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.’