LAST week I had to have emergency treatment for chronic back sprain. After two days of intensive therapy I managed the five-minute walk to my car in a record 20 minutes, desperate to be driven to my physio. Sadly the car was gone.

It had been left in a Kensington and Chelsea residents’ parking bay, sporting its £70 residents’ permit, parked directly underneath a sign which said parking would be restricted three days hence. Fearing the worst, I called the car pound. My vehicle had indeed been towed away and the council intended to charge me £135 for its day’s bed and board.

I rang Kensington town hall, requesting that my car, which had been legally parked and illegally towed, be returned. It wasn’t my fault that they couldn’t read the date on their own prohibition sign. And I needed the car because of my bad back.

I was put through to Miss Williams. Miss Williams couldn’t authorise the car’s return and transferred me to Miss Shew. Miss Shew suggested Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson wasn’t there. The mayor’s secretary suggested Mr Davis. Miss Birch said better speak to Mr Yates. Mr Yates was in a meeting.

Eventually Mr Yates, Parking Enforcement Manager, rang and said there had been a sign farther up the road from my car indicating that parking was restricted the day my car was left. There was no way he would authorise its return. Mr Yates disagreed that two contradictory signs in one bay were an indication of council incompetence.

Graciously he conceded that if I paid the £105 removal fee plus the £30 ticket, I could collect my vehicle and fill in a formal representations form to request the council to refund my money. I was as incensed as when the council sent a note offering parking spaces under the town hall for residents who were going on holiday and didn’t want their cars towed away – for £35 a week.

Hip, controversial and publicity-keen priest who keeps beehives on his roof. Radical, blunt and flamboyant rector with the New Age Disneyland and counselling caravan in his church yard. Passionate man of rousing sermons and woolly sweaters.

Such is the image of the Rev Donald Reeves, the ‘Red Vicar’ and rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly. He closes the curtains fully against the sun in his rectory study – a room lined with books, most of which he’s read – and asks me to sit in the Bishop’s chair.

He was going to dress specially for this occasion – and then he forgot. So he’s wearing a faded lumberjack-style shirt with missing button, grey trousers and 12-year-old shoes (polished by this former second lieutenant). He also wears a gold chain.

‘I have a problem with clothes because I live in three different places. I often find myself in the wrong place with the wrong clothes.’ He looks massively perplexed and speaks quickly, often emphasising the last word in the sentence. ‘I like to dress casually.’

When the photographer arrives, he changes into priest’s grey shirt and dog collar, ‘otherwise people will think I’m some worn-out headmaster or failed film star’. He reckons people ‘patronise, ignore or disdain’ him in such garb. ‘And I get sick of tourists asking me the way to Stratford-upon-Avon when I’m standing in Piccadilly. (He says: ‘Just turn left at the top.’) They think I’m some sort of unofficial guide.’ Does he like wearing dresses? He looks pensive, raising his eyes to Him Upstairs. ‘I do enjoy wearing a dress, which is what the cassock is. A cassock alb – which is like a white nightdress – covers a multitude of sins. And you don’t have to wear anything under it!’ He laughs. ‘It’s quite an impersonal garment, which is good when you’re taking a service.’ He has a voice that needs no microphone whether in church or cathedral. ‘I’m an actor, really.’ He later admits that preaching sometimes becomes an ego trip; and he loves doing television.

‘My voice is clear, passionate, not parsonical. I hope you wouldn’t think I was a priest by my voice.’ What else would he like people to think he is? ‘Ooh, the editor of the Observer.’ He actually fancies he looks a bit like an exhausted newspaper editor.

He has the face of a haunted ghost, with loads of M shapes engraved on his forehead and dark eyes with circles underneath to match. He appears tired and grey.

‘People always say my face is quite interesting. I eat all the wrong foods all the time, and I don’t exercise enough – but I don’t smoke or drink. (He used to smoke a pipe for effect. ‘That was a dead loss.’) I like my face. My body’s not too bad – I had a good look at it this morning, knowing you were coming to see me.’

He considers his eyes the windows to his soul. ‘Mine look troubled and quite deep.’ And why does he look so anxious? ‘Well, I’ve been through it a bit in my life. Also because of the hidden work I do with people, supporting and encouraging.

‘Of course, the Press always love this thing about my unhappy childhood – so I’ve changed the story now: I had the most marvellous, blissful childhood.’ He had psychotherapy for five years, to help him come to terms with his ‘desultory’ relationship with his family and to develop his vocation as a priest. He’s 57 and proud of it. ‘I feel I’m approaching the prime of my life. That’ll be when I’m about 80 if God allows me to live that long.’ Does he fear dying? ‘I think I’m frightened of a long illness, but I’m not frightened of the actual dying. Not at the moment, anyway.’ He’s a strong character with a delightful sense of humour and seriousness. He comes over initially as rather impatient, with a defensive crustiness that belies his obviously caring nature. (It’s almost as if he overcompensates to protect himself from being ridiculed or patronised.) He has a brusque, angry manner that hides his nervousness. He listens well, being very open to suggestions. And as the interview progresses, he softens – risking his vulnerable, gentle side.

He’s keen to dispel his trendy image. ‘It suggests one’s flippant at a deep level. But I am a passionate, serious man -probably too serious, but not solemn. I care for and bother about the truth the whole time.’ He’s also at pains to change the perception of vicars as those ineffectual, nice-to-everybody people who dodder through television programmes.

‘I’m not a do gooder or a sensitive, caring wimp – but I am thoughtful about people who are in a mess.’ Indeed, he’s doing a dedicated job, lots of good works, and has boosted his ailing congregation and placed his church on the map.

Is he the Red Vicar? ‘That’s absurd. I’m more to the Left than the Right – but there’s not much difference between the two now.’ The image, he says, came about because Ken Livingstone and Tony Benn spoke at St James’s. ‘But so did Norman Tebbit.’

And is he controversial? ‘I don’t seek it, but it is inevitable if you do the sort of things I do. Occasionally, I go over the top.’ And is he the loony vicar? ‘Well, they thought Jesus was pretty loony.’

So how would he describe himself? ‘I like my clarity about issues, my passion for people, my generosity and my imagination. I’m not in the least jealous of other people’s success – that’s a God-given thing. The more they prosper, the more pleased I am. I also regard it as a deep privilege to be of use to people who want to share their lives with me in some way. ‘My weakness is that my judge of character is sometimes questionable. I always see the best in people, even the rascals. And I’m also very impatient about meetings – there’s an ecclesiastical disease where people seem to need to have meetings about everything from collecting harmoniums to dead cats.’ Is he impatient? ‘What!’ he says, yet again. (Is he deaf? Certainly there’s an abruptness there.) ‘No, I’m not deaf. It’s just that I’m having to think on my feet. But I do suffer from tinnitus. I have a sort of impatience. I get very fed up with busybodies who criticise my work here. And I get really angry with rich, mean people.

‘I also get very angry about the lies that go on in religious circles and about the lack of truth in politics.’ Is he a hypocrite? ‘Oh, all the time. I think religious people are. I always say to people ‘do as I say, not as I do’.’ For example, he disapproves of private property. ‘But I have a house.’

Curiously, he comes over as rather hard. ‘I know I can be intimidating. People are frightened of me. I don’t like that. But it’s my armour. I’m strong, articulate and clear, but there is also a very private side of me that hardly anyone sees.

‘Inside, I think I have a longing to be comforted, to be held physically and emotionally.’ His face changes extraordinarily as he says this, becoming vulnerable and boyish. ‘There is a little boy inside me and I want to safeguard that inner child and prevent him from being squashed.’ He never married. How does he regard himself sexually? ‘I don’t’ – he stutters -‘think about this subject much. Because there’s not much to say about it. I’d call myself celibate, but I’m not a grim, ascetic, dismal person. I don’t want to talk about my sexuality . . .

‘Well, yes, there have been times when I’ve been lonely, but they grow less as I get older. I know a lot about friendship. But I think we go on too much about sexuality and personal relations. It’s one of the idolatries of our society.’

How long has he been celibate? His voice goes low. ‘Twenty-something years – I don’t know. No, it’s not for religious reasons. It’s really to do with my personality. Maybe it’s a sort of fear. I’ve often been quite frightened of a close relationship like that. I had them when I was much younger, but I’m fearful of them.’

People used to call him Agony Reeves. ‘I’m always agonising about things, worrying about them. But I’m not unhappy. I think I’m an integrated person.’

Cool, self-assured, forthright former waitress, clerk and receptionist who was born in New Zealand. Devout, unimaginative housewife who was convicted in 1981 of murdering her nine-week-old baby Azaria by cutting her throat with a pair of nail scissors at Ayers Rock. Hard, unsympathetic, little bitty lady who was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. Unflinching author of Through My Eyes, a direct and detailed account of her conviction and subsequent exoneration, phenomenally recalled in 768 pages. This is the image of the lady who went from housewife to household word. Enter Lindy Chamberlain, 42: Logical Lindy as she was known in prison, or Lindy Gulla (which means ‘good one’) to the Aboriginal girls. ‘It meant that I was all right and wasn’t going to put them down because of their colour or because they couldn’t read or talk properly.’

Former prisoner 2958 looks like a smart secretary in her neat make-up, patent shoes, sheer tights, black skirt and striped shirt.

‘I’d wear shoestring straps, bare shoulders, very light clothes-Stubbies (shorts), thongs (flip-flops), boob tubes. I wore a sun frock for the first inquest.’ She speaks in a light and clipped antipodean accent, very Neighbours-ish, emphatic, high, but full of apparent self-assurance. She steamrollers interruptions-and my attempts to tell her she’s going off the point-pressing on determinedly with what she is saying, even when the questions are about something else, although the interview can only be short owing to her schedule.

She’s insistent on giving a history of her wardrobe, relating it mostly to her various court appearances. She is very much the one in control. Her look turns out, curiously, to have been moulded by the Press-after constant criticism, comments, admonishments ‘not to wear anything too busy or provocative’, photographers saying wear this or that. She’s very professional and has packaged herself nicely into a very saleable commodity.

‘I have a designer friend, Jean Bas, who dresses me for my interviews.’ She borrows the clothes and gives them back afterwards. ‘So it gives the impression you’re rich when you’re not.’

She charges for interviews, apart from when she’s launching a book. Exonerated but not compensated, she needs money. ‘All that publicity has meant I can’t get a job.’ It is the newspapers and television stations who have made money out of her plight.

She has been described as tough, unsympathetic and not showing enough emotion for a mother who had lost a child to a dingo.

‘I suppose my face in repose is fairly straight. It’s fairly severe when I’m not smiling. When you have 1500 cameras around you, jurors and hostile people looking at you, your face goes stiff. I tried to keep as neutral a face as possible. And then it looked severe.’ And now? ‘Well, yeah, this is it.’ (She’s smiling.) One of the things that went against her was her apparent passive acceptance of her loss. ‘An English response, misunderstood by the emotional Greeks and Italians in Australia . . . and when you believe in something after death, it doesn’t affect you so much. You don’t have a cold, hard feeling of nothing being left.’

People just saw a hard-nosed murdering bitch (her words) when they saw her. But she is a private person, guarded even, who doesn’t show her true feelings to strangers.

She has brown hair, brown eyes and has put on two stone while writing the book-which weighs almost as much. She laughs at the latter notion. She laughs easily and also has a sense of the ridiculous, which comes out in her book.

So how would she describe herself? ‘I’m normally about seven stone. I’m only five feet one inch and people think because I’m on TV that I’m taller. They always go, ‘Ooh, you’re tiny’.’

Does that make her strive more? ‘Oh no, I think nice things come in small parcels-otherwise, diamonds would come the size of Ayers Rock.’ She comes over as cool, very self-composed with a perkiness.

She has sad eyes that have seen a lot. Meryl Streep went further and said she had eyes like the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. ‘I don’t know.’ (Laughs.) ‘I’ve never been in one of those.’

While she was in the prison next to an abattoir, kept awake at night by the sound of pigs being slaughtered, she worked on the drains and did cementing without gloves. How resilient! ‘With my bare hands. It’s really good hand cream.’

Suffering from flu, your interviewer repeats a question. ‘I told you that in my last answer,’ she says sharply. She knows how to keep a person on her toes. So how would she describe herself in terms of character? ‘Now in what way is that question different from the last one?’ she retorts in a chilly tone. What a hard time she gives! (Too intimidating to dare ask her about her sexuality. On simply enquiring about her relationship with her husband, one gets a frosty: ‘No comment.’) ‘Well, you have to be specific. I have a very accurate attention to detail. I’m fairly tidy, fastidious, too meticulous. I’ve always relied on memory-my book is from memory-and in court they’d say you can’t possibly have that good a memory.

‘I used to be shy in public, but not any more. That’s the greatest change . . . I don’t let people walk over me. If I get the wrong change in a shop, I say so instead of walking away disgruntled. I don’t suffer fools any more, though I’ll still be polite to stupid people.

‘I don’t think there’s any call to be rude to people. And I think you should remember to treat people the way you want to be treated.’ And what sort of mother is she? ‘A fairly reasonable one. I think I’m pretty laid back. If the kids fall over, I don’t scream and panic. But I do see if they are really hurt . . . I like to keep them fairly tidy and neat. My kids and I have a lot of fun . . .’

She continues: ‘I’ve always been a very positive person. I like to get all the information in before making a decision and then I’ll stick to it’-she’s rather boring in her delivery-‘I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail. ‘I didn’t see why I should admit to something I hadn’t done just for an extra bit of physical comfort-I would have had to live with my conscience.’ Certainly, she has endurance and spirit.

‘If I make a promise I keep it. I’ll do anything humanly possible to do it.’ She’s leaning forward, fiddling with her leg, cradling herself in her arms; it’s the only time in the meeting that there’s any flexibility in her body, though she becomes progressively softer as the interview proceeds. ‘I guess that’s another reason I got labelled as being hard. I’d do things that went against the tide, even things that got me into trouble with the screws. But I believe in honesty.’

So what does she think got her through all this? ‘Faith,’ she says, her eyes lighting up. (She is a Seventh-day Adventist.) And how does the image of a formerly convicted murderess sit with her now? ‘Well, it never really worried me because I knew I was innocent.’ Does she think she’s a bitter person? ‘No.’

She’s been described as strange, difficult, sneering, callous, mysterious . . . ‘Well, am I?’ (Laughs.) ‘The papers got sick having to come up with something new over 10 years and just put down whatever came into their heads.’

She presents herself as amazingly self-possessed and calm. Image or reality? ‘I think that’s my nature. If there’s a road crash, I’ll pull over, act quite calmly-then feel sick afterwards.’

And is she formidable? ‘No.’ (Laughs.) A friend who hadn’t seen her for 12 years recently came over. ‘After 10 minutes, she said, ‘Gee, you haven’t changed at all’.’

I’ve got the reputation of being fairly stubborn. But if I hadn’t been, I would never have got out of jail.