FIRST there was Penny Hughes, Coca-Cola’s 35-year-old UK president who, newly pregnant, decided that motherhood was the real thing and abandoned her position and £250,000 salary.

Now the glossy magazine editors – the prototype You Can Have It All And More women – are, in the gleeful eyes of Tabloid Man, succumbing to the pressures of running home and magazine, getting their priorities straight and chucking in the latter for the former or, at least, for lower-paid freedom.

On Saturday Amanda Evans, editor of Homes and Gardens, quit for her home and garden. The week before, Linda Kelsey, the original Cosmo woman turned editor of She (the magazine to reclaim motherhood and help women juggle their lives), left, suffering from stress and wanting to spend more time with her son. And remember the recent exodus of five other female editors from National Magazine, publisher of Harpers & Queen to Good Housekeeping? You could imagine the babes at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Tatler and House and Gardens, cocking a snook and nappy at their National Magazine competitors. Instead, shivers have gone down their well-bred spines at the misogynist cries of ‘told you so’ and ‘you can’t run a company/magazine and raise a child’ in the Press.

Don’t you know, ask the Conde Nast girls, that Annie Holcroft, publishing director of Vanity Fair, brings her kids to the office? They watch Wombles videos while she negotiates million-dollar deals and sews name tags in their clothes. And that Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has an eight-month-old baby, a 12-year-old live-in stepdaughter and husband and the most glamorous job in the universe?

ALEXANDRA, 37, has Mother Earth’s long hair and ample breasts, Mama Nature’s clean face, grey cashmere jumper and high snakeskin shoes. The walls of her voluminous turquoise and peppermint office display not photographs of Linda and Naomi, but of her son, Sam. She is clever, she is successful. And she’s paid, partly, to meet glamorous people, to party, wear heavenly clothes and receive bucketloads of flowers. ‘Some days I think ‘having it all’ means that I am so lucky. Other days I think it means, ‘why have I got all this dumped on me?” laughs Alexandra, who was up at 5am with Sam. Does she think she’s good at her job? She pauses. ‘Sometimes.’ But her job is stressful. ‘I have to be available for people to talk to constantly, which is draining. Responsibility is stressful, as is travelling two and a half months a year, and trying to pack everything in so as to have time with Sam.” Alexandra says her husband Paul (writer Paul Spike) is probably the one who gets it when she gets home.

‘I sympathise with what I’ve read about Linda Kelsey,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been severely anxious twice in my life. Suddenly everything becomes too much and you decide to take time out. I’ve now learnt breathing techniques and how to notice when things are seriously pretty difficult. But I get terrible pressure headaches. Lavender oil and Rescue Remedy are very good.’ She crosses her arms self-protectively.

She believes the idea that women work because they want to have it all is a fallacy. ‘You work because you’re paying bills. That’s what most married women with children here are doing.’ Alexandra employs a daily, gardener, nanny and laundry woman. ‘Practically my whole salary goes on paying for help and my share of the mortgage. The nanny has more money to throw around, by far, than myself.’

That salary, it should be said, is not your average London career girl’s. ‘It’s under six figures!’ she protests. Paul also pays for the upkeep of his two children by a previous marriage. Alexandra took four and a half months’ maternity leave. ‘I looked after Sam non-stop and spent most of the time breast-feeding. The rest of the time I spent solidly trying to find a nanny. I interviewed millions of people.’

What were her feelings about work while she was on leave? ‘Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with coming back. I thought I’d miss Sam and be unable to do the job. On leave you become quite unconfident. But the transition was easier than I thought and ultimately I don’t have any desire to be at home on my own with a baby day after day. I’d become bored, unconfident and depressed.’

She was raised by a working mother, the etiquette writer Drusilla Beyfus. ‘I was brought up by the person I’m now becoming, only she was better organised. So I know exactly what it’s like having a working mother. Until I was about seven my mother didn’t have much to do with me. She had a nanny at weekends and nights and lots of other staff. I suspect that as a baby my relationship with her was not as it should be.’

BEING a working mother is difficult. ‘We’ve got it wrong in many ways. It’s not really feasible for women to work incredibly hard, be good mothers, lovers, wives, housekeepers. The more we try to do, the worse it is for us. The whole question of men and women’s roles in the partnership is something that hasn’t caught up with such developments. There is no other area in your life so unclearly defined.’ Sometimes, ‘like everybody’, she feels desperate to quit work. ‘A lot of the time I’d like a peaceful life. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you’re rushing so much of the time. Probably all of us have looked at more flexible, alternative, freelance or whatever ways of working. But money plays a great role in that. I’ve never been career-orientated. But I’ve always been motivated by the desire to earn money.’

ANNA Gonta has been in labour at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital since 5am. It’s now 10am. Her baby’s heart is fluctuating. Anna, who’s had an epidural, says she doesn’t feel any pain. But Arthur, her husband, clutches his stomach. ‘I feel pain here,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have this with the first one.’ Anna smiles weakly.

Now it’s 2pm. Anna, pushing and moaning, looks anguished. ‘The baby’s getting tired and distressed,’ says the midwife, in a plastic apron. The baby is in a difficult position, with its head facing upwards. Suddenly its head starts to appear. The midwife performs an episiotomy, cutting the perineum, but the cord is wound tightly round the baby’s neck. A bell is rung frantically.

Suddenly there are eight of us in the room. The baby’s heart rate is low, its breathing poor, its face blue-grey. It doesn’t cry. It’s not responding. It looks dead. The paediatrician rushes the baby over to a resuscitating unit, giving it oxygen, massaging it. A short time later the baby is well, pink and crying happily.

Next door Lindsay Bull is having an easier time. She’s had no pain relief. ‘Good girl, keep it coming,’ coaxes midwife Fiona Allison. Her husband sprays Lindsay’s face with Evian. Now she’s kneeling and wailing. Now pursing her lips. ‘Put your hand down and see what’s there,’ says Fiona. The baby’s head. ‘Oh my God,’ says Lindsay. The baby, her first, is born after just four hours. What are they going to call him? ‘Bradley?’ Lindsay replies, quizzically. ‘Er, all right then,’ says her husband, blankly. Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital (QCCH) is one of the world’s foremost maternity hospitals, a place of pioneering research and a centre of excellence, which has trained a third of the country’s consultant obstetricians and gynaecologists. And where they delivered the progeny of Patricia Hodge, Cilla Black, Karen Keating and the Aga Khan. But it’s also a hospital with an uncertain future – of not knowing whether it will be merged with Chelsea and Westminster or relocated to the Hammersmith. The problem is, of course, money.

In 1990 QCCH had a deficit of £1.5 million and faced closure because the governing body was unable to finance its relocation. Now the Hammersmith Hospital NHS Trust – of which QCCH is part – has a deficit of £8.5 million. The redoubtable Bunty Lewis, immaculately dressed and coiffured, looks as if she could run the hospital single-handed. Instead, she administers the appeal office on a full-time but voluntary basis. ‘I probably subsidise it a bit,’ she admits. She resurrected Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball and runs a ‘Babies’ Bawl’ children’s tea party for 300, raising £600,000 in six years for research and equipment. But hospitals should not rely on Bunties’ and debs’ photo-calls for funds.

We visit the Special Care Baby Unit – pronounced ‘Scibu’ in nursespeak. ‘Hands must be washed on entering and leaving unit,’ warns one sign. ‘Switch off all mobile telephones,’ alerts another. Kylie Ross, wearing floral dress and mournful expression, strokes 2lb Bailey’s back. Her baby is attached to tubes and breathing apparatus.

Joanne Tucker sits between incubators containing her two seven-week-old babies. She had given birth to triplets. ‘The third passed away after 14 days,’ she says. Now Joseph is 3lb 7oz and George five ounces lighter. ‘They’re my first but not my last,’ she confides. ‘Never again,’ stage whispers Joanne’s mother, Daisy Webster, joking. ‘I’m getting her sterilised.’

Nearby is the neo-natal ward. Here newsreader Pamela Armstrong’s son, AJ, lay 18 months ago. ‘When my baby was born, he wasn’t breathing and he didn’t have a heartbeat,’ says Pamela. He was rushed into a nuclear resonance magnetic imager – a magnet the size of a room – to check for brain damage. ‘Happily he was all right. But soon after he looked like spaghetti junction, millions of tubes going in and out. Other babies weighed less than a bag of sugar. They looked like stick insects.’ Miraculously most of these 11b babies thrive.

Sister Christina Tom-Johnston, a kindly midwife, counsels bereaved parents. ‘When a mother is about to lose her baby, I’m called to see her at the delivery suite,’ she says. Recently she saw someone whose baby was anencephalic (born with no brain). ‘Due to her religious beliefs, she didn’t want a termination.’

When a baby dies, Christina helps arrange the funeral, accompanies the parents to it, and follows up by telephone. She also runs support groups, and annual remembrance services at Acton Hill Church. ‘We had a congregation of 150 this year, representing 50 dead babies over three years,’ she says. ‘I give the parents daffodils and a candle bearing their baby’s name. The parents come forward when I call out the babies’ names. I’m usually crying myself by this time. Then I light the candle and put it on a table and it burns until the end of the service.’

Fortunately new-born deaths are a rarity. For 99 per cent of the babies born at the hospital – nearly 4,500 babies a year – the outcome is happy. QCHH is a world leader in fetal medicine, boasting Britain’s largest Centre for Fetal Care. Here Professor Nick Fisk’s team has become the first in the world to offer ‘tele-medicine’, which allows the transfer of distant ultrasound scanning images down phone lines to waiting specialists. They received one of the country’s first Siemens scanners allowing detection of any foetal abnormality before the 12th week of pregnancy, often permitting it to be corrected in utero. Here they showed last year for the first time that the unborn child can feel pain in the womb. And here Dr Michael de Swiet, one of only two obstetric physicians in the country, specialises in the medical problems of pregnancy.

It’s also QCCH that pioneered ultrasound; fetal heart monitoring; screening expectant mothers for rubella; Maggie Campbell’s innovative One-to-One midwifery practice – allowing the woman the same midwife throughout her pregnancy and post-natal period for continuity of care – human milk banks, special care baby units, fetal blood sampling, in utero blood transfusions, the mobile epidural; plus the country’s only post-natal depression clinic. This month they’re also starting the country’s first clinic for teenagers, allowing them to discuss gynaecological difficulties in confidence.

Now senior obstetrician John Malvern is running an antenatal clinic, wearing white coat and name label. His current patient, 26-year-old Carol Brown, is on her sixth pregnancy since 1989. ‘A decent sort of gap between pregnancies,’ says John, with an ironic smile. He’ll need his sense of humour. He’s delivering my first born in June.

I’M ON MY back on a bed with my legs over a woman’s shoulders. She pulls my supine body. Suddenly a man in an anorak appears on the roof outside the window of her first-floor Beauchamp Place room.

“Oh, don’t worry about him. They’re all fur coat and no drawers around here,” the woman responds curiously.

The woman is Chryssie Fitzgerald, Princess Diana’s personal health therapist. Yesterday she was exposed in the News Of The World as a former Madam and dominatrix.

Chryssie, 45, was convicted by Marylebone magistrates in 1983 for running a brothel. Now she runs an alternative health clinic in Knightsbridge and is married to Keith Rodrigues, who taught Diana kick-boxing.

I met Chryssie last month for my first and only treatment. As she pulled my legs over her shoulders, she said the position would help elongate my spine and alleviate my back problem.

It wasn’t a technique that had been used on me during four years of physiotherapy and osteopathy, but no matter. At least I was fully clothed. And I assume the man on the roof was inspecting the gutter. My appointment had been hard to get. I was six months pregnant, suffering from sinus and reckoned reflexology would be kinder on Junior than antibiotics. Outside the clinic is a sign displaying the Chinese word for health. You ring the bell to be let in at street level, then knock to have the door upstairs unlocked. Chryssie has a genial, caring presence but surprises with her looks. She has neither a trim figure nor radiant complexion to make a client envy her therapies. But she has a rousing manner that would enthuse the residents of an old people’s home. The room contains a little bit of alternative everything, apparently in the hope that something might work. I saw a huge amethyst trained, I think she said, on the pituitary; a framed poem (or was it a prayer?) to the colon; feng shui mirrors; statuettes of cats; certificates for her non-surgical facelifts and some unpronounceable Chinese treatments.

Chryssie starts massaging my feet to release blocked energy, hoping to fight disease in related parts of the body.

She treats the person as a whole, attending every acupuncture point. “Bless you little toe, ah, bless you,” she whispers, pummelling my toe. She looks me straight in the eyes and is a friendly, no-nonsense type. She asks me what I do. I say I am a journalist, and ask for an interview. She agrees, sets a date and suggests I have colonic irrigation – an idea at which I balk. I can do without the introduction of warm filtered water into my intestines.

I look out for Princess Diana in the waiting room as I leave, but she is not there, neither is another client, Rula Lenska. Instead there are a couple of rastafarians.

I pay £40 for my appointment. Chryssie gives me a hug and tells me to sit down and drink a cup of fruit tea. It takes away the nasty taste of the Bach flower remedy, a potion made from plants to deal with my emotional symptoms.

Later Chryssie’s receptionist cancels our proposed interview an hour before we are due to meet. “Chryssie had a miscarriage four, I mean two, months ago and needs time to get over it,” she explains. I call five times subsequently, but she does not reply. The next I hear of her is in the Sunday papers.

IT IS undisputed that hospital admission for asthma has increased steadily in Britain over the past 20 years; for children, the admissions graph goes uphill at 45 degrees. One in 10 suffer from asthma, a huge increase over the past few years. Nitrogen dioxide from exhaust fumes has been similarly increasing in the air: twice as high as 20 years ago.

Children on bicycles, engulfed in a cloud of exhaust smoke from a passing bus, accompany worried articles about our smelly and damaged world. It is surprising, then, to hear from two world experts that the incidence of asthma is no higher in cities than it is in the country. A recent survey in Scotland found that it was just as bad in Skye as in the centre of Aberdeen. Another survey compared post-Cold War industrial East Germany to clean West Germany and, again, found levels just the same.

And as for the hated ozone layer, Peter Barnes, Professor of thoracic medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital, says: “You’d expect the ozone level to be higher in cities, but it’s not. Ozone is formed by nitrogen dioxide and oxygen coming together, catalysed by sunlight. In the city, the ozone reacts again with the nitrogen dioxide to form oxygen. So the levels of ozone are actually higher in the country.”

Really knowledgeable people, like Professor Barnes and Dr Andy Bush, Senior Lecturer in Paediatrics at Royal Brompton, are willing to admit ignorance. The underlying cause of asthma remains a mystery, and the two experts do not pretend otherwise. “There are two issues,” said Dr Bush. “What is causing asthma in the first place; and if you’ve got asthma, what makes it worse?

“There’s quite a lot of evidence that pollutants can make asthma worse if you’ve got it, but I suspect they’re not actually causing asthma.” But the disorder attracts theories from the under-informed as irresistibly as cot death, anorexia, ME or any other mysterious medical horror of modern life.

Anti-pollutionists blame the increase on exhaust fumes; anti-smoking campaigners point to women smoking during pregnancy; anti-stress obsessives say it is overwork and anti-central-heating fanatics blame house-dust mites, a warm, modern house being a breeding paradise.

In trying to find answers, volunteers – asthmatic and non-asthmatic – undergo grim tests. They endure up to six hours in various kinds of polluted air in an exposure chamber, sometimes working on an exercise bicycle. “The tests are controversial,” said Professor Barnes, “because to get any effect you have to use high levels of pollution. If you do tests with nitrogen dioxide, you can’t detect the effects; but what seems to happen in real air is that if you have nitrogen dioxide mixed with sulphur dioxide, then you do have an effect.

“That’s the concern: pollutants are amplifying each other, and the combinations are what cause trouble.”

WHAT is clear is that asthmatics are all different and no one theory will account for all cases. Sylvia Dowding is south-east regional organiser for the National Asthma Campaign. Its aims are to fund research, build awareness and offer support. Her son, 25, had severe childhood asthma which is now controlled. Mrs Dowding feels that pollution can be a trigger. “If asthma is there already, pollution can bring it on. But when my son was young he had to spend a night in London for some tests. We thought the city air might be dreadful for him, but actually we had one of the best nights ever. It just shows how individual the problem is.”

The pollution theory is positively harmful, she says. “People might think, well, there’s nothing to be done, and give up taking medication, or give up trying to find the true reasons for it.”

Her son has been a smoker since he was 15, with no ill-effects on his asthma. “You need a tube to soothe the tube” as the wry asthmatic Joe Follows says to the hero of Ferdinand Mount’s novel Of Love and Asthma – a charming love story written by a man who knows just what it is like to be “a member of the great community of the bronchially strangulated”. The smoking asthmatic, like the chocolate-eating fatty or the one-lunged long-distance cyclist, is simply putting two fingers up to health theorists. Surely a good thing, even if it is medically slightly mad?

Dr Bush, though, has a thing about smoking and is convinced – though it is still only a theory – that passive smoking is an underlying cause of asthma. He cites a study in the Isle of Wight which showed that women who smoke in pregnancy are more likely to have babies with childhood asthma. In the second half of pregnancy, the baby’s tubes increase in size, but they don’t if the mother smokes. “The Government has breathtaking hypocrisy when campaigning for the health of the nation while allowing cigarette advertising,” he says. “Smoking in front of a child is a form of child abuse. My 15-year-old son tells me that about three-quarters of his friends are smoking.”

What the great doctor says may well be true, but there is a whiff of the hobby horse in his words.

Asthma is also being diagnosed more than it used to be and doctors admit that this is part of the reason why numbers are going up. ‘A lot of grown-ups say, ‘I always had a bad chest’,” said one south London GP. ‘Now almost any child who gets slightly wheezy at night is said to have asthma.” PROFESSOR Barnes said: ‘But an attack is an attack. You can’t hide it. And the increase in hospital admissions shows that asthma is getting worse.” In the waiting room at Dr Bush’s paediatric clinic, there were different things said about the pollution question.

The mother of Toni Watson, 16, from Shoreham-by-Sea, said: ‘We moved to the coast: we thought it would be the end of Toni’s asthma. But it’s been far worse. Perhaps it’s the main roads nearby, or the factories. We don’t know. We took Toni to Disney World in Florida in 1993 and for that whole fortnight she was fine. My other daughter has no problems with allergies in London, but when she stays with us she’s always coughing and sneezing.” The mother of Esther Grew, 13, said: ‘I do believe pollution makes it worse. We live at Wallington in Surrey. It used to be a village, now it’s so busy with cars going through to Croydon, it’s disgusting.”

Mike Lacey, father of nine-year-old Rasmus, said: ‘We live at Heston, three-quarters of a mile from the runway at Heathrow. We moved from Denmark last year. Rasmus hadn’t had any trouble there but it’s been really bad here.”

Farah, 11, who goes to Graveney School in Tooting, added: ‘I always take my inhaler before games: swimming and PE bring my attacks on. My asthma’s about the same in the town and in the country. But I’m allergic to cats.’ Mrs Turner, mother-of-three from Chingford, said: ‘My son has hay fever, my daughter Robin has asthma and the baby has the first signs of eczema. I’ve asked the doctor, ‘Where should we live? I want to get rid of this’. But there’s no simple answer. And you can’t get a doctor to tell you that traffic pollution’s bad for asthma. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy, to stop everyone moving out of towns into the country.”

The diary of a sufferer JOE Pitura-Riley (now three) would shout, scream and cough at night, and awaken at least six times, writes Caroline Phillips. His mother Annette was exhausted and could never sleep more than two hours for being at her son’s side.

If ever Annette or husband David, a corporate video presenter, allowed Joe into the chilly garden, he’d be wheezy and chesty. If Joe even ran to the bottom of the garden, he would gasp and rasp. And whenever he caught a cold, it would go straight to his chest and he’d have to be hospitalised. Joe was admitted to Guy’s hospital six times between the ages of 18 months and eight years.

The first time Annette took him to hospital, he was eight months old. She was traumatised. ‘I asked the doctor whether Joe was going to die,” says Annette, 33, a literature student.‘He had started to turn blue and looked so scared. I felt so helpless for this little baby who couldn’t get air into his lungs.”

ON CHRISTMAS Day last year 10-year-old Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by a family friend. Her assailant, Barry, 50, was convicted after a week-long case which ended on 30 September. He’s now on bail, awaiting sentencing on 21 October. Elizabeth, meanwhile, cries inconsolably in her bedroom with the Phil Collins poster; often she won’t sleep in her own bed or close her eyes all night. She has an IQ of 168, but recently flunked her exams. She goes to the lavatory 50 times a day and, at night, walks along the corridor in her flannel pyjamas, clutching her soft toy rabbit, and spends three hours in the bathroom. Her father thinks she’s trying to wash away her dirty feelings.

Her father, Malcolm (all names have been changed), who lives on his invalidity pension, is sitting in their south London Cartlandesque sitting room – all turquoise and pink with shells on the shelves, a tea cup to mark his silver wedding anniversary to Constance, fluffy candyfloss carpet and fairy lights twinkling in the buds of the pink silk chrysanthemums. Any minute now you expect to see Father Christmas.

Instead, Malcolm, in jeans and T-shirt, with a face that betrays months of anguish, speaks in the clipped voice of restrained anger. He talks of the horror of the day his only child was molested. He’s angry and lashes out about the ‘awful’ counselling they’ve all received, the ‘terrible court ordeal’ for his child and the strain on his marriage.

ELIZABETH is special to her parents who thought they couldn’t conceive. She is also a gifted child. ‘By just 14 months she knew all her colours, not just red, white and blue, but aquamarine, turquoise and khaki. At 19 months she had learned the alphabet and, shortly afterwards, started reading newspapers. She’d say things like, ‘Oh look, Margaret Thatcher is on the front page’.’ Elizabeth was nationally acclaimed.

Last Christmas the family stayed with Barry’s family. They’d become friends after meeting in Spain when Elizabeth was a year old and Malcolm was recuperating from breaking his back. ‘Barry had two children by his first marriage and seemed funny and charming,” remembers Malcolm.

On Christmas Day, the families played party games. Then Elizabeth accompanied Barry to look at his computer. ‘When I went upstairs shortly afterwards,’ says Malcolm, ‘her mother said, ‘Tell Daddy what you’ve just told me’. Elizabeth told how Barry had played with her private parts. He’d pulled down her knickers and tights, kissed her on the neck and made her sit on his lap. He wasn’t drunk and it lasted a few minutes. All while we were in the next room.’ Malcolm’s voice rises.

Malcolm, in his confusion, decided he didn’t want to upset Barry’s family and would speak to him quietly next morning. In addition, Malcolm was mugged savagely five years ago and has difficulty driving at night. He rationalised that he couldn’t leave until daylight.

Next morning Constance confronted Barry. ‘She told him he’d sexually molested our child. He didn’t deny it and said, ‘Let’s talk about it after Christmas’.’ Malcolm and Constance then approached the Child Protection Unit (CPU). ‘They advised us, initially, to let Elizabeth get over it. She was taking exams. But she completely freaked, and did nothing but cry.’ On 14 January the CPU took statements. ‘The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) thought there wasn’t a case, because of lack of evidence (although the police fought for it). Then they saw the video that Elizabeth had made in the CPU. A St Mary’s Hospital paediatrician advised that a medical examination would create further trauma, so she didn’t have one.” Barry was arrested in March and bailed. The night before the court case, Elizabeth said: ‘It’s dark outside, Daddy, I want to go out there and tell you something.” She told him how she’d been digitally penetrated. ‘She didn’t say that on video in front of the police officers, a man and a woman. She was too scared and embarrassed.”

Elizabeth, once an outgoing child, has become disturbed and clingy. “But we can’t cuddle her now. She pushes us away.’

AND the events of the past few months have tested her parents’ marriage. ‘You scream at each other, have sleepless nights and can’t see justice being done. Your daughter is up every two minutes to the loo and your wife is blaming you for not smacking that man on the nose.’

On police advice the family had counselling. ‘Elizabeth wasn’t allowed to talk about the incident because then they could have said we’d manipulated her. It’s been useless for us too. One night Elizabeth was sobbing until 5am and we called Childline who suggested we give her a sedative. When we told the counsellor, she said, ‘Why on earth did you ring them?” In court, standard procedures were followed. ‘I never want it to happen to another family and, please God, not to us again. She was taken early in the morning so we couldn’t talk to her, and put in a separate room. What my child had to endure for a day under cross-examination and video evidence was horrendous. We were told the defence would be lenient, but it wasn’t. The woman barrister put Elizabeth through the ordeal of saying it had never happened.’

Malcolm complained to Sir Thomas Bingham, Master of the Rolls, who acknowledged the distress to which victims are subjected. ‘But it is essential,’ he wrote, ‘that a defendant should have a fair opportunity to advance any defence he may have, within the limits of propriety.’ On 30 September, Barry was convicted and bailed. ‘We feel dreadful,’ says Malcolm. ‘The police had told us the judge would almost certainly have passed a custodial sentence for reports and that Barry would be put in prison awaiting sentence.’

So what does Malcolm want to happen to Barry? ‘The judge,’ wrote Sir Thomas, ‘will face a difficult task in deciding on the correct sentence and you may feel that it is not as severe as you would wish.’

RANDOM drugs tests are to be carried out on about 12,000 prisoners a year to combat the growing narcotics problem in jails.

It’s estimated that nearly half the inmates of British prisons take self-prescribed medication (heroin, LSD, cannabis and the like) while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That’s a prison population of 49,000 in England and Wales alone. So the forthcoming tests should provide enough material and statistics for Prison Service paper shufflers to write off an entire rainforest.

But aren’t they locking the cell after the criminal has bolted? Isn’t this approach comparable to giving HIV tests and forgetting about condoms and safe-sex education? Can it really be effective to discipline a hopeless junkie whose test proves positive?

Many prisoners are inside due to their addiction, rather than because they are inherently criminal. Addicts deal in drugs or steal to support their habit, commit crimes of violence when drunk or stoned, and up to half of all property crime (the cost of which has soared to £4 billion a year) is drug-related.

The Addictive Diseases Trust, a pioneering charity, is fighting successfully against spiralling crime by treating prison inmates for substance abuse. The ADT programme – the first to establish itself full-time in a penal institution, Downview Prison, Surrey – has rehabilitated a third of those it has treated. Remove people from the cycle of addiction and prison and many will cease to reoffend.

The drug tests cost £12 each – which is partly why they haven’t been used before on a wide scale in prisons – and the number of notified addicts has risen fivefold since 1982.

By contrast, £1,500 is required to put an inmate through the ADT programme. So it wouldn’t be logical to press the Prison Service to provide statutory funding.

After all, it only costs £23,000 a year to keep someone in prison. I’M THE only journalist ever to have met Michael Jackson privately in over a decade, unless you count Oprah Winfrey. I spent several hours with him last year. Just after the beleaguered star cut short his world tour and admitted an addiction to pain killers. At the time, the world’s journalists were searching the globe for him and The Sun was offering £10,000 for a sighting or photograph.

Jackson arrived heavily disguised in a red satin face mask and was driven in a Toyota Previa with clear glass windows and children in it. I was prevented, both then and now, from writing about our meeting, professionally the hardest thing I’ve ever had to bear. A number of legal and personal constraints impeded me from so doing, and I awaited an interview which has not yet transpired. (In my memoirs he’ll appear in heavily camouflaged form, wearing a blue silk face mask.) He didn’t strike me as the marrying type. But last week it was reported that he wed Lisa Marie Presley. Surely the papers missed something out. That Elvis was there.

The exposure of my inflexible friend SINCE I was given a piggy, I’ve banked with National Westminster. Unquestioningly, I queued and phoned my branch and held the line for so long my mum could have baked a souffl. This year they improved and gave me a personal account manager, so I had someone dealing with my individual requirements. One to one service which concentrated the mind wonderfully on the cheque books that never arrived.

Recently, I received a customer service questionnaire asking about my experience of Nat West over the last six months. The bank sends 132,000 of these to a random selection every month, and 20 per cent respond. I’m not normally one to fill in holiday competitions, coupons and finish the ditties on the packet of Persil, but I did it.

I considered it at length. Mulled such options as “The branch has made no effort to provide enough staff to satisfy demand” and “More often than not they’ve made a mistake” and “Have you had to give all the details to more than one person before they found someone who could answer your question properly?”

Then I moved my account to The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Care but no attention HOSPITAL authorities were only alerted to the disappearance of a pensioner who had offered himself as a guinea pig for medical students in a Manchester hospital when his relatives became worried. He was discovered on 9 July in the hospital lavatory, dead. He’d been there for 19 hours, and his grief-stricken family are calling for an inquiry.

Equally tragic is the tale of a man who last year went to Bart’s for his heart-outpatients appointment. He signed in and was dispatched along the corridor to see his consultant. He never arrived, and nobody noticed. Two weeks later he was discovered, decomposing in the gents.

Fortunately, all is not gloomy. I have a friend who is a renal specialist in a major London hospital. Returning to work after a short holiday, he made a brisk walk round the wards. Then he discovered a cheerful chap in stripy pyjamas lying on a trolley in the corridor.

My friend asked him how he was. The gentleman pulled the blankets up under his chin, but said he felt all right. My friend, noticing something amiss, enquired whether he’d completed the admission procedure. The man replied that he thought so. ‘I have been here a week,’ he replied. Overpriced facilities Bargain hunter: Betty Boothroyd IMISSED the redoubtable Betty Boothroyd, who opened the Harrods sale, and I ended up standing mournfully outside what rank among the world’s most expensive lavatories. Or luxury ladies’ washrooms, in Fayedspeak. The lavatories cost £250,000: each cistern and bowl was over £10,000, the room is fitted with £40,000-worth of Italian marble and you wave your hand in front of an infra-red sensor at the basin to turn on the water. Entry costs £1. This buys a swipe card which operates the electronic sensor to the inner sanctum. (Harrods card? That’ll do nicely.) About 300,000 people went to the top people’s store on the first day of the sale. All the women I saw shrieked in disbelief and headed off for a free pee round the corner. Only 400 could afford to spend more than a penny.

Who said the recession was lifting?

IS TENNIS in terminal decline? At the goldfish bowl of the Stella Artois finals day at Queens Club, the smattering of rent-a-celebs watched the singles. Those with their eye on the ball were such notables as Roger Moore and his daughter Deborah, the ubiquitous Ivana Trump and on-off lover Riccardo Mazzuchelli, and Baroness Fiona Thyssen.

But then a funny thing happened. They repaired for tea with adman Frank Lowe, president of the Stella tournament, and many of them didn’t bother to go back to watch the doubles. Conspicuous by their presence were Stefanie Powers and her French husband Patrick de la Chenais, who returned to sit with his arm bleakly round her shoulder.

Here was hard as new ball evidence of the trouble with tennis. That the game is losing its audience, fans are bored, that its spectacle is being killed by champion introverts like Pete Sampras, PC Plod umpires and one-dimensional (the dimension is apathy) players who don’t rally and care about nothing but the upwardly mobile money prizes.

Gone are the days of controversial players like ‘Nasty’ Ilie Nastase who reduced umpires to stuttering wrecks and drew fans as much for his racquet as his racket. Who played a fine game and bought umbrellas on court, used his racquet as a cane, dropped his drawers and with today’s fines would have clocked about $10,000 a match.

LAST week he played a veterans’ tournament, The Hurlingham Seniors, at the eponymous club. He arrived exceedingly late, came in naked-eyed from the blazing sunshine, sat down in the dark club room and put on his Ray-Ban shades for the interview. He thinks today’s stars lack flash and panache. ‘I don’t want to take away from the players’ talent. But the way they play I don’t like,” he says, adjusting his sunglasses for optimum effect. The way the game is played by most of the players today has killed the spectators. The game is different and too physical. There are less rallies because they smash stronger, hit harder. And they play too much tennis. They get tired and can’t perform their best most of the time.

‘It’s also less fun. They have managers and sponsors which we didn’t – we just got on and played tennis and enjoyed it – and business pressures and sponsorship which mean they are not free to do what they want. Of course there are good tennis players, but they don’t have the personalities of champions. I hope in the future we’ll have more McEnroes and Connors. We have Agassi, but that’s not enough. But you can’t make personalities, they have to be born.’

Could he have beaten most of today’s stars with a wooden racquet? ‘I dunno. In my prime, I think yes.’

Some of Nasty’s thoughts are echoed by the ‘Rockhampton Rocket’, Rod Laver, the shy Australian who was a spectacularly aggressive player and one of the greatest in tennis history. ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ he says, laughing. ‘I just enjoyed the game, played hard and had a prolonged career. These days a lot of players find they can’t because of disinterest, injuries or family situations.’

He doesn’t hold that there’s a ‘whole lot wrong with tennis’ but thinks Wimbledon spectators should be politely presented with a questionnaire asking: ‘What do you think is wrong with tennis and what are your suggestions for what could be done?’

‘I suspect many would answer that tennis just takes too long for the modern world. You can watch a match for four hours and think, ‘Gee nice tennis, but it’s just too long.”

Sitting under the flight-path skies of Hurlingham, he blames the ‘transition’ in tennis partly on technology. ‘When we were around, you couldn’t blast the ball with a wooden racquet.’

He thinks the court should be slowed down, the ball changed less frequently (‘so it gets heavier and softer’), the timing between points changed (‘to go back and get a towel after every second or third point is wrong’), ends changed after three games and a couple of months a year where points are not awarded.

He’s mindful of what he dubs the changing of the guard. ‘The new players don’t have charisma and haven’t learned to relate to the public as spectators.’ Fans may prefer the extravagant dramas of Agassi or the agonies of an air-punching Boris Becker. But the exuberant era of crotch-plucking Jimmy Connors and bad-mouthing superbrat John McEnroe has passed. ‘There’s huge prize money out there,’ says Laver. ‘So you can’t say, ‘I’m going to be the clown, the court jester and lose matches.’ That’s not going to get you into the draw next week.’

Indeed Laver is in awe of Sampras, despite his winning matches but not hearts. ‘People should be bowing at his feet. He’s such a great talent, so dedicated to the sport and playing his best tennis under pressure.’ COLUMNIST, tennis player and erstwhile match spectator Taki Theodoracopulos demurs. Now a veteran, Taki has played with ‘Emo’ Roy Emerson and Ken Rosewall, who was known as one of the greatest little men ever to play the game. ‘I make a point of not watching modern tennis or going anywhere near any tournaments,’ he retorts, from New York after a rough night on the town.

‘Life consists of trying not to watch the horror and behaviour of these complaining, whining humanoids. Everyone wants to see his fellow man make money. But this is too much. They make too much and try too little with tie breaks and the best of three. It’s bullshit compared with what it was.’ Larry Adler, mouth organist cum tennis opponent of Victor Lownes and Martin Amis, is equally scathing. ‘Players aren’t what they used to be. Jim Courier could walk through Piccadilly Circus without his baseball cap on and nobody would recognise him.’

Adler plays every day – ‘Cinderella tennis. I never get to the ball’ – except when he’s snowed off. Ten days ago he had an angioplasty heart operation, but was back on court two days later. And he was a fanatically keen spectator for a decade.

‘I used to sit just where the players walk on centre court at Wimbledon. They had practically to climb over me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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