This time around, the welcome at the Hotel Nove Lazne spa was more effusive. For a start, they spoke English, and they didn’t frogmarch Mum down the corridor and throw her in a basement room.

In 1987, it was a different story. Under communist rule, the Nove Lazne was a medical centre — English visitors walking in unannounced off a coach tour and asking for a massage were rare.

Now Mum can laugh about it. Sort of. “They all started shouting at me. I was marched down the corridor to a room, pummelled black and blue and told: ‘You’re not here to enjoy yourself.’ It was so intimidating and frightening.”

Feeling confident of a better reception, we travelled to Marianske Lazne, a spa town in the West Bohemia hills of the Czech Republic, for five days last September. I was intrigued to see where the real spa story began before it was hijacked by UK country hotels offering pamplemousse facials and calling them a “spa treatment”. My mother, Jean, 65, was curious to revisit the town, and we were both keen to check out our health.

The Nove Lazne has undergone a facelift since 1987, when it was primarily a day spa centre for trade unionists and party officials. Four years ago, hotel rooms were added and the spa and treatment rooms overhauled. And last year, staff began English lessons as the number of Britons checking in for treatments had leapt by 50 per cent in a year.

Our rooms looked out over the central park. While running my in-room Jacuzzi, I opened the windows and gazed over a blaze of red and gold maples to the grand Regency buildings bordering the park. But the communist era hasn’t been erased totally: all the flowers in the hotel were plastic.

Marianske Lazne (Marienbad in German) sprang up two centuries ago, when a local monastery physician was the first to build a bath house. The 43 springs of various mineral compositions, natural gas from a volcanic spring and mud rich in iron sulphate have since been used to treat various ailments.

The town’s reputation brought the great and the gout-ridden to Bohemia, with Strauss, Kafka, Chopin, Kipling and Ibsen all visiting. It became the cultural capital of Europe. Mark Twain, visiting in 1832, described the town as “the most charming on the Continent, as pretty as can be wished”. In 1823, Goethe, a renowned spa fan, stayed in what is now the town museum: the square it sits on is named after him.

We had been warned by Patricie, one of the hotel’s executives, not to expect pure pampering at the Nove Lazne. “It can be a problem because of what people expect — it is important they clearly understand that we offer health treatments. Some think it is going to be a holiday farm.”

Suitably disabused of that notion, we found the message confirmed by the hotel doctor Pavel Knara, a wiry, manic sexagenarian who is a walking advert for his treatments. After 27 years at the hotel he retains a passion for his mineral waters, gas and mud.

“All three make a spa,” he said, proceeding to damn rival spa regions with faint praise. “Budapest has hot springs but isn’t carbonated and is sulphurous — not ideal for blood circulation,” he shrugs. Bavaria, he says, has mineral waters and Slovakia has mud — “but not the CO2 gas.”

Triumphant, he goes on to discuss his patients — “not our clients”. They are usually over 60, says Pavel, with hip, shoulder, back, kidney and prostate problems. “Now,” he barks, “let’s look at you.”

Whipping out a 1960s stethoscope, he checks my breathing, temperature, pulse and blood pressure: 135/60. Normal. Phew. He rotates my head, jabs my stomach and wrenches my shoulders. I am told to sit down and he jerks my left leg upwards and outwards. Unsurprisingly, my knee cracks. Arthritis, he confidently predicts. “Do you play sports with your left leg?” “Er, no, my right.” “Hmmm, very interesting.”

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