A ‘holiday’ camp for Suzuki Method training is exhausting -but it’s worth all the sacrifices, says Caroline Phillips

COUNTESS PACHTA has driven from Germany to stay in an English boarding school.

“Cold showers, queueing for food and being woken at night by false fire alarms is romantic,” she says. “We can’t do this at home.”

“I went to boarding school, so this is familiar,” adds Masamichi Yokoi, the president and chief executive of Daiwa Europe, a Japanese securities conglomerate.

“But I wasn’t expecting to sleep somewhere without a private bathroom.”

Meanwhile, Simon Bruce, a partner at the law firm Farrer & Co, has to sleep in a dormitory with his wife and four children. Down the corridor, Lord Strathclyde (the leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords) is also sharing a bathroom with strangers. “Just like being back at school, except the food’s better,” he says.

This is my third year here, so I know to smuggle in La Fromagerie survival food parcels and my goosefeather pillow. You would hardly guess that we are here for our children to learn music.

“It’s wonderful to see the incredible progress my daughter makes in music in a short period,” says Yokoi. “It’s hard work for the parents,” adds Strathclyde, the father of three talented pianists. “But there are huge social, emotional and intellectual benefits for the children.” A four-year-old girl with bunches walks by carrying a violin that is one sixty-forth the size of a full concert violin. By the end of the week, like many of the children here, she will have performed a solo in front of up to 600 people.

This is the London Suzuki Group International Summer School, a week-long violin, viola, cello and piano course held each year at Bryanston School, in Dorset. It is organised by London teachers of Suzuki, a Japanese method of teaching music. There are 236 playing children, aged 4 to 17, with participants and 39 teachers from as far afield as Israel and Colombia. Plus enough pianos to stretch the length of Sloane Street.

All the Bryanston places were snapped up weeks before the closing date for applications. There was a long waiting list, which included children who had performed at the Royal Festival Hall. Why? Because it is inspirational. By the end there are phenomenal orchestral and chamber music performances by children who met only days before. It’s also like being back at school, except that parents have to observe all their children’s lessons. It’s exhausting and intensive.The Suzuki method was devised in the 1930s by Dr Shinchi Suzuki, who noted children’s capacity to learn their mother tongue fluently. If infants could master a complex language such as Japanese by the age of 6, he argued, they must be able to learn a musical instrument with comparable ease if training began at 2 or 3. Dr Suzuki challenged the belief in innate musical talent: “There is no such thing… the secret is repetition.”

Parental involvement and encouragement are prerequisites. Suzuki parents attend all their children’s private and group lessons throughout the year and oversee their daily practice. The triangle of parent, teacher and child is a defining feature of the method.

Parental involvement can be very useful in the early stages of learning and provides additional motivation -however, says Dr Susan Hallam, a music psychologist at the University of London, “as children become older they may rely on their parents, which is counter-productive”.

Learning is by listening, and sight-reading is delayed. “Because they learn to play by ear initially means that sometimes they find it difficult to read music,” says Hallam.

Some are sceptical about such intensive training for young children. “I’m against hot-housing,” says Helen Likierman, a clinical psychologist and Suzuki mum who has attended Bryanston since 1988. “But this is about developing self-motivation, self-confidence and a sense of achievement.”

There is no selection process for the summer school. The first year, my daughter Ella played in her concert with just her right hand after only three lessons: the teacher pointed out to her the correct playing finger. At Bryanston, under-7s study three hours a day; older children have private lessons. And group lessons.

Then there’s swimming, squash, tennis and meeting friends. The week costs Pounds 385 for children over 7 and the same for parents. “We can do it only because of a bursary,” says Collette Morris, the deputy head of a state primary school and a Bryanston regular. Her eldest son once sold his saxophone to contribute to his brother’s fees. “Lots of people struggle to do Suzuki. I’ve cancelled my pension contributions to pay for it.”

Dr Suzuki’s intention wasn’t to produce professional musicians; he nursed a deeper purpose. Yehudi Menuhin recalled him saying that his ambition was to create amateurs who might give themselves the joy of music and contribute to the harmony of society. Dr Suzuki believed in developing sensitivity, discipline, endurance and a beautiful heart. As I watch my children performing in their concerts, I think he got it right.

*Details of the next school (August 21-28) from lsg@suzukimusic.net

FORMER Londoner Adrienne Campbell, 34, eats food foraged from hedgerows, teaches her children at home, has just created a new local currency for her Sussex village, boycotts supermarkets, won’t vaccinate her children, changed her name from Katy when she felt she’d outgrown it, was celibate for two years, has spiritual revelations and gave birth underwater at home in front of her children and the au pair.

Hers is an unusual life, and very unusual for someone educated at Francis Holland, a smart private London school. She was raised by her international businessman father and nicely bred stepmother among their friends like David Niven, Sean Connery and multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She also gained a scholarship to America’s leading science university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, aged 19, she wrote a paper on cancer (with a professor from Harvard and another from MIT). Then she became a journalist on The Economist.

But first the currency. Adrienne, who lives near Wadhurst, has created a currency called Wads with 10 other community-minded souls. “One Wad equals a pound,” she says. “If I want to buy someone’s honey I’ll pay him a cheque in Wads, he banks that cheque at the wholefood shop and uses the credit to buy something locally. It’s a centralised bartering system whereby people exchange goods and services without having to do so directly with one another. If I have masses of herbs I can exchange them for baby-sitting or plumbing.”

The currency is useful for people short of cash and encourages villagers to develop skills and get to know one another. “Such systems are flourishing in England. More than 200 of them have started over the past five years.” She smiles and takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

SHE has also embarked upon another singular project. In January, Adrienne and two other families started a unique school in her sitting-room. It has eight children from the ages of five to eight whom she intends to educate until school-leaving age. The National Curriculum is followed loosely. But the emphasis is on freedom and nature (“The children can tell what animals have been through the hedges by the footprints and stool”) and fees are £600 a term. She hopes for a government grant and to offer an alternative to the state system. The idea came to her after her five-year-old daughter Sophie had spent a year at the village school.

“She didn’t like having to do maths when she wanted to read, or art when she felt like writing.” Adrienne was disillusioned by the state and private systems, the more so after studying the pioneering work of Satish Kumar, a visionary in Dorset. “Children educated privately are pushed academically too early on. Also I believe in respecting children’s choices.” Her school is a non profit-making, parent-run co-operative. “A parent who is a paid teacher teaches in the morning and the other parents teach for free in the afternoons.”

The latter don’t have formal qualifications. “The parent is the best qualified to teach the child. Studies show that home-educated children are two or three years ahead of school ones if they go back into the system.” She says her pupils are happy, uncompetitive, motivated and respectful. We’re sitting in the exquisite setting of her garden, next to wild flowers and her 25-year-old Citron. Here she lives with her three daughters (aged one to five) and composer husband, Dirk, in a 100-year-old oast house with round rooms. She has a beautiful equine face, speaks purposefully and slowly, and wears jeans and scraped-back hair. Her body is relaxed. Her first life-changing experience came on holiday in Turkey in 1982. “I had a spiritual revelation. I can’t explain it more.” On returning, she joined Subud, a cross-denominational religious movement. “Twice a week we do spiritual exercises. It’s like tapping into a divine life force.” She met Dirk through Subud. “We’d both been celibate because we kept making the wrong choices with the opposite sex.

“It was instant recognition. We got engaged after two weeks.” From there her lifestyle took more and more alternative turns. Take childbirth. “My mother had died in childbirth, having twins, so I thought through very carefully how I wanted to do it.”

Her first born, Sophie, was delivered underwater, without painkillers and with Dirk in the birthing pool. She didn’t have a choice with her next, Anna, who was born prematurely. She decided to have her third baby at home. TWO midwives and the children were present at the birth. “They sat cuddled up on the sofa next to Dirk and the au pair. I was screaming and grunting and Sophie was pretty disgusted with the blood.” Wasn’t that damaging and traumatic?

“Possibly. But I think it helped the girls bond with Rose and see that birth is a normal part of everyday life.” Wasn’t it voyeuristic? “Possibly. But I think the pros outweighed the cons.”

The family rarely visits a doctor. “I’ll only go for a diagnosis in order to find out whether the illness is infectious and what the long-term effect will be.’ She relies instead on herbal remedies, homeopathy, eating healthily and fasting once a year during Lent. “We eat a lot of salads made from weeds, wild flowers and hedgerow herbs.”

Adrienne decided not to vaccinate her children against anything. “I read extensively and felt the risks were greater than the benefits. The well-documented hazards of vaccine are brain damage, convulsions, a damaged immune system and death.” She looks at her feet.

Her attitude to personal hygiene is alternative as well. She didn’t wash her children’s hair for two years and now washes it only occasionally. “I have friends who spend six weeks letting the gunk out – you have to wear a hat because it’s so disgusting – and, after that, you have lovely shiny hair.”

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.”

I SLAMMED on the brakes of the car in heavy Christmas traffic. Adrian, my fiancee, got out and walked off. So I abandoned the vehicle, door open, in the middle of Kensington High Street.

Motorists behind hooted. I yelled to Adrian that if he didn’t want his car left there, he’d better collect it. Then I hurled the keys to him – or at least to a place estate agents would have considered within his walking distance.

Passers-by, captivated by the domestic soap but looking discomfited, pretended they weren’t watching. I huffed off, collected later by the kindly Adrian in his retrieved car. He’d complained about my driving. Leaving the car to drive itself had seemed a perfectly rational way to react. I’m pregnant. We’ve had 13 weeks of this madness. I’m normally slightly Mediterranean, but never like this.

In the week of the abandoned-car incident we went to a Sunday service in St Mary Abbot’s, seeking a venue in which to marry so that the bun-in-the-oven doesn’t come from a single-parent family when his father is away on business trips. We’ve been together nearly five years and I’ve been wearing the Phillips rock for one, so it’s not so much shotgun, but more of an about-bloody-time wedding.

The service started, and my betrothed said something suspect. So what does a girl do? Say shhh? Course not. Stomp out, that’s what. Flying past the congregation in Ferrari-red coat, bereft of keys and money. Then spend the rest of the day, happy as Santa, visiting friends and forgetting to go home for our lunch party.

I knew I was enceinte when the pregnancy test – well, four actually – showed positive. It seemed to me that the first three came from tampered stock, thus necessitating a fourth test. I was several loaves short of a picnic even then. Luckily, the beloved, watching Silence Of The Lambs, was in cheery mood when I broke the good news.

Immediately I suffered the most common complaint of pregnancy. Worry. First worry was who to have it with, so to speak. I chose John Malvern who combines professional brilliance with a sense of humour and a senior post at Queen Charlotte’s. A rare combination in a man.

Since then, like a third to half of all pregnant women, I’ve suffered from the misnomer of morning sickness. More like morning, noon, afternoon and middle-of-the-night sickness. And show me a cigarette and I rush to the bathroom.

Then came the gas, heartburn, burgeoning 38 double-D cups, indigestion, emotional instability, crying five times in a day, reduced libido, wanting a Thai curry in the middle of the night and dizziness.

My sense of smell has become bloodhound strong. People smell. Not just pongy, body-odorous types, but everyone. A friend once told me she always knew when she was pregnant when she could smell women menstruating. I thought she was bonkers.