HARLEY Street psychoanalyst and phobia expert Michael Whitenburgh, 41, a neat and smallish man with watery eyes and a rubicund face, arrived an hour late. He’d called after we should have started and said in a measured voice: ‘I’m going to be half an hour late, my sister has just died.’ He didn’t want to reschedule.

‘Some people choose the most inconvenient time to die,’ he said, surprisingly flippantly in his Liverpudlian accent, as he arrived. He sat cosily beside me rather than at the desk in his monumental consulting room. It was only 11.30am and he smelled of alcohol. (He said he’d been drinking the night before, but I had my doubts. Later on the phone he said: ‘Well, I had a brandy that morning.’) And as the interview progressed, something in his manner and what he said rang alarm bells. I actually had this creepy feeling that maybe his sister hadn’t died at all. Whitenburgh is promoting this as national Phobia Awareness Week. Today he will be at London’s St Giles Hotel as part of his countrywide campaign to educate the public on phobias and let them know that permanent help is available.

You might chuckle about retrophobia (the fear of returning to work after a holiday), erythrophobia (fear of blushing) or alektorophobia (fear of chickens), but phobias are serious things. He believes that 90 per cent of the population has a phobia, and he claims to have ‘cured 12,000 people’ in 15 years. But there’s nothing on earth that scares him. ‘I can honestly say I am frightened of nothing.’

Whitenburgh, who also runs the private School of Stress Counselling clinic in Liverpool, has recently had spectacular media coverage which has, so far, generated 1,700 phone calls. He is booked solid for the next month with eight new patients a day (at £65 for a 45-minute session). His team of five in Liverpool has monitored all calls and identified 200 different phobias. ‘Astonishingly, the most common fear is monophobia (fear of loneliness), closely followed by claustrophobia. The most ridiculous phobias are a fear of buttons (button phobics have to replace their buttons with Velcro fastenings), bagpipes, toilet ball cocks and dwarfs,’ he recites, alarmingly.

Phobias are a result of an outward expression of inner emotional turmoil, he says. The person can’t justify these feelings, so he externalises the internal stress as a phobia. ‘If someone has a powerful emotional experience and sees a spider at the same time, then the spider will be blamed for the experience.’

The effects of phobias are dire. ‘They bring on palpitations, dizziness, cold sweats, panic and depression. They isolate the person, making him lonely. They affect the auto-immune system and lead to heart disease as the emotions pull on the heart strings. It can be devastating. The lady who is frightened of ball cocks can only go to her own toilet. Her life is totally restricted.’

Whitenburgh says he cures phobias in anything from one to six sessions. He gets his subjects to relax by visualising country scenes. Then he makes the patient regress to the time of the original cause of the phobia, bringing out the emotion. This is known as abreacting.

‘Eventually all hell breaks out,’ is the way he puts it. ‘There are emotions and tears. I have never failed, and there is a technical word for this, to bring the person to catharsis in 12 sessions maximum.’ He claims a 100 per cent success rate. ‘I ask anybody who is not satisfied to come back for free treatment. Nobody ever has.’ Symptoms, he says, will never reappear in another form.

He glosses over his ‘hotchpotch’ training, which took place from Liverpool Polytechnic to Switzerland (‘under Professor Doctor Max Lucher’ of Basle University. ‘I’d prefer you didn’t mention that,’ he says, without elaborating) and the Vienna School of Psychoanalysis.

I called him later to query his qualifications. He admitted that he’d only spent a month in Basle and six weeks in Vienna. His real training was for 18 months with the Psychoanalytical Institute of Bournemouth. Subsequent enquiries found no trace of such an establishment. When I called again, he remembered that he’d actually trained with the International Association of Hypnoanalysts – a correspondence course supplemented with four one-day seminars.

Whitenburgh did undergo psychoanalysis himself. The son of a building manager, he has (‘had, I mean,’) six sisters, a ‘very happy’ childhood, is married to a trainee counsellor and has two children, one of whom has cerebral palsy.

‘When you go through analysis, you become very content within yourself.’ He is controlled as he speaks, giving nothing away with his body. ‘I was in analysis for 10 to 12 weeks, once a week’ – a short time for someone training professionally. The British Psycho-analytical Institute says that its analysts undergo analysis five times a week for at least four years. ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated,’ said Whitenburgh, dismissively. He considers lengthy analysis for trainee therapists outmoded. In fact, in his work as a general psychoanalyst, he tends ‘to keep people for treatment for a maximum of three months’.

Amazingly, anybody can call himself a psychoanalyst: there is nothing illegal in doing so. But Dr Richard Lucas, consultant psychiatrist and external relations officer for the British Psychoanalytical Institute, says: ‘You can’t be a bona fide psychoanalyst (trained in Britain) unless you have received the British Psychoanalytical Society’s intensive training.’

FRINGE therapists might disagree with this and Whitenburgh certainly does. ‘I have permission from the Minister of Health to call my centre a clinic, and I’ve done plenty of training.’

Is he for real? ‘I’ve had 15 years of experience and work to a code of ethics, which includes no sex with the patient and treating him in the shortest possible time. We have professional indemnity, but no one has ever claimed.’

But Dr Lucas says: ‘I wouldn’t recommend this treatment. It might be dangerous. Patients can become very disturbed with unpredictable results, like harming themselves or even contemplating suicide, if they are not treated in a responsible way by someone who has been trained rigorously.’ Whitenburgh demurs. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever dangerous in what I do. My patients are not vulnerable. They’ve tried everything, the pills, the potions. They want my help. I am the catalyst. Once a person abreacts, his life will improve.’

So what then of Whitenburgh’s dead sister? When I called him five days after the interview, he was cagey. He even had trouble remembering her name, only reluctantly disclosing where she’d died and saying he didn’t want her mentioned in the article. Subsequent calls to the registrars and coroners of Liverpool uncovered no record of her death.

Whitenburgh rang later the same day. ‘I’m shaking with aggression. I wasn’t thinking straight on the phone earlier,’ he said. ‘But my sister is not dead. It’s been a practical joke and I only found out this morning. I was on tour when a man who said he was a friend of a friend called to tell me that she’d died. I’ve been away ever since and didn’t want to phone her home. Somebody is really sick. They’ve also sent round the black vans to my home twice to collect my body. We’ve told the police, but they say, ‘What can we do?”

I don’t know what to believe. But one thing I know for sure is that Whitenburgh does have a phobia. ‘Maybe I’m phobic about journalists,’ he said, when we last spoke. ‘I don’t like them.’

IT’S OVER. The harsh streaks of an uneasy dawn brings the news that they have found the last of them. He is dead. We are told he is Peter Alcock. More we do not know.

Faces sunk from lack of sleep take in the information and turn away. There is no emotion left. The price of coal!

I look around what is for me an unfamiliar landscape. The head-gears over the shafts look like giant, grey steel Meccano constructions. Their halogen lights are always on for shift workers, making the whole place look somewhat like the Nottingham Forest football ground under floodlights. A yellow bulldozer goes back and forth up a black mountain, stockpiling coal. There are 400,000 tonnes in these mountain stocks – enough to fuel 100,000 homes for a year. You’d need climbing gear to tackle one of these man-made mountains.

They should be selling it – but they are over-producing. The killer around here, says one policeman without irony, is the dash for gas. They have 14 million tonnes of coal on the ground in Bilsthorpe. We are in Robin Hood country, the region near Sherwood Forest. But this is the land not of merrie men but dejected ones.

There is frost on the road and there are patches of fog. You can make out industrial estates, quarries and flesh-coloured buildings – miners’ houses on the fringe of the pit.

It is a busy and bustling community during the day but it is no place to be standing and stamping one’s feet during the night; especially this night.

Around 4am it really hits me. Two orange-suited miners with lamps on their heads and in their hands walk past. The air is chilly and it may be only that which set off the shivers.

We are waiting for two men still 2,000 feet beneath the ground on which I stand.

Now we know they were dead already. Then, we still had hope. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking of the wife of David Shelton, 31, from Bingham, who was visited by a personnel manager earlier in the evening. She is eight months pregnant and has an 18-month old child – and he had to tell her that her husband had been found dead.

Despite all the technological advances in recent years the fear that their man might not return from their shift lurks in the subconscious of every miner’s wife from the day they marry to the day he retires. It is that which makes miners wives special people and miners’ communities special: The price of coal.

In St Margaret’s Church they lit five candles for the missing. Forty people turned up for the service of mourning for the dead and exaltation for the living.

It started at 11am yesterday when the collapse occurred. The flying squad emergency team from Mansfield Hospital and the pit’s emergency team were immediately in operation.

They brought out Paul Smith with facial injuries, in deep shock but conscious, with a sore back.

Then they found Bill McCulloch, a 26-year-old bachelor who lived with his parents. Bill was dead.

It is different at pitheads these days in times of disaster. Mourning is done in private. Technology detracts somehow from the great drama of the rescue. Yet it is human still. Throughout the night colliery workers brought us tea and coffee.

‘There were one or two doomwatchers at Toppa Pit Lane,’ said a security man, ‘but now it’s quiet.’

Earlier he was given flowers – white and yellow roses and pink hydrangeas picked by an ex-miner from Clipstone pit and a former miner from Bilsthorpe.

‘They wanted them put inside pit shafts,’ he said. ‘If he’s taken t’trouble to pick them, I must get them down there when I’m allowed.’ The flowers lay on a plastic chair in his office dying – while the teams of tired men, working ‘20-minute snaps’ pursued a rescue operation in which hope was fading.

And then, suddenly, it was over and the miners and their families returned to get on with the rest of their lives, while we who came to report upon this night got into our cars and drove away weary past a gamut of safety instructions: ‘Wear gloves’ dictated one sign on the road; ‘Think before you act’ said another; ‘Remove dangers yourself’; ‘Wear eye protection’; ‘Know your support rules’.

For us the morning brought another story in another part of the country.

CHERRY ROOMES is 43. To date she has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

THE nursery stands ready and the crib has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise. It is the crib Cherry Roomes slept in as a child. Now it awaits the arrival of a miracle.

To date Cherry has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

Two children from a previous marriage have survived, but all the other babies died in the womb and with four of them Cherry had to go through labour knowing the child was already dead. Yet next week she hopes to give birth to baby number 16 by Caesarean section. He already has a name, Benjamin.

By safely delivering him, the medical team at King’s College Hospital will be making medical history, and put an end to one woman’s extraordinary saga of love, despair and monumental determination.

Benjamin is already a miracle of human science. For the baby has already undergone the world’s first bone marrow transplant in the womb and he has been kept alive by regular blood transfusions – some of them directly into his heart.

His mother has rare rhesus negative blood. Her husband Geoff, a primary school headteacher, is rhesus positive. Every time Cherry Roomes becomes pregnant, the unborn baby is also rhesus positive, and her body simply attacks and kills it as a foreign invader.

The nursery stands ready and the crib Cherry herself slept in as a baby has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise.

‘I recovered the crib inside and out in 1981, but I’ve never had a baby to put in it,’ she says.

Although she has never heard Benjamin’s cries, she feels she already knows him. She has journeyed from their Kempston home near Bedford to King’s College for one day every week of her pregnancy. At the hospital, she watches the baby on a scanner as he undergoes a complex series of tests. Two albums full of blurry scanner pictures chart Benjamin’s development from seven weeks after conception. Cherry can locate every limb and facial movement from them.

‘To me, it’s like looking at normal photographs. He’s a very strong, fit, healthy baby.’

Cherry Roomes, who says she is talking to us because she wants to help other childless couples, is clearly remarkable, but so then is Dr Kypros Nicolaides, a consultant in foetal medicine and head of the Harris Birthright foetal research centre at King’s. It is he who has refused to be beaten by Cherry Roomes’s problems and, as a result, his relationship with the couple has become intensely close.

She finds it difficult explaining the almost primal instincts that urge her to keep trying and for putting the crushing pain of bereavement behind her, the instinct that has driven her on in the constant, dogged struggle to bear a child that comes from herself and Geoff.

In 1986, convinced they would never conceive, she and Geoff adopted baby Charlotte, then aged 15 months, and a cerebral palsy sufferer. ‘I had two sons already and we had adopted Charlotte, but I felt it would complete the family to have one child that we shared, one of Geoff’s. ‘To be honest, you blank out the pain. You just put it at the back of your mind. If you dwelled on it, you couldn’t cope. If you thought about it, you wouldn’t ever try for another one.

‘I haven’t carried all the babies to the end. A lot of my miscarriages came early. It is a lot more upsetting to carry a child 20 to 35 weeks and then lose it. Your immediate reaction is ‘I’ll never do it again’. But eventually you get over it, because time heals. But it doesn’t get any easier each time one dies.’

She found the death of Eleanor (who was severely handicapped) her worst experience. ‘She may not have been the sort of child that most people want, but we loved her. Her death was desperately painful for us. Nothing could be worse than that. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that completely. I’ll never forget her. We talk about her daily. Her photos are still around.’ With the exception of the death of her first baby, she has seen all of her offspring. ‘I’ve always asked to see them, to hold them, to look at them. They’re not people if you don’t look at them. They have to have identities. If they don’t have identities, there wouldn’t be any point. ‘I have photos of the little ones who have died. You’d be surprised how early a foetus has features, you’re not looking at some horrendous red blob. The photos help you to grieve for the baby.

‘At no time when we have lost a baby have we screamed and yelled and cried in front of Charlotte. You keep your grieving behind closed doors. My husband goes to church every week. I don’t go at the moment, because I’m not the right shape. But we do have very strong religious beliefs. We believe in life after death. Hopefully somewhere our children are all together.’ Dr Nicolaides say: ‘People may think she is mad and I am mad, but I am only trying to do what my patients want. And if that is to help them have children, then that’s what I do.’

There have been five haemorrhages during the pregnancy. During one of them, the Roomes phoned Dr Nicolaides at home in the middle of the night. ‘I just told them to get down to the hospital as fast as they could and I met them there,’ he says. ‘She was all right. She is a very brave woman.’ It was Dr Nicolaides who developed the bone marrow transplant technique which had to be carried out before the baby developed its own immune system, just 12 weeks into the pregnancy when it was less than three inches long. Marrow from Mrs Roomes’s hip was removed under local anaesthetic. It was purified and injected directly into the wriggling baby’s thimble-sized stomach using a hollow needle. The idea was to make him start producing his own rhesus negative blood.

Cherry explained: ‘Benjamin hasn’t got the same blood group as me, which was the idea of the bone marrow transplant.’

It didn’t work. It reduced the rejection process, but Cherry’s blood is still attacking the baby’s red cells. Now, the blood transfusions from Cherry not only top up his blood supply but also confuse his mother’s immune system so that it does not try to attack the growing baby.

‘Now it seems my body doesn’t recognise the baby as totally foreign, so it’s not having an all-out, vicious attempt at killing it, which has happened with my other babies. It’s only a half-hearted one,’ she says calmly, showing little of the emotional stress that must mark each minute of her day.

The transfusions carry their own deadly risks.

‘You never know with each transfusion if it’s going to kill him,’ she said.

‘The last one two weeks ago obviously created a strain on his heart. He was very quiet for several days afterwards, but I could feel him wriggling so I knew he was alive.

‘There is still one more transfusion to go before the birth. I just have not to think about anything going wrong. I have total trust in the team at King’s and I have to think they’re going to get it right.’

Her two sons Grant, 22, and William, 17, from her first marriage survived because the rhesus incompatibility was less severe.

Last year, Dr Nicolaides, who has been their mentor since 1985, offered them new hope with the experimental marrow transplant.

‘I have to believe him,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t take anything away from Charlotte and the boys that we want to have one last try.

‘At the moment, I’m the only one who’s agreed to have this treatment done. But if they don’t have people who are prepared to try, then they are never going to progress.

‘If we can get help and help others at the same time, I think that’s good.’

Eight o’clock on Sunday morning at the Duke of York’s headquarters in Chelsea. We are backstage at the Roland Klein fashion show, part of London Fashion Week. The lights are bright and the seats are empty. The models complain that it is freezing.

By the time the show starts at 12.30 there will be 32 of them. Right now, 10 sultry and tired-looking ones are on the catwalk being accessorised and sartorially refitted. Others wait backstage, gossiping and smoking. Many appear to have got the job by dint of having anorexia and you wouldn’t look twice at some of them without make-up on.

This lasts 25 minutes and costs around £75,000, which doesn’t include making the clothes. None of the models has rehearsed for the show and some of them arrive only 10 minutes before it begins.

Melissa, in Klein’s fake fur, fur boots and a velvet jacket, draws earnestly on a cigarette, then stubs it on the carpet. ‘Dah-ling,’ says Kevin, the producer, kissing the air around model Anjani’s cheeks. Round him the girls keep doing silly walks and pelvic thrusts, in a parody of the job. ‘Can you see my knickers?’ another girl asks him. Model Dunya laughs and says the girls’ ages vary. ‘But we all lie about them.’

It’s 9.30am and Yasmin Le Bon is gossiping. ‘It’s like I had to walk down the runway with one foot, basically.’ Yasmin (who gave birth five months ago to Saffron) looks sensational even in rollers.

Backstage seems like a communal changing-room on the first day of Harrods’ sale, except for the constant thumping music coming from the stage area. A makeshift Neville Daniel hair salon has been set up in the corner, like some pre-fab theatre. By 11am the dressers (women who look like Debenhams sales assistants and help the models change) are sitting doing their knitting. Some processed chicken sandwiches have arrived which, amazingly, the models wolf down. In addition, lots of them put sugar in their coffee.

Everywhere, girls are now doing their faces, one in a yoga position on the floor in the semi-darkness. ‘We do it better, we know our faces better,’ intones Sonia. ‘It’s like,’ says Yasmin, who is doing her own make-up, ‘do they have 30 sets of clean brushes? You don’t want an eye infection.’ At 11.15am four of the models are still missing, rushing in from other shows. The ones who are here are standing around looking bored, in curlers and smoking incessantly. The atmosphere is relaxed. Instead of bitchiness, one hears pleasantries. The only nasty remark came when one model asked where the lavatory was. ‘She’s pretending she’s never been to the toilet,’ sneered her colleague once she’d sashayed off to the Portaloo. There are now about 80 people backstage, in roughly 10 by four metres. The talk is multinational. ‘He paid me 5,000 Deutschmarks for two hours’ work,’ one model is trembling with excitement as she tells her friend. ‘Non lo so,’ comes the reply. There are cries of ‘Did you see your picture in the paper? It’s good’, and ‘Did you do Paul Costello? He’s nice, eh?’. By 12.15pm, the photographers are encamped around the catwalk. The panic about who sits where is over. Roland says: ‘You only have to sit one person wrong and you’ve ‘ad it.’ He hasn’t made his models rehearse, because he wants them to be spontaneous. ‘Just walk,’ he says. ‘Just look natural.’ But he is in a tizz, because the curtain at the back of the walk has been put on the wrong way round.

At 12.20pm, the last model arrives, with windswept hair and no make-up. A squeak goes up in the salon. And now she’s got to wear a bustier and it doesn’t fit. The noise level is increasing, the atmosphere becoming more manic and the excitement is palpable.

‘Into outfits, please,’ the cry goes up at 12.30pm and the hired dalmatian who has to walk up the er, catwalk, starts barking. ‘What pretty lingerie, dah-ling,’ says one model to another. ‘Do you think I’m too small to wear this bra?’ the recipient of the compliment asks the producer. ‘Have a baby, they get bigger,’ he says. ‘Then they go,’ says Yasmin, dolefully. It’s 12.40pm. The music is thumping and the sound of the audience can be heard. The hairdresser is throwing a wobbly because there’s no spray. ‘Come on, we’re starting,’ says Kevin, squeakily. ‘Melissa, Elizabeth, now.’ ‘Take your cigarettes away. Cigarettes off,’ yelps Roland. Suddenly even the plainest ones look stupendous.

At 12.50pm, a force 10 panic is blowing. ‘Who starts off?’ says one girl. ‘Where are the steps?’ asks another. ‘Quick, Melissa, you’re on,’ says Roland. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she says.

Nearby, Moschino’s male models, who have taken little notice of the girls getting changed in front of them, are themselves now in various degrees of undress and watching the Roland Klein show on the monitor. ‘That doesn’t work at all,’ says one. ‘The dog’s dying to get off.’

The girls run across the room and change clothes at the speed of video fast forward. The hairdresser drags his hands through their hair just before they go on stage. There is a crowd of models waiting to hit the catwalk. ‘Where are they going?’ Roland is crying. ‘Go down the stairs. Behind the scenes is turmoil. But up front things look sleek as clothes make their way sexily up the catwalk. ‘You ‘aven’t been,’ Roland keeps accusing. (Answer: ‘Yes I have.’) ‘You’re all on,’ screams Roland for the finale.

Backstage there are big smiles, claps and euphoria. The show is over. All the models kiss Roland. The dressers take the clothes back. One girl puts on her thermal vest and a pair of skimpy shorts. The others return to the models’ uniform of jeans and cowboy boots. They kiss the air and call au revoir and ciao, and walk out into the rain with their make-up still on their faces.