SO have you got a secret bank account or secret stash of fivers at the back of the knicker drawer? Many women have.

According to new research, women over 35 are richer than ever, but one in ten still squirrels money away so that they know they always have something they can spend on themselves, their children or to get away.

Blame it on an instinct as old as time. Women are fearful. All the way down through the ages - however generous and wealthy their husbands, however comfortable their lives - women have known that one day something can turn it all upside down. War, illness, unemployment, death, disaster, desertion or a child in trouble - any of those emergencies that turn up, throw life out of kilter and need money to deal with.

Rich women had jewellery that they could sell in a crisis. Poor women had pennies saved in the best teapot. Modern women have high interest deposit accounts. The instinct is exactly the same.

The only true independence is financial independence - it is the independence it brings as much as the actual money they earn that keeps many mothers working. How many women in the past have stayed in miserable marriages because they simply couldn't afford to leave?

Newly married and broke, I plonked an enormous empty wine jar on the kitchen windowsill to take all my loose change. Never one to beat about the bush, I called it my Running Away Jar - so that I would never have to stay just because I couldn't afford to go.

The jar has long since become a joint endeavour. If we run away now, the chances are we'll run away together.

But have I got a secret bank account as well? Now that would be telling.

NOVELIST Margaret Drabble is well known for not having the best relationship with her equally famous sister AS Byatt. So how nice to hear her on Desert Island Discs giving generous praise to her ex-husband Clive Swift, and all his jolly family.

Clive, of course, plays the long suffering Richard, husband of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. Obviously he had practice in dealing with determined women.

THE association of retired Metropolitan Police detectives has voted to ban women from joining their organisation. "Most of us didn't work with women and we don't want to socialise with them," said a spokesman.

With dinosaur attitudes like that, is it any wonder the Met's had more than its share of problems in recent years?

BARRY George, the man charged with the murder of television presenter Jill Dando, was said in court to have "an unhealthy obsession with celebrities".

If that were a crime, all the nation's tabloid newspaper editors would be in the dock with him.

A 16-year-old boy has been jailed for 30 months for raping his 15-year-old girlfriend. He says it was a bit of passion that went too far when she changed her mind at the last minute. She says he ripped her clothes off her and that she is now too shaken by the incident to go back to school. The truth, possibly, lies somewhere in between.

But it turns out that the girl went off in the car with the 16-year-old and his 39-year-old friend after she'd been drinking with them in a pub.

Yes, of course, 15-year-old girls should always feel safe wherever they are and whoever they're with.

But there are laws that are supposed to stop youngsters from drinking.

And part of the reason is to prevent them from getting into exactly the sort of situation in which these two found themselves. Teenage hormones cause enough problems on their own - the least we can do is try to keep them sober.

Maybe Ronnie Biggs should have been left to die in Brazil from where he'd taunted the authorities long enough. Maybe we should have enough humanity to let him end his days with the best of NHS care - even from prison.

Far more disturbing than either of these options is the way in which Ronnie Biggs, like his fellow train robbers and people like the Krays, have been turned into folk heroes - bit of a lad, bit of a laugh. No harm in them really.

Tell that to the family of train driver Jack Mills, so injured in the attack that he never worked properly again.

Criminals are parasites, and if we turn them into glamorous Jack the Lads, is it any wonder that our children have a warped sense of right and wrong?