WHEN Dr. José Batlle met his 93-year-old patient in her small Bronx apartment, she didn’t have much furniture beyond a small TV, a sofa and a wheelchair. What she did have in abundance were pills — 15 types from a variety of doctors, including a pulmonologist, a cardiologist and a gerontologist. He discovered that some medicines had expired, others were unnecessary and some were dangerous if taken together.
Dr. Lili Sacks moved to a clinic in Seattle that focuses on longer appointments. She now sees up to 12 patients a day instead of 25.
Sitting with his patient and her son
Dr. Batlle cut the number of her medicines to four. He also gave the family his personal cellphone number.
Before coming to see him, the woman had endured several emergency-room visits and hospital stays. With Dr. Batlle, she was able to avoid all of that.
Calling a doctor on his cell? No waiting for an appointment? It’s the type of service that Dr. Batlle tries to offer to all of his 1,500 patients. “I prefer to keep them healthy than treat them when they are sick,” he says.
The efforts of Dr. Batlle and other primary care physicians may get a boost at the federal level. The Obama administration is considering ways to persuade medical students to pursue careers in primary care by raising their pay, and is channeling them to work in underserved rural areas. And the White House has already set aside $2 billion for community health centers through the economic stimulus package.
But more far-reaching health care reform remains an uncertainty, and in the interim a small but growing number of doctors are trying to take matters into their own hands.
By stepping off the big-clinic treadmill, where doctors are sometimes asked to see a different patient every 15 minutes, Dr. Batlle has joined the vanguard of physicians trying to redefine health care. These doctors spend more time with patients, emphasize prevention and education to keep them healthy and can handle many medical problems without referrals to specialists.
In many cases, this kind of care can reduce a patient’s medical bills. That’s more crucial than ever: according to a study published online by the American Journal of Medicine, 60 percent of all bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were driven by health care costs.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but doctors involved in this movement, called “patient centered” practices, say its popularity is growing.
“I travel to a lot of medical conferences, and I’m meeting more and more doctors embarking on this path,” said Dr. L. Gordon Moore, who runs IdealMedicalPractices.org, a program to help small practices become more innovative and efficient. The Web site IdealMedicalHome.org has about 800 doctors who post and trade ideas, while more than 700 physicians have adopted methods from HowsYourHealth.org. Many of these doctors see fewer patients per day than they did before.
To make personalized care possible in an era when compensation is often tied to the number of patients they see, doctors use technology to streamline processes and reduce administrative costs. Dr. Batlle, for example, uses online appointment scheduling and manages his medical records electronically. He prescribes medications from his computer and offers virtual visits by phone and e-mail.
It cost Dr. Batlle about $25,000 to buy the technology to make all of this possible, but he estimates that he saves close to $100,000 a year in salaries and billing costs. And he has made enough money to begin renovations on a new office in Washington Heights in Manhattan.
The model seems to be working, according to a 2008 study by Dr. John H. Wasson at Dartmouth Medical School. His research showed that patients in patient-centered practices were more likely to say they were informed about how to manage chronic diseases and got the care they needed, compared with those in a national sample of medical practices. They also were less likely to say they had to wait for an appointment.
“If the goal is to deliver patient care when and how they want and need it, this is the way to go,” Dr. Wasson said.
Of course, even doctors in this movement acknowledge that it is not a panacea for the country’s health care problems. Privacy advocates warn that electronic patient records can be breached, and computer glitches can make patient records inaccessible for hours. Big clinics can be better for people who have several health problems and need easy access to a variety of specialists. Moreover, some doctors may not want to leave a big clinic because they feel they lack the technical or business skills they need — or because a salaried job there may be more stable in this economy.
And while the patient-centered movement is growing, the nation may not be able to afford to have all its primary care doctors reduce the number of patients they see. Across the country, primary care physicians are in short supply, in part because average salaries for family practitioners are the lowest of any medical specialty. According to a 2008 survey of physician salaries by the American Medical Group Association, their average annual salary is $201,555, versus $356,166 for a general surgeon and $614,536 for a neurological surgeon.
“Medical school loans can be so high, you need to be a specialist to pay them back,” Dr. Batlle said. “But our country doesn’t need yet another sleep apnea specialist.”
LILI SACKS, a primary care doctor in Seattle, says she began thinking differently about her work on the day she realized she was beginning each appointment with the words, “Sorry I’m late.”Scheduled to see as many as 25 patients a day at a large clinic, she lacked the time for thorough examinations and discussions. Because of this, she said, primary care doctors are often forced to order tests and send patients to specialists.
“Could I have helped some people without specialists and tests? Absolutely,” said Dr. Sacks. “Would it have saved the patient and the insurance company both money? Absolutely. Is the system set up for the best care and cost efficiency? Absolutely not.”
Dr. Sacks said she worried that seeing so many patients would lead to errors. Last year, she moved to a clinic that focuses on longer patient appointments, 30 to 60 minutes. This translates to 10 to 12 patients a day. Patients also communicate directly with her by phone or e-mail.
During those longer appointments, Dr. Sacks can perform basic lab tests and simple procedures, so patients see fewer specialists.
“I probably head off a handful of emergency-room visits and hospital stays every month because patients can see me as soon as they have a problem, and I can be thorough rather than rushed,” she said.
One patient who avoided the emergency room was Todd Martin, a store manager in Seattle who went to Dr. Sacks’s clinic on a Saturday.
“I couldn’t stop coughing and was having trouble breathing,” Mr. Martin said. “They were able to see me and give me a chest X-ray.”
Mr. Martin said he spent $40 for the resulting prescription but the rest was covered by a monthly fee he pays Dr. Sacks. “A weekend visit to the E.R. would have easily cost $1,000,” he said.
Dr. Sacks charges patients a direct monthly fee of $54 to $129 based on age, and she doesn’t take insurance. Her office calls its philosophy “direct practice” because it’s a direct contract between doctor and patient. But she advises patients to obtain insurance plans to cover large, unexpected health costs like those to treat cancer or a heart attack.
“We say it’s like having a car and paying for your own oil changes and tuneups, but getting insurance in case you need a big repair,” she said.
Dr. Garrison Bliss, who in 2007 founded the group where Dr. Sacks works, has offered direct-practice services since 1997. He says patients can save 15 to 40 percent of their medical costs by using this model, based on his examination of insurance rates and his belief that good primary care can fill most of a patient’s needs.
Insurance plans that cover every little thing can be very expensive, Dr. Bliss said. He said that a patient who paid an annual fee at his clinic and took out a higher-deductible insurance plan would usually come out ahead, even if the patient’s health needs meant that he or she had to pay the entire deductible.
Dr. Bliss’s office operates with just two administrative employees for seven doctors. He estimates that if he took insurance, one or two administrative workers would be needed per doctor.
Insurance administration costs can take a big bite out of a practice’s revenue. A recent Weill Cornell Medical College study found that a third of the money received by primary care physicians pays for interactions between a doctor’s practice and patients’ health plans.
Patricia Rogers Caroselli, a retired assistant principal who is a patient of Dr. Sacks, dreaded going to her former clinic. “The waiting room was always noisy and crowded,” she said. In the examining room, she felt that she should “get in and out and not waste the doctor’s time with questions,” she said.
In contrast, she said, she appreciates the friendly calm of Dr. Sacks’s new surroundings and the personal attention. “Everyone should have this kind of patient care,” she said.
Dr. Sacks said the financial mechanics of the direct-practice model match her medical goals. When she was compensated based on insurance, she was paid every time she saw a patient. Now, if she can use education and prevention to reduce office visits, she and her patients benefit, she said.
“Having more time to sit with each patient has made me a better doctor,” she said. “I had a disabled patient that I saw for 13 years. Until she came to my new clinic, I never had the time to learn the details of her accident and the resulting complications. I was always treating whatever the immediate concern was.”
TECHNOLOGY has helped many doctors reduce costs. Dr. Batlle says he has been building his arsenal of technology solutions one by one, with “lots of trial and error,” for eight years.
Recently, he saw a 52-year-old patient with hypertension. As he examined the patient, noting blood pressure and other vital signs, he entered the information into his laptop computer to add to the patient’s electronic medical record. He also typed in the codes for billing and insurance.
The patient wondered if he was due for a prescription refill, so Dr. Batlle checked his computer again, found that he was, and hit a button to send the refill request to the pharmacy. As the patient left, Dr. Batlle hit the keyboard to send the bill electronically to the insurance company.
“He’ll even go to the Web to schedule his follow-up appointment,” Dr. Batlle said. “I don’t pay a receptionist to sit and answer phones.”
Dr. Batlle says other doctors could outfit an office for less than the $25,000 he spent on technology.
“Most doctors think they need to hire two receptionists, a billing person and two nurses to run a primary care office,” he said. “But they can learn about these technologies from other doctors, and the software salespeople do some training.”
Some physicians hire consultants to find and install the right equipment. Doctors who want to switch to electronic health records may also receive financial support from the government through the stimulus package.
By using new technology and streamlining processes, small primary care practices can reduce their costs to half of what a typical practice pays, from about 60 percent of income down to 30 percent, Dr. Wasson said. He said that doctors who focus on reducing their costs can see fewer patients without sacrificing income. Dr. Sacks said she and her colleagues didn’t have to take a pay cut when they moved to Dr. Bliss’s practice.
As Congress and the Obama administration begin to focus more closely on health care, some primary care doctors are weighing in. Dr. Bliss, for instance, has been to Washington twice in the last month to share his ideas with legislators. He knows he’s in a debate with powerful voices, especially insurance companies and hospitals. So he and other doctors are encouraging patients to speak up as well.
“We need to bring the patients to the barricades with us,” Dr. Batlle says.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
U.S. Lawyers Agreed on the Legality of Brutal Tactic
When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.
That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.
While signing off on the techniques, Mr. Comey in his e-mail provided a firsthand account of how he tried unsuccessfully to discourage use of the practices. He made a last-ditch effort to derail the interrogation program, urging Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to argue at a White House meeting in May 2005 that it was “wrong.”
“In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government,” Mr. Comey wrote in a May 31, 2005, e-mail message to his chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg. He feared that a case could be made “that some of this stuff was simply awful.”
The e-mail messages are now in the hands of investigators at the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is preparing a report expected to be released this summer on the Bush administration lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh methods. The inquiry, under way for nearly five years, will be the Justice Department’s fullest public account of its role in the interrogation program, which President Obama has ended.
In years of bitter public debate, the department has sometimes seemed like a black-and-white moral battleground over torture. The main authors of memorandums authorizing the methods — John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — have been widely pilloried as facilitators of torture.
Others, including Mr. Comey, Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Levin, have largely escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.
But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.
For example:
¶Mr. Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, unnerved the C.I.A. in June 2004 by withdrawing a 2002 memorandum written by Mr. Yoo that said only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture.
In addition, in a previously undisclosed letter to the agency, Mr. Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.
¶Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring “torture is abhorrent.” But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods.
¶Mr. Comey, who had forced a 2004 showdown with White House officials over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, concurred in that Bradbury opinion. His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed “grave reservations” and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department,” Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. Rosenberg.
Justice Department lawyers involved in the opinions felt torn between what was legal and what was advisable, Mr. Levin said. “Obviously you can only do that which is legal,” he said in a recent interview. “But that does not mean you should automatically do something simply because it is legal.”
The e-mail messages and documents provide new details about a critical year in the interrogation saga, beginning in mid-2004. The C.I.A. inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the harsh methods, prompting a review of the program. Under intense White House pressure, the Justice Department lawyers in May 2005 approved a series of opinions that reauthorized the harshest practices.
The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. The law defined torture as treatment “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.
The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted.
Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. “There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute,” said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.
But many believe that even under that law, the Justice Department should have recognized that waterboarding, at least, was torture. To argue otherwise, said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, required “extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis.”
Waterboarding, the near-drowning method that Mr. Obama has described as torture, was used on three operatives for Al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. The C.I.A. never used the technique after it was reauthorized in 2005.
point: the methods themselves were legal..I.A. officials had been nervous about the legality of their proposed methods from the start in 2002. They had asked Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, to grant interrogators immunity in advance from prosecution for torture. Mr. Chertoff refused, but neither did he warn the agency against the methods it was proposing.
The agency’s worst fears about the potential liability of its officers returned with a vengeance in 2004, after the sharp criticism from the agency’s inspector general and Mr. Goldsmith’s withdrawal of the first torture memorandum. C.I.A. officials demanded a comprehensive legal review.
But Mr. Goldsmith resigned in July 2004, and his successor as acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Levin, quickly set to work on the review, assisted by his top deputy, Mr. Bradbury.
On July 22, 2004, the Justice Department offered the C.I.A. interim assurance that it could use all methods except waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith had questioned. On Aug. 6, Mr. Levin issued another interim letter reauthorizing waterboarding, as long as rules were followed.
But in February 2005, when Mr. Levin moved to a job as legal adviser to the National Security Council, the new interrogation opinions had not been approved by all necessary officials. The day before his departure, Mr. Levin stopped by and apologized to Mr. Bradbury for leaving it to him to sign the volatile documents.
By April 2005, the opinions were in final form, and Mr. Comey, who had set his own resignation for August, concurred in the 46-page opinion affirming the legality of the 13 techniques. But he told Mr. Gonzales that he strongly objected to Mr. Bradbury’s second opinion, allowing multiple techniques to be used in a single interrogation session.
Mr. Gonzales told him that he was “under great pressure” from Vice President Dick Cheney to complete both memorandums and that President George W. Bush had asked about them, Mr. Comey recounted in one of the 2005 e-mail messages.
Later, after reading a revised draft of the second opinion, Mr. Comey added that “my concerns were not allayed, only heightened.” He said he wanted more time to fix the memorandum, but Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, Theodore Ullyot, told him the White House would not wait.
Mr. Comey wanted an analysis centered on actual interrogations in an effort to limit the type and combination of techniques that would be permissible, according to someone familiar with his thinking.
“I told him the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the [expletive] hit the fan,” Mr. Comey wrote in another e-mail message. “It would be Alberto Gonzales in the bull’s-eye. I told him it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong. I told him it could be made right in a week, which was a blink of an eye, and that nobody would understand at a hearing three years from now why we didn’t take that week.”
That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times.
While signing off on the techniques, Mr. Comey in his e-mail provided a firsthand account of how he tried unsuccessfully to discourage use of the practices. He made a last-ditch effort to derail the interrogation program, urging Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales to argue at a White House meeting in May 2005 that it was “wrong.”
“In stark terms I explained to him what this would look like some day and what it would mean for the president and the government,” Mr. Comey wrote in a May 31, 2005, e-mail message to his chief of staff, Chuck Rosenberg. He feared that a case could be made “that some of this stuff was simply awful.”
The e-mail messages are now in the hands of investigators at the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is preparing a report expected to be released this summer on the Bush administration lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh methods. The inquiry, under way for nearly five years, will be the Justice Department’s fullest public account of its role in the interrogation program, which President Obama has ended.
In years of bitter public debate, the department has sometimes seemed like a black-and-white moral battleground over torture. The main authors of memorandums authorizing the methods — John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury — have been widely pilloried as facilitators of torture.
Others, including Mr. Comey, Jack Goldsmith and Daniel Levin, have largely escaped criticism because they raised questions about interrogation and the law.
But a closer examination shows a more subtle picture. None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal.
For example:
¶Mr. Goldsmith, now a Harvard law professor, unnerved the C.I.A. in June 2004 by withdrawing a 2002 memorandum written by Mr. Yoo that said only pain equal to that produced by organ failure or death qualified as torture.
In addition, in a previously undisclosed letter to the agency, Mr. Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.
¶Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring “torture is abhorrent.” But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods.
¶Mr. Comey, who had forced a 2004 showdown with White House officials over the National Security Agency’s surveillance program, concurred in that Bradbury opinion. His objections focused on a second legal opinion that authorized combinations of the methods. He expressed “grave reservations” and asked for a week to revise the memorandum, warning Mr. Gonzales that “it would come back to haunt him and the department,” Mr. Comey said in a 2005 e-mail message to Mr. Rosenberg.
Justice Department lawyers involved in the opinions felt torn between what was legal and what was advisable, Mr. Levin said. “Obviously you can only do that which is legal,” he said in a recent interview. “But that does not mean you should automatically do something simply because it is legal.”
The e-mail messages and documents provide new details about a critical year in the interrogation saga, beginning in mid-2004. The C.I.A. inspector general had questioned the legality and effectiveness of the harsh methods, prompting a review of the program. Under intense White House pressure, the Justice Department lawyers in May 2005 approved a series of opinions that reauthorized the harshest practices.
The lawyers had to interpret a 1994 antitorture law written largely with despotic foreign regimes in mind, but used starting in 2002, in effect, as a set of guidelines for American interrogators. The law defined torture as treatment “specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” By that standard, a succession of Justice Department lawyers concluded that the C.I.A.’s methods did not constitute torture.
The only issues that provoked debate were waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith questioned, and some combinations of multiple techniques, which Mr. Comey resisted.
Some outside experts agree that the language of the 1994 law is strikingly narrow. “There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute,” said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.
But many believe that even under that law, the Justice Department should have recognized that waterboarding, at least, was torture. To argue otherwise, said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a St. John’s University law professor who has studied the interrogation memorandums, required “extraordinary contortions in language and legal analysis.”
Waterboarding, the near-drowning method that Mr. Obama has described as torture, was used on three operatives for Al Qaeda in 2002 and 2003. The C.I.A. never used the technique after it was reauthorized in 2005.
point: the methods themselves were legal..I.A. officials had been nervous about the legality of their proposed methods from the start in 2002. They had asked Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, to grant interrogators immunity in advance from prosecution for torture. Mr. Chertoff refused, but neither did he warn the agency against the methods it was proposing.
The agency’s worst fears about the potential liability of its officers returned with a vengeance in 2004, after the sharp criticism from the agency’s inspector general and Mr. Goldsmith’s withdrawal of the first torture memorandum. C.I.A. officials demanded a comprehensive legal review.
But Mr. Goldsmith resigned in July 2004, and his successor as acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Levin, quickly set to work on the review, assisted by his top deputy, Mr. Bradbury.
On July 22, 2004, the Justice Department offered the C.I.A. interim assurance that it could use all methods except waterboarding, which Mr. Goldsmith had questioned. On Aug. 6, Mr. Levin issued another interim letter reauthorizing waterboarding, as long as rules were followed.
But in February 2005, when Mr. Levin moved to a job as legal adviser to the National Security Council, the new interrogation opinions had not been approved by all necessary officials. The day before his departure, Mr. Levin stopped by and apologized to Mr. Bradbury for leaving it to him to sign the volatile documents.
By April 2005, the opinions were in final form, and Mr. Comey, who had set his own resignation for August, concurred in the 46-page opinion affirming the legality of the 13 techniques. But he told Mr. Gonzales that he strongly objected to Mr. Bradbury’s second opinion, allowing multiple techniques to be used in a single interrogation session.
Mr. Gonzales told him that he was “under great pressure” from Vice President Dick Cheney to complete both memorandums and that President George W. Bush had asked about them, Mr. Comey recounted in one of the 2005 e-mail messages.
Later, after reading a revised draft of the second opinion, Mr. Comey added that “my concerns were not allayed, only heightened.” He said he wanted more time to fix the memorandum, but Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, Theodore Ullyot, told him the White House would not wait.
Mr. Comey wanted an analysis centered on actual interrogations in an effort to limit the type and combination of techniques that would be permissible, according to someone familiar with his thinking.
“I told him the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the [expletive] hit the fan,” Mr. Comey wrote in another e-mail message. “It would be Alberto Gonzales in the bull’s-eye. I told him it was my job to protect the department and the A.G. and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong. I told him it could be made right in a week, which was a blink of an eye, and that nobody would understand at a hearing three years from now why we didn’t take that week.”
My harsh lesson in love and life
Observer writer and interviewer Lynn Barber was an innocent 16-year-old schoolgirl when she met an older man and began a relationship that lasted two years. By day she was a diligent student; by night 'Simon' charmed her with dazzling stories, expensive restaurants and foreign films. And then came a rude awakening. In this exclusive extract from her memoir - now made into a film starring Carey Mulligan and Rosamund Pike - she describes her introduction to an adult world of sexuality and betrayal and how she was damaged by her suitor's lessons in life
I met Simon Goldman in 1960 when I was 16 and he was - he said - 27, but was probably in his late 30s. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leant over to the passenger window and said, "Want a lift?" Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham. He had a funny accent - later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh - but I asked if he was foreign. He said: "Only if you count Jews as foreign." Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely: "Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed." (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had lived in Israel when he was "your age". I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought 19. But then when he said, "Fancy a coffee?" I foolishly answered, "No - my father will kill me if I'm late." "School tomorrow?" he asked, and, speechless with mortification, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and asked: "Can I take you out for coffee another evening met Simon Goldman in 1960 when I was 16 and he was - he said - 27, but was probably in his late 30s. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leant over to the passenger window and said, "Want a lift?" Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham. He had a funny accent - later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh - but I asked if he was foreign. He said: "Only if you count Jews as foreign." Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely: "Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed." (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had lived in Israel when he was "your age". I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought 19. But then when he said, "Fancy a coffee?" I foolishly answered, "No - my father will kill me if I'm late." "School tomorrow?" he asked, and, speechless with mortification, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and asked: "Can I take you out for coffee another evening?"
An Education by Lynn Barber Penguin, published 25 June, £8.99 Order An Education at the Guardian bookshop My life might have turned out differently if I had just said no. But I was not quite rude enough. Instead, I said I was very busy rehearsing a play which meant that, unfortunately, I had no free evenings. He asked what play, and I said The Lady's Not for Burning at Richmond Little Theatre. Arriving for the first night a couple of weeks later, I found an enormous bouquet in the dressing room addressed to me. The other actresses, all grown-ups, were mewing with envy and saying, "Those flowers must have cost a fortune." When I left the theatre, hours later, I saw the Bristol parked outside and went over to say thank you. He said: "Can't we have our coffee now?" and I said no, because I was late again, but he could drive me home. I wasn't exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father.
My father's grillings were notorious among the Hampton Grammar boys. He wanted to know what marks they got at O-level, what A-levels they were taking, what universities they were applying to. He practically made them sit an IQ test before they could take me to the flicks. But this time, for once, my father made no fuss at all. He asked where Simon and I had met; I said at Richmond Little Theatre, and that was that. He seemed genuinely impressed by Simon, and even volunteered that we could stay out till midnight. So our meeting for coffee turned into dinner, and with my father's blessing.
Simon took me to an Italian place in Marylebone and of course I was dazzled. I had never been to a proper restaurant before, only to tea rooms with my parents. I didn't understand the menu, but I loved the big pepper grinders and the heavy cutlery, the crêpes suzettes and the champagne. I was also dazzled by Simon's conversation. Again, I understood very little of it, partly because his accent was so strange, but also because it ranged across places and activities I could hardly imagine. My knowledge of the world was based on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, and none of them had a word to say about living on a kibbutz or making Molotov cocktails. I felt I had nothing to bring to the conversational feast and blushed when Simon urged me to tell him about my schoolfriends, my teachers, my prize-winning essays. I didn't realise then that my being a schoolgirl was a large part of my attraction.
Over the next few weeks, it became an accepted thing that Simon would turn up on Friday or Saturday nights to take me to the West End. Sometimes we went to the Chelsea Classic to see foreign films; sometimes he took me to concerts at the Wigmore or Royal Festival Hall, but mostly we went to restaurants. The choice of restaurants seemed to be dictated by mysterious visits Simon had to make on the way. He would say, "I've just got to pop into Prince's Gate", and would disappear into one of the white cliff-like houses while I would wait in the car. Sometimes the waiting was very long, and I learnt to take a book on all our dates. Once, I asked if I could come in with him, but he said, "No, this is business", and I never asked again.
Besides taking me out at weekends, Simon would sometimes drop in during the week when he said he was "just passing". (Why was he passing Twickenham? Where was he going? I never asked.) On these occasions, he would stay chatting to my parents, sometimes for an hour or more, about news or politics - subjects of no interest to me. Often the three of them were so busy talking they didn't even notice if I left the room. I found this extraordinary. It was quite unprecedented in our house for me not to be the centre of attention.
Perhaps I should explain about my parents. They were first-generation immigrants to the middle class and all their hopes were invested in me, their only child. They had no relatives in London, and no friends who ever came to the house - my father had his bridge club, my mother her amateur dramatics, but all they talked about at home was me, and specifically my schoolwork. My father often quoted Charles Kingsley's line "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever", but he said it sarcastically - he wanted me to be clever, and let who will be good. I had been reared from the cradle to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship and go to the best possible university. By the time I met Simon, I was well on track. I had a scholarship to an independent school, Lady Eleanor Holles, a royal flush of O-levels, and my teachers predicted that I would easily win a place at Oxford to read English. But still my parents fretted and worried. Their big fear was that my Latin would "let me down".
Simon in theory represented everything my parents most feared - he was not one of us, he was Jewish and cosmopolitan, practically a foreigner. He wore cashmere sweaters and suede shoes; he drove a pointlessly expensive car; he didn't work in an office; he was vague about where he went to school and, worst of all, boasted that he had been educated in "the university of life" - not a teaching establishment my parents recognised. And yet, inexplicably, they liked him. In fact, they liked him more than I ever liked him, perhaps because he took great pains to make them like him. He brought my mother flowers and my father wine; he taught them to play backgammon; he chatted to them endlessly and seemed genuinely interested in their views. I suppose it made a change for them from always talking about me.
Yet none of us ever really knew a thing about him. I think my parents once asked where he lived and he said "South Kensington", but that was it. I never had a phone number for him, still less an address. As for what he did, he was "a property developer" - a term I suspect meant as little to my parents as it did to me. I knew it was somehow connected with these visits he had to make, the great bunches of keys he carried, the piles of surveyors' reports and auction catalogues in the back of his car, and the occasional evenings when he had to "meet Perec" which meant cruising around Bayswater looking for Perec (Peter) Rachman's Roller parked outside one of his clubs. Rachman would later give his name to Rachmanism when the press exposed him as the worst of London's exploitative landlords, but at that time he was just one of Simon's many mysterious business colleagues.
Simon was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them. The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect - I blame Albert Camus. My normal instinct was to bombard people with questions, to ask about every detail of their lives. But just around the time I met Simon I became an existentialist, and one of the rules of existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated. And, as it happened, this suited Simon fine. My role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden, implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did. To ask questions would have shown that I was interested in him, even that I cared, and neither of us really wanted that.
Simon established early on that I was a virgin, and seemed quite happy about it. He asked when I intended to lose my virginity and I said: "17", and he agreed this was the ideal age. He said it was important not to lose my virginity in some inept fumble with a grubby schoolboy, but with a sophisticated older man. I heartily agreed - though, unlike him, I had no particular older man in mind. He certainly didn't seem like a groper. I was used to Hampton Grammar boys who turned into octopuses in the cinema dark, clamping damp tentacles to your breast. Simon never did that. Instead, he kissed me long and gently and said: "I love to look into your eyes." When he kissed me, he called me Minn and said I was to call him Bubl but I usually forgot. Eventually, one night, he said, "I'd love to see your breasts", so I grudgingly unbuttoned my blouse and allowed him to peep inside my bra. But this was still well within the Lady Eleanor Holles dating code - by rights, given the number of hot dinners he'd bought me, he could really have taken my bra right off.
And then one day, on one of his drop-in visits, Simon said he was going to Wales next weekend to visit some friends and could I go with him? I confidently expected my parents to say no - to go away, overnight, with a man I barely knew? - but instead they said yes, though my father added jocularly, "Separate rooms, of course." "Of course," said Simon. So off we went for the first of many dirty weekends. I hated Wales, hated the grim hotel, the sour looks when Simon signed us in. We shared a room, of course, and shared a bed, but Simon only kissed me and said: "Save it till you're 17." After that, there were many more weekends - Paris, Amsterdam, Bruges, and often Sark in the Channel Islands, because Simon liked the hotel there, and I liked stocking up on my exciting new discovery, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. They brought my sophistication on by leaps and bounds.
As my 17th birthday approached, I knew that my debt of dinners and weekends could only be erased by "giving" Simon my virginity. He talked for weeks beforehand about when, where, how it should be achieved. He thought Rome, or maybe Venice; I thought as near as possible to Twickenham, in case I bled. In the end, it was a new trendy circular hotel - the Ariel? - by Heathrow airport, where we spent the night before an early morning flight to somewhere or other, I forget. He wanted to do a practice run with a banana - he had brought a banana specially. I said, "Oh for heaven's sake!", and told him to do it properly. He talked a lot about how he hoped Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home. Somewhere in the middle of the talking, he was inside me, and it was over. I thought: "Oh well, that was easy. Perhaps now I can get a proper boyfriend." (I think the word that best describes my entire sex life with Simon is negligible. He was a far from ardent lover - he seemed to enjoy waffling about Minn and Bubl more than actually doing anything. And whereas my games mistress was always bellowing across the changing room, "But you said it was your period last week!", Simon always took my word for it when I said that Minn was "indisposed".)
The affair - if it was an affair - drifted on, partly because no proper boyfriends showed up, partly because I had become used to my strange double life of schoolgirl swot during the week, restaurant-going, foreign-travelling sophisticate at weekends. And this life had alienated me from my schoolfriends: if they said, "Are you coming to Eel Pie Jazz Club on Saturday?", I would say: "No, I'm going to Paris with Simon." Of course my friends all clamoured to meet Simon, but I never let them. I was afraid of something - afraid perhaps that they would see through him, see, not the James Bond figure I had depicted, but this rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age, whose stories didn't add up.
Because by now - a year into the relationship - I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about Simon. I knew his cars (he had several Bristols), and the restaurants and clubs he frequented, but I still didn't know where he lived. He took me to a succession of flats which he said were his, but often they were full of gonks and women's clothes and he didn't know where the light switches were. So these were other people's flats, or sometimes empty flats, in Bayswater, South Kensington, Gloucester Road. He seemed to have a limitless supply of them.
But by now there was a compelling reason for staying with Simon: I was in love. Not with Simon, obviously, but with his business partner, Danny, and his girlfriend, Helen. I loved them both equally. I loved their beauty, I loved their airy flat in Bedford Square where there was a harpsichord in the corner and pre-Raphaelites on the walls. At that time, few people in Britain admired the pre-Raphaelites, but Danny was one of the first, and I eagerly followed. He lent me books on Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Millais, and sometimes flattered me by showing me illustrations in auction catalogues and saying "What do you think? Should I make a bid?" I found it easy to talk to Danny; I could chatter away to him whereas with Simon I only sulked.
Helen was a different matter. She drifted around silently, exquisitely, a soulful Burne-Jones damsel half hidden in her cloud of red-gold hair. At first, I was so much in awe of her beauty I could barely speak to her. But gradually I came to realise that her silence was often a cover for not knowing what to say and that actually - I hardly liked to use the word about my goddess - she was thick. I was terrified that one day Danny would find out. And there were sometimes hints from Simon that Danny's interest in Helen might be waning, that there could be other girlfriends. Knowing this, keeping this secret, made me feel that it was crucial for me to go on seeing Helen, to protect her, because one day, when I was just a little older and more sophisticated, we could be best friends.
Simon always refused to talk about business to me ("Oh you don't want to know about that, Minn") but Danny had no such inhibitions. He loved telling me funny stories about the seething world of dodgy property dealers - the scams, the auction rings, the way the auctioneers sometimes tried to keep out the "Stamford Hill cowboys" by holding auctions on Yom Kippur or other Jewish holy days, and then the sight of all these Hasidic Jews in mufflers and dark glasses trying to bid without being seen. Or the great scam whereby they sold Judah Binstock a quarter acre of Ealing Common, without him realising that the quarter acre was only two yards wide. Through Danny, I learnt how Peter Rachman had seemingly solved the problem of "stats" - statutory or sitting tenants - who were the bane of 1960s property developers. The law gave them the right to stay in their flats at a fixed rent for life if they wanted - and they had a habit of living an awfully long time. But Rachman had certain robust methods, such as carrying out building works all round them, or taking the roof off, or "putting in the schwartzers" (West Indians) or filling the rest of the house with prostitutes, that made stats eager to move.
So I gathered from Danny that the property business in which Simon was involved was not entirely honest. But my first hint of other forms of dishonesty came about 15 months into the relationship when I went to a bookshop on Richmond Green. Simon had taken me there several times to buy me books of Jewish history and the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer - I was glad to have them, though I never read them. But on this occasion, I went alone and the bookdealer, who was normally so friendly, asked: "Where's your friend?"
"What friend?"
"Simon Prewalski."
"I don't know anyone of that name," I said truthfully.
"Well, whatever he calls himself. Tell him I'm fed up with his bouncing cheques - I've reported him to the police."
That evening I said to Simon" "Do you know anyone called Prewalski?"
"Yes - my mother, my grandparents, why?"
I told him what the book dealer had said.
Simon said: "Well don't go in there again. Or if you do, don't tell him you've seen me. Say we've broken up."
"But what did he mean about the bouncing cheques?"
"How should I know? Don't worry about it."
So that was a hint, or more than a hint. But soon there was unmistakable proof. Simon and Danny were buying up a street in Cambridge called Bateman Street, so we often stayed there. One weekend I was moaning - I was always moaning - "I'm bored with Bateman Street", so we drove out towards Newmarket. At a place called Six Mile Bottom, I saw a thatched cottage with a For Sale sign outside. "Look, how pretty," I said. "'Why can't you buy nice places like that, instead of horrible old slums?" "Perhaps we can," said Simon, so we bounced up to the cottage and an old lady showed us round. I was bored within minutes, but Simon seemed unconscionably interested in the bedroom corridor which he kept revisiting. Then I saw him going out to the car, carrying something. Eventually we left and went for lunch at a hotel in Newmarket. We were having a rather lugubrious meal when two men came into the dining room and one pointed the other towards our table. The man introduced himself as a detective. He said: "We've had a complaint from a Mrs so and so of Six Mile Bottom. She says a couple visited her cottage this morning and afterwards she noticed that a valuable antique map by Speed was missing from one of the bedrooms." "Oh, Simon!" I said. He shot me a look. "Perhaps we could have this conversation outside," he suggested. He went outside with the policeman. I waited a few minutes and then went to the Ladies, and out the back door and away down the street. I had just enough money for a train back to London. I hoped Simon would go to prison.
He didn't of course; he bounced round to Clifden Road a few days later and took me out to dinner. "How could you steal from an old lady?"
"I didn't steal. She asked me to have the map valued."
"No she didn't - I was with you."
"All right, she didn't ask me. But I recognised that the map was by Speed and I thought if I got it valued for her, it would be a nice surprise."
I knew he was lying, but I let it go. I said: "If you ever really stole something, I would leave you."
He said: "I know you would, Minn."
But actually I knew he had stolen something and I didn't leave him, so we were both lying.
When I did try to leave him a few weeks later, it was not out of moral outrage but because I was bored. I was bored with Minn and Bubl, I was bored with the endless driving round, the waiting while he ran his mysterious errands, the long heavy meals in restaurants, the tussles in strange bedrooms, the fact that we never met anyone except Danny and Helen. I told Simon: "We're finished - I've got to concentrate on my A-levels." He said: "We're not finished. I'll come for you when you've done your A-levels."
On the evening after my last A-level, Simon took me out to dinner and proposed. I had wanted him to propose, as proof of my power, but I had absolutely no intention of accepting because of course I was going to Oxford. Eighteen years of my life had been dedicated to this end, so it was quite impertinent of him to suggest my giving it up. I relayed the news to my parents the next morning as a great joke - "Guess what? Simon proposed! He wants me to marry him this summer!" To my complete disbelief, my father said, "Why not?" Why not? Had he suddenly gone demented? "Because then I couldn't go to Oxford." My father said: "Well - is that the end of the world? Look," he went on, "you've been going out with him for two years; he's obviously serious, he's a good man; don't mess him around." I turned to my mother incredulously but she shook her head. "You don't need to go to university if you've got a good husband."
This was 1962, well before the advent of feminism. But even so, I felt a sense of utter betrayal, as if I'd spent 18 years in a convent and then the Mother Superior had said: "Of course, you know, God doesn't exist." I couldn't believe my parents could abandon the idea of Oxford. But apparently they could and over the next few days they argued it every mealtime - good husbands don't grow on trees, you're lucky to get this one ("And you not even in the family way!"), why go to university if you don't need to? Simon meanwhile was taking me to see houses, asking where I wanted to live when we were married. I couldn't resist telling my schoolfriends: "I'm engaged!" And they were all wildly excited and thrilled for me, and said "You'll never have to do Latin again!" Even so, I was queasy - I'd always liked the sound of Oxford, I even liked writing essays, I wasn't so keen to give up the idea.
Events overtook me in the last few days of term. Miss R Garwood Scott the headmistress somehow got wind of my engagement and summoned me to see her. Was it true I was engaged? Yes, I said, but I would still like to take the Oxford exams. She was ruthless. I could not return to school (in those days you had to stay for an extra term to do Oxbridge entrance) if I was getting married. When was the wedding and which church would it be in? Not in church, I said, because my fiancé was Jewish. Jewish! She looked aghast - "Don't you realise that the Jews killed Our Lord?" I stared at her. "So I won't take the Oxford exams," I said. My little gang was waiting for me outside her study. "I told her I was leaving," I announced. "She tried to persuade me to stay but I refused." They all congratulated me and begged to be bridesmaids. Then I went to the bogs and cried my eyes out.
I told my parents: "I'm not going to Oxford, I'm marrying Simon." "Oh good!" they said. "Wonderful." When Simon came that evening, they made lots of happy jokes about not losing a daughter but gaining a son. Simon chuckled and waved his hands about, poured drinks and proposed toasts - but I caught the flash of panic in his eyes. A few days later, probably no more than a week later, we were in the Bristol on our way to dinner when he said he just needed to pop into one of his flats. Fine, I said, I'll wait in the car. As soon as he went inside the house, I opened the glove compartment and started going through the letters and bills he kept in there. It was something I could have done on any one of a hundred occasions before - I knew he kept correspondence in the glove compartment, I knew the glove compartment was unlocked, I was often waiting in the car alone and had no scruples about reading other people's letters. So why had I never done it before? And why did it seem the most obvious thing in the world to do now? Anyway the result was instantaneous. There were a dozen or more letters addressed to Simon Goldman, with a Twickenham address. And two addressed to Mr and Mrs Simon Goldman with the same address.
I behaved quite normally that evening though at the end, when he asked if Minn would welcome a visit from Bubl, I replied smoothly that she was indisposed. By that stage, I was at least as good a liar as Simon. As soon as I got home, I looked in the phone book - and why had I never thought of doing that before? - and sure enough found an S Goldman with a Popesgrove (Twickenham) number, and the address I'd seen on the letters. It was only about half a mile from my house, I actually passed it every day on the bus to school. I spent the night plotting and rehearsing what I would say, working out scripts for all eventualities. When I finally rang the number the next morning, it was all over in seconds. A woman answered. "Mrs Goldman?" I said. "Yes." "I'm ringing about the Bristol your husband advertised for sale." "Oh," she said, "is he selling it? He's not here now but he's usually back about six." That was enough or more than enough - I could hear a child crying in the background.
I took the train to Waterloo, and walked all the way to Bedford Square. Helen was in, and guessed as soon as she saw me - "You've found out?"
Yes, I said - "It's not just that he's married - he lives with her. And there's a child."
"Two, actually."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm sorry. I wanted to. The other night when you said you were engaged, I told Danny we must tell you, but he said Simon would never forgive us."
This was - what? - my third, fourth, fifth betrayal by adults? And I had really thought Helen was my friend.
"What was Simon planning to do?" I asked her. "Commit bigamy?"
"Yes," she said soberly. "That's exactly what he intended to do. He felt he'd lose you if he didn't. He loves you very much you know."
I went home and raged at my parents - "You did this. You made me go out with him, you made me get engaged." My parents were white with shock - unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest. My mother cried. When Simon came that evening, my father went to the door and tried to punch him. I heard him shouting, "You've ruined her life!" From my bedroom window, I saw Simon sitting in the Bristol outside with his shoulders shaking. Then my father strode down the front path and kicked the car as hard as he could, and Simon drove away. I found the sight of my father kicking the car hilarious and wanted to shout out of the window, "Scratch it, Dad! Scratch the bodywork - that'll really upset him!'
It was a strange summer. My parents were grieving and still in deep shock. I, the less deceived, was faking far more sorrow than I felt. After all, I never loved Simon whereas I think perhaps they did. I stayed in my room playing Cesar Franck's Symphony in D Minor very loudly day after day. My main emotion was rage, followed by puzzlement about what to do next. I had no plans for the summer or - now - for the rest of my life. When my A-level results came, I not only got the top marks I fully expected in English and French, but also - mirabile dictu - top marks in Latin. I slapped the letter on the breakfast table and said, "You see? I could have gone to Oxford."
My father took the day off work, probably for the first time in his life, and went to see Miss R Garwood Scott. God knows what humble pie he had to eat - and he hated humble pie - but he came back with a grim face and a huge concession. She had agreed I could be entered for the Oxford exams as a Lady Eleanor Holles pupil, and I could sit the exams at school. But she was adamant that I could not attend the school - it was up to him to arrange private tutorials. Mum and Dad talked far into the night about how they would find a tutor, and how they would pay. A day or two later - presumably at Miss R Garwood Scott's instigation - one of my English teachers rang and volunteered to be my tutor. So I spent that autumn writing essays and going to tutorials, working hard and feeling lonely. My parents were in such deep grief that mealtimes were silent. Once or twice I saw the Bristol parked at the end of the street, but I was never remotely tempted to go to it.
I sat the Oxford exams, I went for interviews, I was accepted at St Anne's. In my second term at Oxford, one of the nuns at the convent where I boarded handed me a note which she said a man had brought. It said "Bubl respectfully requests the pleasure of the company of Minn for dinner at the Randolph Hotel tonight at 8." I tore it up in front of the nun. "Don't ever let that man in," I told her. "He's a con-man." I went round to Merton to tell my boyfriend, Dick, and he said, "Well, I'd like to meet him - let's go to the Randolph." So we did. Simon was sitting in the lobby - on time, for once in his life - looking older, tireder, seedier than I remembered. His face lit up when he saw me and fell when I said, "This is my boyfriend, Dick." Simon said politely, "Won't you please both stay to dinner as my guests?" "How are you going to pay for it?" I snapped and Dick looked at me with horror - he had never heard me use that tone before. Simon silently withdrew a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and I nodded, OK.
Dick was enchanted by Simon. He loved his Israeli kibbutz stories, his fishing with dynamite stories, his Molotov cocktail stories. I had heard them all before and sulked throughout the meal. As Dick walked me back to my convent, he said, "I see why you were taken in by him - he is quite a charmer, isn't he?" "No," I said furiously, "he's a disgusting criminal con-man and don't you dare say you like him!"
Was Simon a con-man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents' house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me. Of course Oxford, and time, would have stolen me away eventually, but Simon made it happen almost overnight. Until our "engagement", I'd thought my parents were ignorant about many things (fashion, for instance, and existentialism, and why Jane Austen was better than Georgette Heyer) but I accepted their moral authority unquestioningly. So when they casually dropped the educational evangelism they'd sold me for 18 years and told me I should skip Oxford to marry Simon, I thought, "I'm never going to take your advice about anything ever again." And when he turned out to be married, it was as if, tacitly, they concurred. From then on, whenever I told them my plans, their only response was a penitent "You know best".
What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have. I learned a lot in my two years with Simon. I learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel, I learned about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford - I could read a menu, I could recognise a fingerbowl, I could follow an opera, I was not a complete hick. But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, straightforward boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank.
But there were other lessons Simon taught me that I regret learning. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of "living a lie". I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.
About the authorBorn 22 May 1944 in Bagshot, Berkshire.
Educated at Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton and St Anne's College, Oxford.
Career Her first job in journalism was at Penthouse. She went on to work for the Sunday Express, Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph magazine. She has worked at the Observer since 1996.
Awards Five UK Press awards and a What the Papers Say award (1990).
Books How to Improve Your Man in Bed, The Heyday of Natural History, Mostly Men, and Demon Barber
Turning point In 1986, when interviewing her ex-employers Bob Guccione and Kathy Keeton, she decided to write for the first time in the first person: "I felt I'd finally found my voice. I never believed in 'objective' interviews anyway - if there are two people in the room, you can't pretend the interviewee is talking into space."
Personal life Married David in 1971, with whom she had two children, Rosie and Theo.
Hobbies Gossip, lunch, birdwatching, contemporary art.
How my young love story was turned into a filmWhen a version of this story first appeared in Granta, a young woman called Amanda Posey said she'd like to buy the film rights and said she had a screenwriter in mind. I thought she was mad, but the screenwriter turned out to be her then boyfriend, now husband, Nick Hornby and they spent literally years honing the script and finding backers till it finally went into production last year. Amanda asked if I'd like to watch some of the filming, and said I should come to the Japanese School, Acton, to watch one of the classroom scenes.
Only as I was driving there did I think: why on earth would they film my story in a Japanese school and why is there a Japanese school in Acton anyway? And at that point I registered the date - 1 April - and decided I must have been the victim of an April Fool.
But no - the Japanese school was there and in fact turned out to be the old Haberdashers' Aske's girls' school which we used to play at lacrosse. It was so eerily like my old school, Lady Eleanor Holles, that I kept looking at the school photos in the corridors to see if I could see myself in them. And entering the classroom was a real madeleine moment because it even smelt like my old classroom.
I met the Danish director, Lone Scherfig, and Carey Mulligan who plays me in the film, and was knocked out by the brilliance of the acting and the incredible care and authenticity that had gone into getting the period detail right.
I saw an early rough cut of the film last summer and the finished version at Christmas. It comes out at the end of October and I firmly believe it will be a hit. Carey Mulligan is amazing - when the film was shown at Sundance earlier this year (and won the audience prize) all the critics hailed her as a star. But the other actors are great too - Peter Sarsgaard as my dodgy boyfriend, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper as Helen and Danny, Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour as my parents, Emma Thompson as my hated headmistress, Olivia Williams as the good teacher who saved me.
Of course I now routinely refer to it as "my" film and have almost convinced myself that I not only wrote it but produced and directed it - but anyway huge thanks to Nick Hornby, Amanda Posey, Finola Dwyer, and Lone Scherfig for making such a good job of it. And if anyone wants to believe that I was as pretty as Carey Mulligan when I was l6, by all means go ahead.
I met Simon Goldman in 1960 when I was 16 and he was - he said - 27, but was probably in his late 30s. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leant over to the passenger window and said, "Want a lift?" Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham. He had a funny accent - later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh - but I asked if he was foreign. He said: "Only if you count Jews as foreign." Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely: "Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed." (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had lived in Israel when he was "your age". I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought 19. But then when he said, "Fancy a coffee?" I foolishly answered, "No - my father will kill me if I'm late." "School tomorrow?" he asked, and, speechless with mortification, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and asked: "Can I take you out for coffee another evening met Simon Goldman in 1960 when I was 16 and he was - he said - 27, but was probably in his late 30s. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in his mouth leant over to the passenger window and said, "Want a lift?" Of course my parents had told me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men, but at that stage he didn't seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said fine. I told him I had never seen a car like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham. He had a funny accent - later, when I knew him better, I realised it was the accent he used for posh - but I asked if he was foreign. He said: "Only if you count Jews as foreign." Well of course I did. I had never consciously met a Jew; I didn't think we had them at my school. But I said politely: "Are you Jewish? I never would have guessed." (I meant he didn't have the hooked nose, the greasy ringlets, the straggly beard of Shylock in the school play.) He said he had lived in Israel when he was "your age". I wondered what he thought my age was: I hoped he thought 19. But then when he said, "Fancy a coffee?" I foolishly answered, "No - my father will kill me if I'm late." "School tomorrow?" he asked, and, speechless with mortification, I could only nod. So then he drove me to my house, and asked: "Can I take you out for coffee another evening?"
An Education by Lynn Barber Penguin, published 25 June, £8.99 Order An Education at the Guardian bookshop My life might have turned out differently if I had just said no. But I was not quite rude enough. Instead, I said I was very busy rehearsing a play which meant that, unfortunately, I had no free evenings. He asked what play, and I said The Lady's Not for Burning at Richmond Little Theatre. Arriving for the first night a couple of weeks later, I found an enormous bouquet in the dressing room addressed to me. The other actresses, all grown-ups, were mewing with envy and saying, "Those flowers must have cost a fortune." When I left the theatre, hours later, I saw the Bristol parked outside and went over to say thank you. He said: "Can't we have our coffee now?" and I said no, because I was late again, but he could drive me home. I wasn't exactly rushing headlong into this relationship; he was far too old for me to think of as a boyfriend. On the other hand, I had always fantasised about having an older man, someone even more sophisticated than me, to impress the little squirts of Hampton Grammar. So I agreed to go out with him on Friday week, though I warned that he would have to undergo a grilling from my father.
My father's grillings were notorious among the Hampton Grammar boys. He wanted to know what marks they got at O-level, what A-levels they were taking, what universities they were applying to. He practically made them sit an IQ test before they could take me to the flicks. But this time, for once, my father made no fuss at all. He asked where Simon and I had met; I said at Richmond Little Theatre, and that was that. He seemed genuinely impressed by Simon, and even volunteered that we could stay out till midnight. So our meeting for coffee turned into dinner, and with my father's blessing.
Simon took me to an Italian place in Marylebone and of course I was dazzled. I had never been to a proper restaurant before, only to tea rooms with my parents. I didn't understand the menu, but I loved the big pepper grinders and the heavy cutlery, the crêpes suzettes and the champagne. I was also dazzled by Simon's conversation. Again, I understood very little of it, partly because his accent was so strange, but also because it ranged across places and activities I could hardly imagine. My knowledge of the world was based on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontes, and none of them had a word to say about living on a kibbutz or making Molotov cocktails. I felt I had nothing to bring to the conversational feast and blushed when Simon urged me to tell him about my schoolfriends, my teachers, my prize-winning essays. I didn't realise then that my being a schoolgirl was a large part of my attraction.
Over the next few weeks, it became an accepted thing that Simon would turn up on Friday or Saturday nights to take me to the West End. Sometimes we went to the Chelsea Classic to see foreign films; sometimes he took me to concerts at the Wigmore or Royal Festival Hall, but mostly we went to restaurants. The choice of restaurants seemed to be dictated by mysterious visits Simon had to make on the way. He would say, "I've just got to pop into Prince's Gate", and would disappear into one of the white cliff-like houses while I would wait in the car. Sometimes the waiting was very long, and I learnt to take a book on all our dates. Once, I asked if I could come in with him, but he said, "No, this is business", and I never asked again.
Besides taking me out at weekends, Simon would sometimes drop in during the week when he said he was "just passing". (Why was he passing Twickenham? Where was he going? I never asked.) On these occasions, he would stay chatting to my parents, sometimes for an hour or more, about news or politics - subjects of no interest to me. Often the three of them were so busy talking they didn't even notice if I left the room. I found this extraordinary. It was quite unprecedented in our house for me not to be the centre of attention.
Perhaps I should explain about my parents. They were first-generation immigrants to the middle class and all their hopes were invested in me, their only child. They had no relatives in London, and no friends who ever came to the house - my father had his bridge club, my mother her amateur dramatics, but all they talked about at home was me, and specifically my schoolwork. My father often quoted Charles Kingsley's line "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever", but he said it sarcastically - he wanted me to be clever, and let who will be good. I had been reared from the cradle to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship and go to the best possible university. By the time I met Simon, I was well on track. I had a scholarship to an independent school, Lady Eleanor Holles, a royal flush of O-levels, and my teachers predicted that I would easily win a place at Oxford to read English. But still my parents fretted and worried. Their big fear was that my Latin would "let me down".
Simon in theory represented everything my parents most feared - he was not one of us, he was Jewish and cosmopolitan, practically a foreigner. He wore cashmere sweaters and suede shoes; he drove a pointlessly expensive car; he didn't work in an office; he was vague about where he went to school and, worst of all, boasted that he had been educated in "the university of life" - not a teaching establishment my parents recognised. And yet, inexplicably, they liked him. In fact, they liked him more than I ever liked him, perhaps because he took great pains to make them like him. He brought my mother flowers and my father wine; he taught them to play backgammon; he chatted to them endlessly and seemed genuinely interested in their views. I suppose it made a change for them from always talking about me.
Yet none of us ever really knew a thing about him. I think my parents once asked where he lived and he said "South Kensington", but that was it. I never had a phone number for him, still less an address. As for what he did, he was "a property developer" - a term I suspect meant as little to my parents as it did to me. I knew it was somehow connected with these visits he had to make, the great bunches of keys he carried, the piles of surveyors' reports and auction catalogues in the back of his car, and the occasional evenings when he had to "meet Perec" which meant cruising around Bayswater looking for Perec (Peter) Rachman's Roller parked outside one of his clubs. Rachman would later give his name to Rachmanism when the press exposed him as the worst of London's exploitative landlords, but at that time he was just one of Simon's many mysterious business colleagues.
Simon was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them. The extent to which I never asked him questions is astonishing in retrospect - I blame Albert Camus. My normal instinct was to bombard people with questions, to ask about every detail of their lives. But just around the time I met Simon I became an existentialist, and one of the rules of existentialism as practised by me and my disciples at Lady Eleanor Holles School was that you never asked questions. Asking questions showed that you were naïve and bourgeois; not asking questions showed that you were sophisticated and French. I badly wanted to be sophisticated. And, as it happened, this suited Simon fine. My role in the relationship was to be the schoolgirl ice maiden, implacable, ungrateful, unresponsive to everything he said or did. To ask questions would have shown that I was interested in him, even that I cared, and neither of us really wanted that.
Simon established early on that I was a virgin, and seemed quite happy about it. He asked when I intended to lose my virginity and I said: "17", and he agreed this was the ideal age. He said it was important not to lose my virginity in some inept fumble with a grubby schoolboy, but with a sophisticated older man. I heartily agreed - though, unlike him, I had no particular older man in mind. He certainly didn't seem like a groper. I was used to Hampton Grammar boys who turned into octopuses in the cinema dark, clamping damp tentacles to your breast. Simon never did that. Instead, he kissed me long and gently and said: "I love to look into your eyes." When he kissed me, he called me Minn and said I was to call him Bubl but I usually forgot. Eventually, one night, he said, "I'd love to see your breasts", so I grudgingly unbuttoned my blouse and allowed him to peep inside my bra. But this was still well within the Lady Eleanor Holles dating code - by rights, given the number of hot dinners he'd bought me, he could really have taken my bra right off.
And then one day, on one of his drop-in visits, Simon said he was going to Wales next weekend to visit some friends and could I go with him? I confidently expected my parents to say no - to go away, overnight, with a man I barely knew? - but instead they said yes, though my father added jocularly, "Separate rooms, of course." "Of course," said Simon. So off we went for the first of many dirty weekends. I hated Wales, hated the grim hotel, the sour looks when Simon signed us in. We shared a room, of course, and shared a bed, but Simon only kissed me and said: "Save it till you're 17." After that, there were many more weekends - Paris, Amsterdam, Bruges, and often Sark in the Channel Islands, because Simon liked the hotel there, and I liked stocking up on my exciting new discovery, Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. They brought my sophistication on by leaps and bounds.
As my 17th birthday approached, I knew that my debt of dinners and weekends could only be erased by "giving" Simon my virginity. He talked for weeks beforehand about when, where, how it should be achieved. He thought Rome, or maybe Venice; I thought as near as possible to Twickenham, in case I bled. In the end, it was a new trendy circular hotel - the Ariel? - by Heathrow airport, where we spent the night before an early morning flight to somewhere or other, I forget. He wanted to do a practice run with a banana - he had brought a banana specially. I said, "Oh for heaven's sake!", and told him to do it properly. He talked a lot about how he hoped Minn would do Bubl the honour of welcoming him into her home. Somewhere in the middle of the talking, he was inside me, and it was over. I thought: "Oh well, that was easy. Perhaps now I can get a proper boyfriend." (I think the word that best describes my entire sex life with Simon is negligible. He was a far from ardent lover - he seemed to enjoy waffling about Minn and Bubl more than actually doing anything. And whereas my games mistress was always bellowing across the changing room, "But you said it was your period last week!", Simon always took my word for it when I said that Minn was "indisposed".)
The affair - if it was an affair - drifted on, partly because no proper boyfriends showed up, partly because I had become used to my strange double life of schoolgirl swot during the week, restaurant-going, foreign-travelling sophisticate at weekends. And this life had alienated me from my schoolfriends: if they said, "Are you coming to Eel Pie Jazz Club on Saturday?", I would say: "No, I'm going to Paris with Simon." Of course my friends all clamoured to meet Simon, but I never let them. I was afraid of something - afraid perhaps that they would see through him, see, not the James Bond figure I had depicted, but this rather short, rather ugly, long-faced, splay-footed man who talked in different accents and lied about his age, whose stories didn't add up.
Because by now - a year into the relationship - I realised that there was a lot I didn't know about Simon. I knew his cars (he had several Bristols), and the restaurants and clubs he frequented, but I still didn't know where he lived. He took me to a succession of flats which he said were his, but often they were full of gonks and women's clothes and he didn't know where the light switches were. So these were other people's flats, or sometimes empty flats, in Bayswater, South Kensington, Gloucester Road. He seemed to have a limitless supply of them.
But by now there was a compelling reason for staying with Simon: I was in love. Not with Simon, obviously, but with his business partner, Danny, and his girlfriend, Helen. I loved them both equally. I loved their beauty, I loved their airy flat in Bedford Square where there was a harpsichord in the corner and pre-Raphaelites on the walls. At that time, few people in Britain admired the pre-Raphaelites, but Danny was one of the first, and I eagerly followed. He lent me books on Rossetti and Burne-Jones and Millais, and sometimes flattered me by showing me illustrations in auction catalogues and saying "What do you think? Should I make a bid?" I found it easy to talk to Danny; I could chatter away to him whereas with Simon I only sulked.
Helen was a different matter. She drifted around silently, exquisitely, a soulful Burne-Jones damsel half hidden in her cloud of red-gold hair. At first, I was so much in awe of her beauty I could barely speak to her. But gradually I came to realise that her silence was often a cover for not knowing what to say and that actually - I hardly liked to use the word about my goddess - she was thick. I was terrified that one day Danny would find out. And there were sometimes hints from Simon that Danny's interest in Helen might be waning, that there could be other girlfriends. Knowing this, keeping this secret, made me feel that it was crucial for me to go on seeing Helen, to protect her, because one day, when I was just a little older and more sophisticated, we could be best friends.
Simon always refused to talk about business to me ("Oh you don't want to know about that, Minn") but Danny had no such inhibitions. He loved telling me funny stories about the seething world of dodgy property dealers - the scams, the auction rings, the way the auctioneers sometimes tried to keep out the "Stamford Hill cowboys" by holding auctions on Yom Kippur or other Jewish holy days, and then the sight of all these Hasidic Jews in mufflers and dark glasses trying to bid without being seen. Or the great scam whereby they sold Judah Binstock a quarter acre of Ealing Common, without him realising that the quarter acre was only two yards wide. Through Danny, I learnt how Peter Rachman had seemingly solved the problem of "stats" - statutory or sitting tenants - who were the bane of 1960s property developers. The law gave them the right to stay in their flats at a fixed rent for life if they wanted - and they had a habit of living an awfully long time. But Rachman had certain robust methods, such as carrying out building works all round them, or taking the roof off, or "putting in the schwartzers" (West Indians) or filling the rest of the house with prostitutes, that made stats eager to move.
So I gathered from Danny that the property business in which Simon was involved was not entirely honest. But my first hint of other forms of dishonesty came about 15 months into the relationship when I went to a bookshop on Richmond Green. Simon had taken me there several times to buy me books of Jewish history and the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer - I was glad to have them, though I never read them. But on this occasion, I went alone and the bookdealer, who was normally so friendly, asked: "Where's your friend?"
"What friend?"
"Simon Prewalski."
"I don't know anyone of that name," I said truthfully.
"Well, whatever he calls himself. Tell him I'm fed up with his bouncing cheques - I've reported him to the police."
That evening I said to Simon" "Do you know anyone called Prewalski?"
"Yes - my mother, my grandparents, why?"
I told him what the book dealer had said.
Simon said: "Well don't go in there again. Or if you do, don't tell him you've seen me. Say we've broken up."
"But what did he mean about the bouncing cheques?"
"How should I know? Don't worry about it."
So that was a hint, or more than a hint. But soon there was unmistakable proof. Simon and Danny were buying up a street in Cambridge called Bateman Street, so we often stayed there. One weekend I was moaning - I was always moaning - "I'm bored with Bateman Street", so we drove out towards Newmarket. At a place called Six Mile Bottom, I saw a thatched cottage with a For Sale sign outside. "Look, how pretty," I said. "'Why can't you buy nice places like that, instead of horrible old slums?" "Perhaps we can," said Simon, so we bounced up to the cottage and an old lady showed us round. I was bored within minutes, but Simon seemed unconscionably interested in the bedroom corridor which he kept revisiting. Then I saw him going out to the car, carrying something. Eventually we left and went for lunch at a hotel in Newmarket. We were having a rather lugubrious meal when two men came into the dining room and one pointed the other towards our table. The man introduced himself as a detective. He said: "We've had a complaint from a Mrs so and so of Six Mile Bottom. She says a couple visited her cottage this morning and afterwards she noticed that a valuable antique map by Speed was missing from one of the bedrooms." "Oh, Simon!" I said. He shot me a look. "Perhaps we could have this conversation outside," he suggested. He went outside with the policeman. I waited a few minutes and then went to the Ladies, and out the back door and away down the street. I had just enough money for a train back to London. I hoped Simon would go to prison.
He didn't of course; he bounced round to Clifden Road a few days later and took me out to dinner. "How could you steal from an old lady?"
"I didn't steal. She asked me to have the map valued."
"No she didn't - I was with you."
"All right, she didn't ask me. But I recognised that the map was by Speed and I thought if I got it valued for her, it would be a nice surprise."
I knew he was lying, but I let it go. I said: "If you ever really stole something, I would leave you."
He said: "I know you would, Minn."
But actually I knew he had stolen something and I didn't leave him, so we were both lying.
When I did try to leave him a few weeks later, it was not out of moral outrage but because I was bored. I was bored with Minn and Bubl, I was bored with the endless driving round, the waiting while he ran his mysterious errands, the long heavy meals in restaurants, the tussles in strange bedrooms, the fact that we never met anyone except Danny and Helen. I told Simon: "We're finished - I've got to concentrate on my A-levels." He said: "We're not finished. I'll come for you when you've done your A-levels."
On the evening after my last A-level, Simon took me out to dinner and proposed. I had wanted him to propose, as proof of my power, but I had absolutely no intention of accepting because of course I was going to Oxford. Eighteen years of my life had been dedicated to this end, so it was quite impertinent of him to suggest my giving it up. I relayed the news to my parents the next morning as a great joke - "Guess what? Simon proposed! He wants me to marry him this summer!" To my complete disbelief, my father said, "Why not?" Why not? Had he suddenly gone demented? "Because then I couldn't go to Oxford." My father said: "Well - is that the end of the world? Look," he went on, "you've been going out with him for two years; he's obviously serious, he's a good man; don't mess him around." I turned to my mother incredulously but she shook her head. "You don't need to go to university if you've got a good husband."
This was 1962, well before the advent of feminism. But even so, I felt a sense of utter betrayal, as if I'd spent 18 years in a convent and then the Mother Superior had said: "Of course, you know, God doesn't exist." I couldn't believe my parents could abandon the idea of Oxford. But apparently they could and over the next few days they argued it every mealtime - good husbands don't grow on trees, you're lucky to get this one ("And you not even in the family way!"), why go to university if you don't need to? Simon meanwhile was taking me to see houses, asking where I wanted to live when we were married. I couldn't resist telling my schoolfriends: "I'm engaged!" And they were all wildly excited and thrilled for me, and said "You'll never have to do Latin again!" Even so, I was queasy - I'd always liked the sound of Oxford, I even liked writing essays, I wasn't so keen to give up the idea.
Events overtook me in the last few days of term. Miss R Garwood Scott the headmistress somehow got wind of my engagement and summoned me to see her. Was it true I was engaged? Yes, I said, but I would still like to take the Oxford exams. She was ruthless. I could not return to school (in those days you had to stay for an extra term to do Oxbridge entrance) if I was getting married. When was the wedding and which church would it be in? Not in church, I said, because my fiancé was Jewish. Jewish! She looked aghast - "Don't you realise that the Jews killed Our Lord?" I stared at her. "So I won't take the Oxford exams," I said. My little gang was waiting for me outside her study. "I told her I was leaving," I announced. "She tried to persuade me to stay but I refused." They all congratulated me and begged to be bridesmaids. Then I went to the bogs and cried my eyes out.
I told my parents: "I'm not going to Oxford, I'm marrying Simon." "Oh good!" they said. "Wonderful." When Simon came that evening, they made lots of happy jokes about not losing a daughter but gaining a son. Simon chuckled and waved his hands about, poured drinks and proposed toasts - but I caught the flash of panic in his eyes. A few days later, probably no more than a week later, we were in the Bristol on our way to dinner when he said he just needed to pop into one of his flats. Fine, I said, I'll wait in the car. As soon as he went inside the house, I opened the glove compartment and started going through the letters and bills he kept in there. It was something I could have done on any one of a hundred occasions before - I knew he kept correspondence in the glove compartment, I knew the glove compartment was unlocked, I was often waiting in the car alone and had no scruples about reading other people's letters. So why had I never done it before? And why did it seem the most obvious thing in the world to do now? Anyway the result was instantaneous. There were a dozen or more letters addressed to Simon Goldman, with a Twickenham address. And two addressed to Mr and Mrs Simon Goldman with the same address.
I behaved quite normally that evening though at the end, when he asked if Minn would welcome a visit from Bubl, I replied smoothly that she was indisposed. By that stage, I was at least as good a liar as Simon. As soon as I got home, I looked in the phone book - and why had I never thought of doing that before? - and sure enough found an S Goldman with a Popesgrove (Twickenham) number, and the address I'd seen on the letters. It was only about half a mile from my house, I actually passed it every day on the bus to school. I spent the night plotting and rehearsing what I would say, working out scripts for all eventualities. When I finally rang the number the next morning, it was all over in seconds. A woman answered. "Mrs Goldman?" I said. "Yes." "I'm ringing about the Bristol your husband advertised for sale." "Oh," she said, "is he selling it? He's not here now but he's usually back about six." That was enough or more than enough - I could hear a child crying in the background.
I took the train to Waterloo, and walked all the way to Bedford Square. Helen was in, and guessed as soon as she saw me - "You've found out?"
Yes, I said - "It's not just that he's married - he lives with her. And there's a child."
"Two, actually."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm sorry. I wanted to. The other night when you said you were engaged, I told Danny we must tell you, but he said Simon would never forgive us."
This was - what? - my third, fourth, fifth betrayal by adults? And I had really thought Helen was my friend.
"What was Simon planning to do?" I asked her. "Commit bigamy?"
"Yes," she said soberly. "That's exactly what he intended to do. He felt he'd lose you if he didn't. He loves you very much you know."
I went home and raged at my parents - "You did this. You made me go out with him, you made me get engaged." My parents were white with shock - unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest. My mother cried. When Simon came that evening, my father went to the door and tried to punch him. I heard him shouting, "You've ruined her life!" From my bedroom window, I saw Simon sitting in the Bristol outside with his shoulders shaking. Then my father strode down the front path and kicked the car as hard as he could, and Simon drove away. I found the sight of my father kicking the car hilarious and wanted to shout out of the window, "Scratch it, Dad! Scratch the bodywork - that'll really upset him!'
It was a strange summer. My parents were grieving and still in deep shock. I, the less deceived, was faking far more sorrow than I felt. After all, I never loved Simon whereas I think perhaps they did. I stayed in my room playing Cesar Franck's Symphony in D Minor very loudly day after day. My main emotion was rage, followed by puzzlement about what to do next. I had no plans for the summer or - now - for the rest of my life. When my A-level results came, I not only got the top marks I fully expected in English and French, but also - mirabile dictu - top marks in Latin. I slapped the letter on the breakfast table and said, "You see? I could have gone to Oxford."
My father took the day off work, probably for the first time in his life, and went to see Miss R Garwood Scott. God knows what humble pie he had to eat - and he hated humble pie - but he came back with a grim face and a huge concession. She had agreed I could be entered for the Oxford exams as a Lady Eleanor Holles pupil, and I could sit the exams at school. But she was adamant that I could not attend the school - it was up to him to arrange private tutorials. Mum and Dad talked far into the night about how they would find a tutor, and how they would pay. A day or two later - presumably at Miss R Garwood Scott's instigation - one of my English teachers rang and volunteered to be my tutor. So I spent that autumn writing essays and going to tutorials, working hard and feeling lonely. My parents were in such deep grief that mealtimes were silent. Once or twice I saw the Bristol parked at the end of the street, but I was never remotely tempted to go to it.
I sat the Oxford exams, I went for interviews, I was accepted at St Anne's. In my second term at Oxford, one of the nuns at the convent where I boarded handed me a note which she said a man had brought. It said "Bubl respectfully requests the pleasure of the company of Minn for dinner at the Randolph Hotel tonight at 8." I tore it up in front of the nun. "Don't ever let that man in," I told her. "He's a con-man." I went round to Merton to tell my boyfriend, Dick, and he said, "Well, I'd like to meet him - let's go to the Randolph." So we did. Simon was sitting in the lobby - on time, for once in his life - looking older, tireder, seedier than I remembered. His face lit up when he saw me and fell when I said, "This is my boyfriend, Dick." Simon said politely, "Won't you please both stay to dinner as my guests?" "How are you going to pay for it?" I snapped and Dick looked at me with horror - he had never heard me use that tone before. Simon silently withdrew a large roll of banknotes from his pocket and I nodded, OK.
Dick was enchanted by Simon. He loved his Israeli kibbutz stories, his fishing with dynamite stories, his Molotov cocktail stories. I had heard them all before and sulked throughout the meal. As Dick walked me back to my convent, he said, "I see why you were taken in by him - he is quite a charmer, isn't he?" "No," I said furiously, "he's a disgusting criminal con-man and don't you dare say you like him!"
Was Simon a con-man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents' house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me. Of course Oxford, and time, would have stolen me away eventually, but Simon made it happen almost overnight. Until our "engagement", I'd thought my parents were ignorant about many things (fashion, for instance, and existentialism, and why Jane Austen was better than Georgette Heyer) but I accepted their moral authority unquestioningly. So when they casually dropped the educational evangelism they'd sold me for 18 years and told me I should skip Oxford to marry Simon, I thought, "I'm never going to take your advice about anything ever again." And when he turned out to be married, it was as if, tacitly, they concurred. From then on, whenever I told them my plans, their only response was a penitent "You know best".
What did I get from Simon? An education - the thing my parents always wanted me to have. I learned a lot in my two years with Simon. I learned about expensive restaurants and luxury hotels and foreign travel, I learned about antiques and Bergman films and classical music. All this was useful when I went to Oxford - I could read a menu, I could recognise a fingerbowl, I could follow an opera, I was not a complete hick. But actually there was a much bigger bonus than that. My experience with Simon entirely cured my craving for sophistication. By the time I got to Oxford, I wanted nothing more than to meet kind, decent, straightforward boys my own age, no matter if they were gauche or virgins. I would marry one eventually and stay married all my life and for that, I suppose, I have Simon to thank.
But there were other lessons Simon taught me that I regret learning. I learned not to trust people; I learned not to believe what they say but to watch what they do; I learned to suspect that anyone and everyone is capable of "living a lie". I came to believe that other people - even when you think you know them well - are ultimately unknowable. Learning all this was a good basis for my subsequent career as an interviewer, but not, I think, for life. It made me too wary, too cautious, too ungiving. I was damaged by my education.
About the authorBorn 22 May 1944 in Bagshot, Berkshire.
Educated at Lady Eleanor Holles School, Hampton and St Anne's College, Oxford.
Career Her first job in journalism was at Penthouse. She went on to work for the Sunday Express, Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph magazine. She has worked at the Observer since 1996.
Awards Five UK Press awards and a What the Papers Say award (1990).
Books How to Improve Your Man in Bed, The Heyday of Natural History, Mostly Men, and Demon Barber
Turning point In 1986, when interviewing her ex-employers Bob Guccione and Kathy Keeton, she decided to write for the first time in the first person: "I felt I'd finally found my voice. I never believed in 'objective' interviews anyway - if there are two people in the room, you can't pretend the interviewee is talking into space."
Personal life Married David in 1971, with whom she had two children, Rosie and Theo.
Hobbies Gossip, lunch, birdwatching, contemporary art.
How my young love story was turned into a filmWhen a version of this story first appeared in Granta, a young woman called Amanda Posey said she'd like to buy the film rights and said she had a screenwriter in mind. I thought she was mad, but the screenwriter turned out to be her then boyfriend, now husband, Nick Hornby and they spent literally years honing the script and finding backers till it finally went into production last year. Amanda asked if I'd like to watch some of the filming, and said I should come to the Japanese School, Acton, to watch one of the classroom scenes.
Only as I was driving there did I think: why on earth would they film my story in a Japanese school and why is there a Japanese school in Acton anyway? And at that point I registered the date - 1 April - and decided I must have been the victim of an April Fool.
But no - the Japanese school was there and in fact turned out to be the old Haberdashers' Aske's girls' school which we used to play at lacrosse. It was so eerily like my old school, Lady Eleanor Holles, that I kept looking at the school photos in the corridors to see if I could see myself in them. And entering the classroom was a real madeleine moment because it even smelt like my old classroom.
I met the Danish director, Lone Scherfig, and Carey Mulligan who plays me in the film, and was knocked out by the brilliance of the acting and the incredible care and authenticity that had gone into getting the period detail right.
I saw an early rough cut of the film last summer and the finished version at Christmas. It comes out at the end of October and I firmly believe it will be a hit. Carey Mulligan is amazing - when the film was shown at Sundance earlier this year (and won the audience prize) all the critics hailed her as a star. But the other actors are great too - Peter Sarsgaard as my dodgy boyfriend, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper as Helen and Danny, Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour as my parents, Emma Thompson as my hated headmistress, Olivia Williams as the good teacher who saved me.
Of course I now routinely refer to it as "my" film and have almost convinced myself that I not only wrote it but produced and directed it - but anyway huge thanks to Nick Hornby, Amanda Posey, Finola Dwyer, and Lone Scherfig for making such a good job of it. And if anyone wants to believe that I was as pretty as Carey Mulligan when I was l6, by all means go ahead.
Protests against Putin sweep Russia as factories go broke
Russian police detaining a demonstrator at an unauthorised protest against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Photograph: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images
Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is facing the most sustained and serious grassroots protests against his leadership for almost a decade, with demonstrations that began in the far east now spreading rapidly across provincial Russia.
Over the past five months car drivers in the towns of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, on Russia's Pacific coast, have staged a series of largely unreported rallies, following a Kremlin decision in December to raise import duties on secondhand Japanese cars. The sale and servicing of Japanese vehicles is a major business, and Putin's diktat has unleashed a wave of protests. Instead of persuading locals to buy box-like Ladas, it has stoked resentment against Moscow, some nine time zones and 3,800 miles (6,100km) away.
"They are a bunch of arseholes," Roma Butov said unapologetically, standing in the afternoon sunshine next to a row of unsold Nissans. Asked what he thought of Russia's leaders, he said: "Putin is bad. [President Dmitry] Medvedev is bad. We don't like them in the far east."
Butov, 33, and his brother Stas, 25, are car-dealers in Khabarovsk, not far from the Chinese border. Their dusty compound at the edge of town is filled with secondhand models from Japan, including saloons, off-roaders and a bright red fire engine. Here everyone drives a Japanese vehicle.
Putin's new import law was designed to boost Russia's struggling car industry, which has been severely battered by the global economic crisis. It doesn't appear to have worked. In the meantime, factories in other parts of Russia have gone bust, leading to rising unemployment, plummeting living standards and a 9.5% slump in Russia's GDP in the first quarter of this year.
An uprising that began in Vladivostok is now spreading to European Russia. Last Tuesday some 500 people in the small town of Pikalyovo blocked the federal highway to St Petersburg, 170 miles (270km) away, after their local cement factory shut down, leaving 2,500 people out of work. Two other plants in the town have also closed. The protesters have demanded their unpaid salaries, and have barracked the mayor, telling him they have no money to buy food. They have refused to pay utility bills, prompting the authorities to turn off their hot water. Demonstrators then took to the streets, shouting: "Work, work."
Putin visited Pikalyovo on Thursday and administered an unprecedented dressing-down to the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, throwing a pen at him and telling him to sign a contract to resume production at his BaselCement factory in the town. He also announced the government would provide £850,000 to meet the unpaid wages of local workers. "You have made thousands of people hostages to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism - or maybe simply your trivial greed," a fuming Putin told Deripaska and other local factory owners. But Deripaska had had little choice but to shut his factory, since Russia's construction industry has now virtually collapsed.
Across Russia's unhappy provinces, Putin is facing the most significant civic unrest since he became president in 2000. Over the past decade ordinary Russians have been content to put up with less freedom in return for greater prosperity. Now, however, the social contract of the Putin era is unravelling, and disgruntled Russians are taking to the streets, as they did in the 1990s, rediscovering their taste for protest.
The events of last week in Pikalyovo also set a dangerous precedent for Russia's other 500 to 700 mono-towns - all dependent on a single industry for their survival. When their factories go bust, residents have no money to buy food. Seemingly, the only answer is to demonstrate - raising the spectre of a wave of instability and social unrest across the world's biggest country.
Most embarrassingly for the Kremlin, the latest demonstrations took place just down the road from the St Petersburg Economic Forum, an annual global event designed to showcase Russia's economic might and its re-emergence as a global power. But after almost a decade of high oil prices - until last summer - Russia has done little to invest in infrastructure, or to help its backward, poverty-stricken regions.
The uprisings began last December when thousands gathered in Vladivostok, demonstrating against the new law on car imports. To crush the protest, and sceptical as to whether the local militia would do the job, the Kremlin flew in special riot police from Moscow. The police arrested dozens of demonstrators and even beat up a Japanese photographer. In Khabarovsk, around 2,000 drivers staged their own noisy protest, driving in convoy with flashing lights to the railway station. Protesters dragged a Russian-made Zhiguli car to their meeting, decorating it with the slogan: "A present from Putin". They signed it, then dumped it outside the offices of United Russia, Putin's party.
Among locals, resentment against Moscow is building. "There is no democracy in Russia. They promise a lot. But they don't listen," Butov said. He added: "Medvedev isn't my president. He's never in the far east." The Kremlin's intransigence could provoke a major backlash, he predicted: "In the next few years there could be a war between the east and west of Russia."
The protests have carried on, with demonstrators regularly taking to the streets in Vladivostok, including last month. Russians in the far east all own right-hand-drive vehicles, which are cheaper to import than the left-hand-drive models used and manufactured in European Russia.
Until recently, the Kremlin had been relatively successful at concealing the scale of the protests, imposing a virtual media blackout. But the demonstrations have become more difficult to ignore. In April Kommersant newspaper reported that angry motorists had called for Medvedev and Putin to be blasted into space, while others waved a banner with the playful slogan: "Putler kaputt!", apparently comparing Putin, Russia's prime minister since last year, to Hitler. The authorities were not amused and launched an investigation.
"Russians are a very forbearing people," Yuri Efimenko, a historian and social activist in Khabarovsk said, sitting in a cafe close to the town's Amur river, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. "There isn't love towards the Kremlin, but there used to be respect. Now that's gone," he said. He added: "People have become more sceptical towards central power."
According to Efimenko, there is little danger Russia will have a revolution. Instead of wanting to overthrow the Kremlin, most Russians want Putin to turn up personally and solve their problems - an age-old model in which Putin plays the role of benevolent tsar. Analysts believe there is little possibility of an Orange Revolution in Russia, or much appetite for western-style reform.
The big winner from the protests are the siloviki - the hardline military-intelligence faction, who advocate more state control of business, and want to get rid of the Kremlin's remaining liberals. The big loser is Medvedev, the hapless president, who may be turfed out of the presidency when his term expires in 2012.
In the meantime, Putin has been promoting Russia's indigenous car industry. Last week he took to the wheel of his Soviet-era Volga Gaz-21 car, giving Russia's patriarch a lift. He also gave a £505m loan to help AvtoVAZ, a struggling Russian car factory on the Volga.
The Butov brothers, however, have a unanimous view of Russian-made cars. "They are crap," Roma said. He recalled how last month Khabarovsk officials gave a free Lada to a war veteran, to celebrate the annual Victory Day on 9 May. "The veteran drove it for a mile. Then it broke down. He came to me and asked if he could swap it for a Japanese model."
Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, is facing the most sustained and serious grassroots protests against his leadership for almost a decade, with demonstrations that began in the far east now spreading rapidly across provincial Russia.
Over the past five months car drivers in the towns of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, on Russia's Pacific coast, have staged a series of largely unreported rallies, following a Kremlin decision in December to raise import duties on secondhand Japanese cars. The sale and servicing of Japanese vehicles is a major business, and Putin's diktat has unleashed a wave of protests. Instead of persuading locals to buy box-like Ladas, it has stoked resentment against Moscow, some nine time zones and 3,800 miles (6,100km) away.
"They are a bunch of arseholes," Roma Butov said unapologetically, standing in the afternoon sunshine next to a row of unsold Nissans. Asked what he thought of Russia's leaders, he said: "Putin is bad. [President Dmitry] Medvedev is bad. We don't like them in the far east."
Butov, 33, and his brother Stas, 25, are car-dealers in Khabarovsk, not far from the Chinese border. Their dusty compound at the edge of town is filled with secondhand models from Japan, including saloons, off-roaders and a bright red fire engine. Here everyone drives a Japanese vehicle.
Putin's new import law was designed to boost Russia's struggling car industry, which has been severely battered by the global economic crisis. It doesn't appear to have worked. In the meantime, factories in other parts of Russia have gone bust, leading to rising unemployment, plummeting living standards and a 9.5% slump in Russia's GDP in the first quarter of this year.
An uprising that began in Vladivostok is now spreading to European Russia. Last Tuesday some 500 people in the small town of Pikalyovo blocked the federal highway to St Petersburg, 170 miles (270km) away, after their local cement factory shut down, leaving 2,500 people out of work. Two other plants in the town have also closed. The protesters have demanded their unpaid salaries, and have barracked the mayor, telling him they have no money to buy food. They have refused to pay utility bills, prompting the authorities to turn off their hot water. Demonstrators then took to the streets, shouting: "Work, work."
Putin visited Pikalyovo on Thursday and administered an unprecedented dressing-down to the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, throwing a pen at him and telling him to sign a contract to resume production at his BaselCement factory in the town. He also announced the government would provide £850,000 to meet the unpaid wages of local workers. "You have made thousands of people hostages to your ambitions, your lack of professionalism - or maybe simply your trivial greed," a fuming Putin told Deripaska and other local factory owners. But Deripaska had had little choice but to shut his factory, since Russia's construction industry has now virtually collapsed.
Across Russia's unhappy provinces, Putin is facing the most significant civic unrest since he became president in 2000. Over the past decade ordinary Russians have been content to put up with less freedom in return for greater prosperity. Now, however, the social contract of the Putin era is unravelling, and disgruntled Russians are taking to the streets, as they did in the 1990s, rediscovering their taste for protest.
The events of last week in Pikalyovo also set a dangerous precedent for Russia's other 500 to 700 mono-towns - all dependent on a single industry for their survival. When their factories go bust, residents have no money to buy food. Seemingly, the only answer is to demonstrate - raising the spectre of a wave of instability and social unrest across the world's biggest country.
Most embarrassingly for the Kremlin, the latest demonstrations took place just down the road from the St Petersburg Economic Forum, an annual global event designed to showcase Russia's economic might and its re-emergence as a global power. But after almost a decade of high oil prices - until last summer - Russia has done little to invest in infrastructure, or to help its backward, poverty-stricken regions.
The uprisings began last December when thousands gathered in Vladivostok, demonstrating against the new law on car imports. To crush the protest, and sceptical as to whether the local militia would do the job, the Kremlin flew in special riot police from Moscow. The police arrested dozens of demonstrators and even beat up a Japanese photographer. In Khabarovsk, around 2,000 drivers staged their own noisy protest, driving in convoy with flashing lights to the railway station. Protesters dragged a Russian-made Zhiguli car to their meeting, decorating it with the slogan: "A present from Putin". They signed it, then dumped it outside the offices of United Russia, Putin's party.
Among locals, resentment against Moscow is building. "There is no democracy in Russia. They promise a lot. But they don't listen," Butov said. He added: "Medvedev isn't my president. He's never in the far east." The Kremlin's intransigence could provoke a major backlash, he predicted: "In the next few years there could be a war between the east and west of Russia."
The protests have carried on, with demonstrators regularly taking to the streets in Vladivostok, including last month. Russians in the far east all own right-hand-drive vehicles, which are cheaper to import than the left-hand-drive models used and manufactured in European Russia.
Until recently, the Kremlin had been relatively successful at concealing the scale of the protests, imposing a virtual media blackout. But the demonstrations have become more difficult to ignore. In April Kommersant newspaper reported that angry motorists had called for Medvedev and Putin to be blasted into space, while others waved a banner with the playful slogan: "Putler kaputt!", apparently comparing Putin, Russia's prime minister since last year, to Hitler. The authorities were not amused and launched an investigation.
"Russians are a very forbearing people," Yuri Efimenko, a historian and social activist in Khabarovsk said, sitting in a cafe close to the town's Amur river, which forms part of the border between Russia and China. "There isn't love towards the Kremlin, but there used to be respect. Now that's gone," he said. He added: "People have become more sceptical towards central power."
According to Efimenko, there is little danger Russia will have a revolution. Instead of wanting to overthrow the Kremlin, most Russians want Putin to turn up personally and solve their problems - an age-old model in which Putin plays the role of benevolent tsar. Analysts believe there is little possibility of an Orange Revolution in Russia, or much appetite for western-style reform.
The big winner from the protests are the siloviki - the hardline military-intelligence faction, who advocate more state control of business, and want to get rid of the Kremlin's remaining liberals. The big loser is Medvedev, the hapless president, who may be turfed out of the presidency when his term expires in 2012.
In the meantime, Putin has been promoting Russia's indigenous car industry. Last week he took to the wheel of his Soviet-era Volga Gaz-21 car, giving Russia's patriarch a lift. He also gave a £505m loan to help AvtoVAZ, a struggling Russian car factory on the Volga.
The Butov brothers, however, have a unanimous view of Russian-made cars. "They are crap," Roma said. He recalled how last month Khabarovsk officials gave a free Lada to a war veteran, to celebrate the annual Victory Day on 9 May. "The veteran drove it for a mile. Then it broke down. He came to me and asked if he could swap it for a Japanese model."
Angry Flint in fresh attack on Brown
Caroline Flint last night accused Gordon Brown of "using" women for his own political convenience. In her first interview since resigning she told the Observer that she was not ashamed of the photoshoot in this paper's magazine that upset Downing Street.
The former Europe minister, who resigned on Friday saying that she had been used as "window-dressing", launched a broadside against the PM, complaining of "this constant pressure, this negative bullying".
Asked if Brown had a problem with women, she retorted: "I don't know. It would have been nice to have had more conversations about the policy areas I was involved with. But we didn't, so I don't know that. You've only got to look and see where women are in cabinet and where they aren't: and they aren't in positions of power, they aren't running spending departments. There's only Yvette [Cooper] now who's actually running a spending department."
Flint claimed that women in Brown's government were used as "a smokescreen, a way of making it look like you've got a lot of women around the table" without letting them influence anything. She added: "I feel like they used me when it was convenient - they put me on the GMTV sofa or on Newsnight - but then judged me not on my work, but on who my friends are."
It also emerged last night that Margaret Beckett, the veteran housing minister, was summarily sacked after making it clear that she wanted to become a full cabinet member. Last night Beckett, a staunch loyalist, insisted she still supported Brown and warned colleagues against manoeuvring for the leadership during an economic crisis. But she did not deny she had been dismissed.
Friends said Beckett is not understood to feel victimised because of her gender - unlike Flint - but had told Brown that her halfway-house position outside cabinet was not tenable and required resolving. Both she and Flint are said to have become increasingly frustrated at being left off circulation lists of papers sent to full cabinet ministers.
However the former MP Oona King, who worked for Brown as an adviser, told the Observer that it was "absolute nonsense" to suggest he had a problem with women, adding that he had once allowed her to bring her toddler son to a meeting when she had childcare problems.
She also accused Flint of exploiting her sexuality: "She shocked a lot of women in the party by often posing in a fashion that implies she's more interested in the way she looks than the policies she presents."
The former Europe minister, who resigned on Friday saying that she had been used as "window-dressing", launched a broadside against the PM, complaining of "this constant pressure, this negative bullying".
Asked if Brown had a problem with women, she retorted: "I don't know. It would have been nice to have had more conversations about the policy areas I was involved with. But we didn't, so I don't know that. You've only got to look and see where women are in cabinet and where they aren't: and they aren't in positions of power, they aren't running spending departments. There's only Yvette [Cooper] now who's actually running a spending department."
Flint claimed that women in Brown's government were used as "a smokescreen, a way of making it look like you've got a lot of women around the table" without letting them influence anything. She added: "I feel like they used me when it was convenient - they put me on the GMTV sofa or on Newsnight - but then judged me not on my work, but on who my friends are."
It also emerged last night that Margaret Beckett, the veteran housing minister, was summarily sacked after making it clear that she wanted to become a full cabinet member. Last night Beckett, a staunch loyalist, insisted she still supported Brown and warned colleagues against manoeuvring for the leadership during an economic crisis. But she did not deny she had been dismissed.
Friends said Beckett is not understood to feel victimised because of her gender - unlike Flint - but had told Brown that her halfway-house position outside cabinet was not tenable and required resolving. Both she and Flint are said to have become increasingly frustrated at being left off circulation lists of papers sent to full cabinet ministers.
However the former MP Oona King, who worked for Brown as an adviser, told the Observer that it was "absolute nonsense" to suggest he had a problem with women, adding that he had once allowed her to bring her toddler son to a meeting when she had childcare problems.
She also accused Flint of exploiting her sexuality: "She shocked a lot of women in the party by often posing in a fashion that implies she's more interested in the way she looks than the policies she presents."
Key to blood clotting discovered
Scientists have discovered a molecular mechanism that is key to regulating the way blood clots.
The team from Harvard University, writing in the journal Science, said the finding could help treat people who have blood-clotting disorders.
If blood clots too much, people can develop a potentially fatal thrombosis; too little and they can bleed to death.
UK experts said the research was important and could help develop new treatments for blood disorders
A molecular messaging system has to maintain a balance between blood not clotting too much or too little.
The Harvard team identified an area on the von Willebrand factor (VWF) blood-clotting protein which contains a molecular sensor to regulate the size of the protein, important for it to work effectively.
VWF is vital to the body's circulation. It controls the balance between blood clotting and bleeding, and abnormalities affecting VWF can lead to health problems such as bleeding disorders and heart attacks.
Dr Wesley Wong, who worked on the research, said: "The human body has an incredible ability to heal from life's scrapes and bruises.
"A central aspect of this response to damage is the ability to bring bleeding to an end, a process known as haemostasis.
"Yet regulating haemostasis is a complex balancing act."
The team say the work will improve understanding of how the body regulates the formation of blood clots, and could also give some insight into how bleeding disorders, such as von Willebrand disease, disrupt this regulation system, potentially leading to new avenues for treatment and diagnosis.
'Refine treatment'
Professor David Lane of the department of haematology at Imperial College London, said: "The size of the VWF protein is important.
"This is controlled by unfolding of VWF by blood flow, which then allows an enzyme - called ADAMTS13 - to get into the protein and chop it up.
"This research has shed light on how this occurs by revealing the detailed structure of the section of VWF that is unfolded and chopped.
"It is important because it tells us where these important sites are in relation to the faults in the protein that cause inherited bleeding disorders, and it tells us more about how blood flow unfolds VWF."
Professor Lane added: "The findings help us to understand the interplay between molecular structure of VWF, blood flow and common diseases, which will help to refine development of treatments."
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "These researchers have deciphered how a crucial part of a crucial protein in our circulation is built.
"This helps us understand how it works in controlling the amount we bleed after injury, while preventing blood clots forming in the wrong place."
He added: "This discovery should aid the creation of more effective medicines for people with diseases, such as von Willebrand's Disease and Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (TTP) [blood clotting disorder], for which treatments are currently not good enough."
The team from Harvard University, writing in the journal Science, said the finding could help treat people who have blood-clotting disorders.
If blood clots too much, people can develop a potentially fatal thrombosis; too little and they can bleed to death.
UK experts said the research was important and could help develop new treatments for blood disorders
A molecular messaging system has to maintain a balance between blood not clotting too much or too little.
The Harvard team identified an area on the von Willebrand factor (VWF) blood-clotting protein which contains a molecular sensor to regulate the size of the protein, important for it to work effectively.
VWF is vital to the body's circulation. It controls the balance between blood clotting and bleeding, and abnormalities affecting VWF can lead to health problems such as bleeding disorders and heart attacks.
Dr Wesley Wong, who worked on the research, said: "The human body has an incredible ability to heal from life's scrapes and bruises.
"A central aspect of this response to damage is the ability to bring bleeding to an end, a process known as haemostasis.
"Yet regulating haemostasis is a complex balancing act."
The team say the work will improve understanding of how the body regulates the formation of blood clots, and could also give some insight into how bleeding disorders, such as von Willebrand disease, disrupt this regulation system, potentially leading to new avenues for treatment and diagnosis.
'Refine treatment'
Professor David Lane of the department of haematology at Imperial College London, said: "The size of the VWF protein is important.
"This is controlled by unfolding of VWF by blood flow, which then allows an enzyme - called ADAMTS13 - to get into the protein and chop it up.
"This research has shed light on how this occurs by revealing the detailed structure of the section of VWF that is unfolded and chopped.
"It is important because it tells us where these important sites are in relation to the faults in the protein that cause inherited bleeding disorders, and it tells us more about how blood flow unfolds VWF."
Professor Lane added: "The findings help us to understand the interplay between molecular structure of VWF, blood flow and common diseases, which will help to refine development of treatments."
Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "These researchers have deciphered how a crucial part of a crucial protein in our circulation is built.
"This helps us understand how it works in controlling the amount we bleed after injury, while preventing blood clots forming in the wrong place."
He added: "This discovery should aid the creation of more effective medicines for people with diseases, such as von Willebrand's Disease and Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (TTP) [blood clotting disorder], for which treatments are currently not good enough."
Swat men's first post-Taliban shave
Men who have fled the fighting in the Swat valley between the Pakistani military and the Taliban have little to cheer them.
They have left their homes, lost their jobs and gone though the ordeal of becoming displaced people in their own country
But some have found freedom to pursue their profession only after arriving in camps set up to provide people fleeing the fighting food and shelter.
These people are the barbers who were banned from shaving off people's beards by the Taliban.
There are about seven barbers in Rangmala, a camp for displaced people which is a couple of kilometres from Malakand Top.
Although they want to go back home once the Taliban have gone they are relishing the chance to work without being threatened.
Shaukat Ali came to the camp from Mingora
On Sunday he shaved his first client for eight months.
He says that there were about 100 barber shops in Mingora and they all were ordered by the Taliban to immediately stop shaving off beards as it was un-Islamic.
Since that order, the barbers stopped shaving off beards and only trim hair.
"I am really pleased that I shaved someone's beard off. I am really lucky because I am one of the few people in the camp that can earn some money," Shaukat Ali says.
Another barber, Farman Ali, used to have a shop but now he is happy just to have a chair in the open.
"The Taliban threatened to attack the barber shops and their houses if they kept shaving customers' beards. Before the Taliban came along with their restrictions I used to do 15 to 20 shaves a day so as soon as they took over I saw my income plummet," says Farman Ali.
He said that almost all the barbers have moved out of Mingora and that although he can work in freedom in the camp and earns 100 rupees a day there, he is longing to return home and work there.
One man from Mingora said that he was having his first shave by a barber for a year.
"I used to shave at home but the luxury of having one's beard shaved by a barber is completely different."
They have left their homes, lost their jobs and gone though the ordeal of becoming displaced people in their own country
But some have found freedom to pursue their profession only after arriving in camps set up to provide people fleeing the fighting food and shelter.
These people are the barbers who were banned from shaving off people's beards by the Taliban.
There are about seven barbers in Rangmala, a camp for displaced people which is a couple of kilometres from Malakand Top.
Although they want to go back home once the Taliban have gone they are relishing the chance to work without being threatened.
Shaukat Ali came to the camp from Mingora
On Sunday he shaved his first client for eight months.
He says that there were about 100 barber shops in Mingora and they all were ordered by the Taliban to immediately stop shaving off beards as it was un-Islamic.
Since that order, the barbers stopped shaving off beards and only trim hair.
"I am really pleased that I shaved someone's beard off. I am really lucky because I am one of the few people in the camp that can earn some money," Shaukat Ali says.
Another barber, Farman Ali, used to have a shop but now he is happy just to have a chair in the open.
"The Taliban threatened to attack the barber shops and their houses if they kept shaving customers' beards. Before the Taliban came along with their restrictions I used to do 15 to 20 shaves a day so as soon as they took over I saw my income plummet," says Farman Ali.
He said that almost all the barbers have moved out of Mingora and that although he can work in freedom in the camp and earns 100 rupees a day there, he is longing to return home and work there.
One man from Mingora said that he was having his first shave by a barber for a year.
"I used to shave at home but the luxury of having one's beard shaved by a barber is completely different."
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