well, but he likes to share.’ Off to Christine’s room with its 18th century Venetian wooden domed bed with silk hangings and cherub. Then along to her partner David’s masculine room with its single bed with two rifles by it and suitcases piled high.

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.’