SHEILA Penrose was queuing patiently, £1.35 clutched in her hand. Under her arm was Hello! magazine and the soft focus cover picture of the Duchess of York, all green imploring eyes and coiffeured, though still stylishly messy hair.
"I just wanted to hear what she had to say for a change," Mrs Penrose said as the queue at the King's Cross newsagents in London shuffled forward. "Everyone else has shad a go. Why not give her a chance?"
After Madame Vasso, Dr Allan Starkie. After Starkie, the duchess herself. After stories of wishing death upon the royal family, sex and debt, new revelations of battered women, farcical domestic arrangements and, of course, more sex.
And lurking there in the background is Buckingham Palace, staffed by overbearing courtiers who rid themselves of Diana and have meted out the same treatment to the duchess. That, at least, is how the wives of Windsor see it.
The duchess is back in the thick of it - if she has ever been away. This week Hello! began serialising her autobiography in which the duchess admits she was unfit to be a member of the royal family and that the mighty power of the palace drove her away from her husband, Prince Andrew.
This week also, and it is no coincidence, Starkie, one time confidant and close friend of John Bryan, her former lover, revealed himself as the duchess's latest colleague- turned tormentor. Starkie claims in his book, Fergie: Her Secret Life, serialised in the Daily Mail, that the duchess lived a life punctuated by tears and tantrums, depression and depravity.
To some it may not matter that the duchess has lived a life where she is known not as Sarah Ferguson but as Frumpy Fergie or Freebie, Fergie or the Duchess of Pork. It may not matter that millions of people know intimate details of the Duchess's life that even a close friend might balk at. It may not matter that we now know she was hit by one of her lovers, that she is millions of pounds in debt and suffers from crushing self doubt.
But to anyone who has read her story, with the fascination reserved for tales of the British royal family it is important. It is a story of persecution and power of one time friends turned against each other in a desperate scramble for cash and justification of the power of Buckingham Palace. It is a right royal story.
As the rain came down on a wet day in June 1987, the Duchess of York, resplendent in a bright blue smock and medieval bonnet, was bellowing orders to her team. "Give us a B," she shouted. "Give us an L." She was the captain of the Blue Bandits and was exhorting her team to greater effort.
The Grand Royal It's A Knockout TV programme was a disaster, in which she played an important role. She horsed around, she fell about. The Princess Royal and Prince Andrew retained a modicum of decorum. The duchess did not. For royal commentators it was a key moment. The duchess was a good time girl, a podgy youngster who may have been good for a laugh but in the end was a joke herself.
It was a critical turning point, says Ben Pimlott, author of the recent biography of Queen Elizabeth. "The duchess was whisked into a showbusiness world. Nobody was prepared for it and she was not prepared for it." The duchess admits that the "public relations debacle would be analysed as my first great blunder".
From there a line can be drawn, through, Freebie Fergie and her famous holidays, through her supposed, neglect of her daughters (she extended a holiday without her children, by a few days), through the row over her £7.5 million mansion, through the revelations of affairs with Steve Wyatt and John Bryan, through Vasso and Starkie, right up to the publication on Tuesday of the first extracts from her book: My Story.
This week was not originally billed as being the war of the books. But some nifty footwork by the duchess's publishers, Simon and Schuster, and Hello! magazine has ensured that it is the duchess's words that are the royal story of the moment rather than Starkie's more lurid account of her life.
$ The Daily Mail had virtually to scrap Tuesday's Starkie extract, crunching the piece down from four pages a day since Saturday to less than half a page and giving three pages to the duchess's book. The headlines said it all: "Life in The Firm by the most reviled woman in Britain" over the duchess's piece: "The great Windsor Castle plate fiasco" for Starkie's more pedestrian insights.
The duchess's book, written with, the "help" of Jeff Coplon, an American sports writer, is an odd mixture of brutal, sometimes pathetic, honesty, revealing insight and horribly awkward humour. She writes that "it would be accurate to say that the porridge was getting cold" as Prince Charles, the Princess Royal and Prince Edward pored over the Daily Mirror's "toe sucking" pictures during breakfast at Balmoral, the royal retreat in the Scottish Highlands.
But mostly it is simply sad. She writes that "what hurt most by far was when they - the press - wrote that I was fat, the hobgoblin I had fought since puberty" (she tried to keep slim on a diet of meat, oranges and vitamins); that "I had been given the rope to hang myself and had tied the knot like a good scout"; that "everyone had a rulebook but me and when I finally got my copy it read in Pig Latin"; and that "I had left a trail of destruction that stretched longer than the train of my supernaturally fabulous wedding gown". At one point she took valium to calm herself, a duchess who was not dignified but rather disgusting.
And just as Diana complained that palace officials were out to get her, so the duchess bemoans the role of the courtiers, that secret group the duchess says are the real purveyors of power in the palace. As yet unwritten is the tale of how some of the most trusted people at Buckingham Palace have determined the monarchy itself, she writes. "Gradually, relentlessly, they had beaten me down.
In sharp contrast the story as told by Starkie, described as a "fast talking American who has acted in an appalling manner" by Ingrid Seward, editor in chief of Majesty magazine and a friend of the duchess, is shot through with salacious gossip. Not so much fly on the wall as fly in the dung heap. One part will suffice: "He [Bryan] used to tell Sarah: `You're a tart, you're a slut' and she would become extremely stimulated .... On one occasion John slapped her very hard across the face. As he related it: `There was a second of stunned silence and then it was as if a fountain was gushing where her eyes should have been'. Her response was out of all proportion to the blow he had dealt her."
HE says the duchess's home life was a confusion of mystics, fortune tellers and brutish men. Friends of the duchess say her book marks the end of the whole sordid process. There are no more works to mine from the duchess's tattered palace; the sewers have already been reached.
They claim that the duchess is a new person, one who has spurned the advice of psychics and turned instead to the writings of Shakespeare, John Donne and Horace Walpole, which she quotes in letters to friends. After this "unreal month" as her father, Major Ron Ferguson, described it, the duchess will concentrate on charity work, the usual route for disgraced royals.
Good works, though, will not be enough and with debts of around £7.5 million the duchess will also soon be embarking on her celebrity interviews for Pans Match magazine. If she really is reading Walpole to "improve her understanding of human emotions", as one friend said, she should remember two of his better known phrases: "This world is a comedy for those that think but a tragedy for those that feel", and "when men write for profit they are not very delicate".