FIRST there was Penny Hughes, Coca-Cola’s 35-year-old UK president who, newly pregnant, decided that motherhood was the real thing and abandoned her position and £250,000 salary.

Now the glossy magazine editors – the prototype You Can Have It All And More women – are, in the gleeful eyes of Tabloid Man, succumbing to the pressures of running home and magazine, getting their priorities straight and chucking in the latter for the former or, at least, for lower-paid freedom.

On Saturday Amanda Evans, editor of Homes and Gardens, quit for her home and garden. The week before, Linda Kelsey, the original Cosmo woman turned editor of She (the magazine to reclaim motherhood and help women juggle their lives), left, suffering from stress and wanting to spend more time with her son. And remember the recent exodus of five other female editors from National Magazine, publisher of Harpers & Queen to Good Housekeeping? You could imagine the babes at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Tatler and House and Gardens, cocking a snook and nappy at their National Magazine competitors. Instead, shivers have gone down their well-bred spines at the misogynist cries of ‘told you so’ and ‘you can’t run a company/magazine and raise a child’ in the Press.

Don’t you know, ask the Conde Nast girls, that Annie Holcroft, publishing director of Vanity Fair, brings her kids to the office? They watch Wombles videos while she negotiates million-dollar deals and sews name tags in their clothes. And that Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has an eight-month-old baby, a 12-year-old live-in stepdaughter and husband and the most glamorous job in the universe?

ALEXANDRA, 37, has Mother Earth’s long hair and ample breasts, Mama Nature’s clean face, grey cashmere jumper and high snakeskin shoes. The walls of her voluminous turquoise and peppermint office display not photographs of Linda and Naomi, but of her son, Sam. She is clever, she is successful. And she’s paid, partly, to meet glamorous people, to party, wear heavenly clothes and receive bucketloads of flowers. ‘Some days I think ‘having it all’ means that I am so lucky. Other days I think it means, ‘why have I got all this dumped on me?” laughs Alexandra, who was up at 5am with Sam. Does she think she’s good at her job? She pauses. ‘Sometimes.’ But her job is stressful. ‘I have to be available for people to talk to constantly, which is draining. Responsibility is stressful, as is travelling two and a half months a year, and trying to pack everything in so as to have time with Sam.” Alexandra says her husband Paul (writer Paul Spike) is probably the one who gets it when she gets home.

‘I sympathise with what I’ve read about Linda Kelsey,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been severely anxious twice in my life. Suddenly everything becomes too much and you decide to take time out. I’ve now learnt breathing techniques and how to notice when things are seriously pretty difficult. But I get terrible pressure headaches. Lavender oil and Rescue Remedy are very good.’ She crosses her arms self-protectively.

She believes the idea that women work because they want to have it all is a fallacy. ‘You work because you’re paying bills. That’s what most married women with children here are doing.’ Alexandra employs a daily, gardener, nanny and laundry woman. ‘Practically my whole salary goes on paying for help and my share of the mortgage. The nanny has more money to throw around, by far, than myself.’

That salary, it should be said, is not your average London career girl’s. ‘It’s under six figures!’ she protests. Paul also pays for the upkeep of his two children by a previous marriage. Alexandra took four and a half months’ maternity leave. ‘I looked after Sam non-stop and spent most of the time breast-feeding. The rest of the time I spent solidly trying to find a nanny. I interviewed millions of people.’

What were her feelings about work while she was on leave? ‘Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with coming back. I thought I’d miss Sam and be unable to do the job. On leave you become quite unconfident. But the transition was easier than I thought and ultimately I don’t have any desire to be at home on my own with a baby day after day. I’d become bored, unconfident and depressed.’

She was raised by a working mother, the etiquette writer Drusilla Beyfus. ‘I was brought up by the person I’m now becoming, only she was better organised. So I know exactly what it’s like having a working mother. Until I was about seven my mother didn’t have much to do with me. She had a nanny at weekends and nights and lots of other staff. I suspect that as a baby my relationship with her was not as it should be.’

BEING a working mother is difficult. ‘We’ve got it wrong in many ways. It’s not really feasible for women to work incredibly hard, be good mothers, lovers, wives, housekeepers. The more we try to do, the worse it is for us. The whole question of men and women’s roles in the partnership is something that hasn’t caught up with such developments. There is no other area in your life so unclearly defined.’ Sometimes, ‘like everybody’, she feels desperate to quit work. ‘A lot of the time I’d like a peaceful life. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you’re rushing so much of the time. Probably all of us have looked at more flexible, alternative, freelance or whatever ways of working. But money plays a great role in that. I’ve never been career-orientated. But I’ve always been motivated by the desire to earn money.’

FORMER Londoner Adrienne Campbell, 34, eats food foraged from hedgerows, teaches her children at home, has just created a new local currency for her Sussex village, boycotts supermarkets, won’t vaccinate her children, changed her name from Katy when she felt she’d outgrown it, was celibate for two years, has spiritual revelations and gave birth underwater at home in front of her children and the au pair.

Hers is an unusual life, and very unusual for someone educated at Francis Holland, a smart private London school. She was raised by her international businessman father and nicely bred stepmother among their friends like David Niven, Sean Connery and multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She also gained a scholarship to America’s leading science university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, aged 19, she wrote a paper on cancer (with a professor from Harvard and another from MIT). Then she became a journalist on The Economist.

But first the currency. Adrienne, who lives near Wadhurst, has created a currency called Wads with 10 other community-minded souls. “One Wad equals a pound,” she says. “If I want to buy someone’s honey I’ll pay him a cheque in Wads, he banks that cheque at the wholefood shop and uses the credit to buy something locally. It’s a centralised bartering system whereby people exchange goods and services without having to do so directly with one another. If I have masses of herbs I can exchange them for baby-sitting or plumbing.”

The currency is useful for people short of cash and encourages villagers to develop skills and get to know one another. “Such systems are flourishing in England. More than 200 of them have started over the past five years.” She smiles and takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

SHE has also embarked upon another singular project. In January, Adrienne and two other families started a unique school in her sitting-room. It has eight children from the ages of five to eight whom she intends to educate until school-leaving age. The National Curriculum is followed loosely. But the emphasis is on freedom and nature (“The children can tell what animals have been through the hedges by the footprints and stool”) and fees are £600 a term. She hopes for a government grant and to offer an alternative to the state system. The idea came to her after her five-year-old daughter Sophie had spent a year at the village school.

“She didn’t like having to do maths when she wanted to read, or art when she felt like writing.” Adrienne was disillusioned by the state and private systems, the more so after studying the pioneering work of Satish Kumar, a visionary in Dorset. “Children educated privately are pushed academically too early on. Also I believe in respecting children’s choices.” Her school is a non profit-making, parent-run co-operative. “A parent who is a paid teacher teaches in the morning and the other parents teach for free in the afternoons.”

The latter don’t have formal qualifications. “The parent is the best qualified to teach the child. Studies show that home-educated children are two or three years ahead of school ones if they go back into the system.” She says her pupils are happy, uncompetitive, motivated and respectful. We’re sitting in the exquisite setting of her garden, next to wild flowers and her 25-year-old Citron. Here she lives with her three daughters (aged one to five) and composer husband, Dirk, in a 100-year-old oast house with round rooms. She has a beautiful equine face, speaks purposefully and slowly, and wears jeans and scraped-back hair. Her body is relaxed. Her first life-changing experience came on holiday in Turkey in 1982. “I had a spiritual revelation. I can’t explain it more.” On returning, she joined Subud, a cross-denominational religious movement. “Twice a week we do spiritual exercises. It’s like tapping into a divine life force.” She met Dirk through Subud. “We’d both been celibate because we kept making the wrong choices with the opposite sex.

“It was instant recognition. We got engaged after two weeks.” From there her lifestyle took more and more alternative turns. Take childbirth. “My mother had died in childbirth, having twins, so I thought through very carefully how I wanted to do it.”

Her first born, Sophie, was delivered underwater, without painkillers and with Dirk in the birthing pool. She didn’t have a choice with her next, Anna, who was born prematurely. She decided to have her third baby at home. TWO midwives and the children were present at the birth. “They sat cuddled up on the sofa next to Dirk and the au pair. I was screaming and grunting and Sophie was pretty disgusted with the blood.” Wasn’t that damaging and traumatic?

“Possibly. But I think it helped the girls bond with Rose and see that birth is a normal part of everyday life.” Wasn’t it voyeuristic? “Possibly. But I think the pros outweighed the cons.”

The family rarely visits a doctor. “I’ll only go for a diagnosis in order to find out whether the illness is infectious and what the long-term effect will be.’ She relies instead on herbal remedies, homeopathy, eating healthily and fasting once a year during Lent. “We eat a lot of salads made from weeds, wild flowers and hedgerow herbs.”

Adrienne decided not to vaccinate her children against anything. “I read extensively and felt the risks were greater than the benefits. The well-documented hazards of vaccine are brain damage, convulsions, a damaged immune system and death.” She looks at her feet.

Her attitude to personal hygiene is alternative as well. She didn’t wash her children’s hair for two years and now washes it only occasionally. “I have friends who spend six weeks letting the gunk out – you have to wear a hat because it’s so disgusting – and, after that, you have lovely shiny hair.”

ANNA Gonta has been in labour at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital since 5am. It’s now 10am. Her baby’s heart is fluctuating. Anna, who’s had an epidural, says she doesn’t feel any pain. But Arthur, her husband, clutches his stomach. ‘I feel pain here,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have this with the first one.’ Anna smiles weakly.

Now it’s 2pm. Anna, pushing and moaning, looks anguished. ‘The baby’s getting tired and distressed,’ says the midwife, in a plastic apron. The baby is in a difficult position, with its head facing upwards. Suddenly its head starts to appear. The midwife performs an episiotomy, cutting the perineum, but the cord is wound tightly round the baby’s neck. A bell is rung frantically.

Suddenly there are eight of us in the room. The baby’s heart rate is low, its breathing poor, its face blue-grey. It doesn’t cry. It’s not responding. It looks dead. The paediatrician rushes the baby over to a resuscitating unit, giving it oxygen, massaging it. A short time later the baby is well, pink and crying happily.

Next door Lindsay Bull is having an easier time. She’s had no pain relief. ‘Good girl, keep it coming,’ coaxes midwife Fiona Allison. Her husband sprays Lindsay’s face with Evian. Now she’s kneeling and wailing. Now pursing her lips. ‘Put your hand down and see what’s there,’ says Fiona. The baby’s head. ‘Oh my God,’ says Lindsay. The baby, her first, is born after just four hours. What are they going to call him? ‘Bradley?’ Lindsay replies, quizzically. ‘Er, all right then,’ says her husband, blankly. Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital (QCCH) is one of the world’s foremost maternity hospitals, a place of pioneering research and a centre of excellence, which has trained a third of the country’s consultant obstetricians and gynaecologists. And where they delivered the progeny of Patricia Hodge, Cilla Black, Karen Keating and the Aga Khan. But it’s also a hospital with an uncertain future – of not knowing whether it will be merged with Chelsea and Westminster or relocated to the Hammersmith. The problem is, of course, money.

In 1990 QCCH had a deficit of £1.5 million and faced closure because the governing body was unable to finance its relocation. Now the Hammersmith Hospital NHS Trust – of which QCCH is part – has a deficit of £8.5 million. The redoubtable Bunty Lewis, immaculately dressed and coiffured, looks as if she could run the hospital single-handed. Instead, she administers the appeal office on a full-time but voluntary basis. ‘I probably subsidise it a bit,’ she admits. She resurrected Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball and runs a ‘Babies’ Bawl’ children’s tea party for 300, raising £600,000 in six years for research and equipment. But hospitals should not rely on Bunties’ and debs’ photo-calls for funds.

We visit the Special Care Baby Unit – pronounced ‘Scibu’ in nursespeak. ‘Hands must be washed on entering and leaving unit,’ warns one sign. ‘Switch off all mobile telephones,’ alerts another. Kylie Ross, wearing floral dress and mournful expression, strokes 2lb Bailey’s back. Her baby is attached to tubes and breathing apparatus.

Joanne Tucker sits between incubators containing her two seven-week-old babies. She had given birth to triplets. ‘The third passed away after 14 days,’ she says. Now Joseph is 3lb 7oz and George five ounces lighter. ‘They’re my first but not my last,’ she confides. ‘Never again,’ stage whispers Joanne’s mother, Daisy Webster, joking. ‘I’m getting her sterilised.’

Nearby is the neo-natal ward. Here newsreader Pamela Armstrong’s son, AJ, lay 18 months ago. ‘When my baby was born, he wasn’t breathing and he didn’t have a heartbeat,’ says Pamela. He was rushed into a nuclear resonance magnetic imager – a magnet the size of a room – to check for brain damage. ‘Happily he was all right. But soon after he looked like spaghetti junction, millions of tubes going in and out. Other babies weighed less than a bag of sugar. They looked like stick insects.’ Miraculously most of these 11b babies thrive.

Sister Christina Tom-Johnston, a kindly midwife, counsels bereaved parents. ‘When a mother is about to lose her baby, I’m called to see her at the delivery suite,’ she says. Recently she saw someone whose baby was anencephalic (born with no brain). ‘Due to her religious beliefs, she didn’t want a termination.’

When a baby dies, Christina helps arrange the funeral, accompanies the parents to it, and follows up by telephone. She also runs support groups, and annual remembrance services at Acton Hill Church. ‘We had a congregation of 150 this year, representing 50 dead babies over three years,’ she says. ‘I give the parents daffodils and a candle bearing their baby’s name. The parents come forward when I call out the babies’ names. I’m usually crying myself by this time. Then I light the candle and put it on a table and it burns until the end of the service.’

Fortunately new-born deaths are a rarity. For 99 per cent of the babies born at the hospital – nearly 4,500 babies a year – the outcome is happy. QCHH is a world leader in fetal medicine, boasting Britain’s largest Centre for Fetal Care. Here Professor Nick Fisk’s team has become the first in the world to offer ‘tele-medicine’, which allows the transfer of distant ultrasound scanning images down phone lines to waiting specialists. They received one of the country’s first Siemens scanners allowing detection of any foetal abnormality before the 12th week of pregnancy, often permitting it to be corrected in utero. Here they showed last year for the first time that the unborn child can feel pain in the womb. And here Dr Michael de Swiet, one of only two obstetric physicians in the country, specialises in the medical problems of pregnancy.

It’s also QCCH that pioneered ultrasound; fetal heart monitoring; screening expectant mothers for rubella; Maggie Campbell’s innovative One-to-One midwifery practice – allowing the woman the same midwife throughout her pregnancy and post-natal period for continuity of care – human milk banks, special care baby units, fetal blood sampling, in utero blood transfusions, the mobile epidural; plus the country’s only post-natal depression clinic. This month they’re also starting the country’s first clinic for teenagers, allowing them to discuss gynaecological difficulties in confidence.

Now senior obstetrician John Malvern is running an antenatal clinic, wearing white coat and name label. His current patient, 26-year-old Carol Brown, is on her sixth pregnancy since 1989. ‘A decent sort of gap between pregnancies,’ says John, with an ironic smile. He’ll need his sense of humour. He’s delivering my first born in June.

I’M ON MY back on a bed with my legs over a woman’s shoulders. She pulls my supine body. Suddenly a man in an anorak appears on the roof outside the window of her first-floor Beauchamp Place room.

“Oh, don’t worry about him. They’re all fur coat and no drawers around here,” the woman responds curiously.

The woman is Chryssie Fitzgerald, Princess Diana’s personal health therapist. Yesterday she was exposed in the News Of The World as a former Madam and dominatrix.

Chryssie, 45, was convicted by Marylebone magistrates in 1983 for running a brothel. Now she runs an alternative health clinic in Knightsbridge and is married to Keith Rodrigues, who taught Diana kick-boxing.

I met Chryssie last month for my first and only treatment. As she pulled my legs over her shoulders, she said the position would help elongate my spine and alleviate my back problem.

It wasn’t a technique that had been used on me during four years of physiotherapy and osteopathy, but no matter. At least I was fully clothed. And I assume the man on the roof was inspecting the gutter. My appointment had been hard to get. I was six months pregnant, suffering from sinus and reckoned reflexology would be kinder on Junior than antibiotics. Outside the clinic is a sign displaying the Chinese word for health. You ring the bell to be let in at street level, then knock to have the door upstairs unlocked. Chryssie has a genial, caring presence but surprises with her looks. She has neither a trim figure nor radiant complexion to make a client envy her therapies. But she has a rousing manner that would enthuse the residents of an old people’s home. The room contains a little bit of alternative everything, apparently in the hope that something might work. I saw a huge amethyst trained, I think she said, on the pituitary; a framed poem (or was it a prayer?) to the colon; feng shui mirrors; statuettes of cats; certificates for her non-surgical facelifts and some unpronounceable Chinese treatments.

Chryssie starts massaging my feet to release blocked energy, hoping to fight disease in related parts of the body.

She treats the person as a whole, attending every acupuncture point. “Bless you little toe, ah, bless you,” she whispers, pummelling my toe. She looks me straight in the eyes and is a friendly, no-nonsense type. She asks me what I do. I say I am a journalist, and ask for an interview. She agrees, sets a date and suggests I have colonic irrigation – an idea at which I balk. I can do without the introduction of warm filtered water into my intestines.

I look out for Princess Diana in the waiting room as I leave, but she is not there, neither is another client, Rula Lenska. Instead there are a couple of rastafarians.

I pay £40 for my appointment. Chryssie gives me a hug and tells me to sit down and drink a cup of fruit tea. It takes away the nasty taste of the Bach flower remedy, a potion made from plants to deal with my emotional symptoms.

Later Chryssie’s receptionist cancels our proposed interview an hour before we are due to meet. “Chryssie had a miscarriage four, I mean two, months ago and needs time to get over it,” she explains. I call five times subsequently, but she does not reply. The next I hear of her is in the Sunday papers.

SETTING up an interview with fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana is a nightmare. Until the last minute, the appointment time is changed and the venue is undecided. Then they offer half an interview – Stefano will talk, Domenico won’t. Then they relent. Next they refuse to have their photographs taken. I arrive in Milan to discover the couple don’t speak English. But, of course, I did forget to ask.

In the event, Stefano turns up and Domenico appears half an hour late. Stefano, 33, is impossibly good looking and charming and Domenico, 36, is all in black. Carla Buzzi, their PR lady with raven hair, black leggings and coal Dolce & Gabbana tent top, translates. This hinders spontaneity. ‘Are you lovers as well as business partners?’ I ask. Solo blah blah amore blah blah. ‘Ha ha ha,’ shrieks Carla. Natter, natter, natter in Italian. ‘Yes,’ comes the cursory reply.

They dress Madonna (‘a friend’), Sting, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Isabella Rossellini (‘a very good friend’), Julia Roberts, Kate Moss (‘not a good friend’ – but they discovered her), Kim Basinger and Brooke Shields. In 1991 Dolce & Gabbana – as they are known in labelspeak – were dubbed Italy’s hottest fashion property. ‘After four years nothing can be hot any more unless you use microwave,’ says Stefano.

Their 1994 worldwide turnover was £66 million, an increase of 81 per cent over the previous year. ‘British sales, buonissima,’ says Stefano. (They love British fashion. What the young do here gets taken up in New York and Milan, they say.) Now, 13 years after starting, they’re manufacturing accessories, perfume and furnishings too. Where do they stand beside Armani, Versace and Valentino? ‘We’re just chickens,’ says Domenico. ‘Like their nephews,’ adds Stefano.

Today they open their first British store, in Sloane Street. Armed with high heels, wielding long patent boots and brandishing studded belts, Stefano and Domenico will fight in the front line of the Bond Street versus Sloane Street battle – a fight highlighted by fashion oracle Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune this week.

Army headquarters is three floors of decorated sandstone, opaquely stuccoed terra rossa and pastel ochre walls, and launch party soldiers from George Michael, Naomi Campbell and the Le Bons to Amanda de Cadenet. IT COMES as no surprise that the maverick duo has chosen to open in Sloane Street, just a few red patent heeled steps from Prada, natch. ‘Bond Street is too status for us,’ explains Domenico. It’s what this month’s Vogue dubs the New Snobbery. Old Snobs cling to their vulgar chain link handbags; New Snobs, identified only by the cognoscenti, swing plastic Prada ones discreetly. The point is that New Snobs spurn obvious displays of status. We meet in their private clients’ showroom, the day after Gucci scion Maurizio was shot on the streets of Milan. ‘Mamma mia,’ says Stefano. ‘All the fashion world is really shocked. We didn’t know him personally. He was not a social person, he was very intimate.’

On the wall is an imposing antique gilt frame containing a bra. The bra, Stefano has said, is like a jewellery box, protecting the most precious part of a woman. ‘We love the most feminine attributes of the women, like their breasts. The symbol of maternity and eroticism. Maybe because in our dreams we would like to be like them,’ he says now.

Dolce & Gabbana have changed the look of (biscuit-suited) Italian fashion with their ironic clothes, which draw inspiration from bordellos and pornography. Domenico says they’re not preoccupied with sex. ‘It’s an important part of life and has to be evaluated seriously.’

Stefano denies they peddle chic pornography. ‘I never show anything. You will never see a woman without a bra or slip. I want to show but not see.’ Their autumn collection has women in men’s tailoring and men who have plundered the wardrobes of Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali. (‘In this moment being trendy is not trendy. We have gone outside fashion’ – Stefano, Milan, 1995.) But their trademark is underwear as outerwear.

For autumn they’ve also shown bustiers and corsets underneath erotic little black see-through dresses worn by riding-crop wielding models in long black boots. ‘We’re talking about rich women who have very little to do and have an attitude that is a bit sodomising,’ explains Carla, for Stefano. Sodomising? ‘No, sadistic, but in a very chic way.’

This brings us to Madonna. She rejected Jean-Paul Gaultier, designer of the famous conical bra, in favour of Dolce & Gabbana to design the costumes for her Girlie tour. Shortly after they were reported as saying they had not seen her show and had not been paid.

‘The Washington Post said we were angry Madonna didn’t pay her invoices,’ says Stefano. ‘But the clothes were a present we gave her. We never asked for money.’

What about the material girl? What stories do they have to tell? Dramatic pause. ‘She likes cinnamon sticks and liquorice,’ replies Stefano. It’s hard to tell if he’s being ironic.

And what of Brooke Shields? Isabella Rossellini? Kate Moss? ‘The funniest thing is that these women all fit into the same dress,’ confides Domenico. ‘It’s a miracle.’

LADY Henrietta Spencer-Churchill, eldest daughter of the Duke of Marlborough whose family seat is Blenheim, divides her time between Fulham and the Oxfordshire estate. But not for her the windy west wing of the grand palace. Lady Henrietta has a snug farmhouse which was used by Blenheim’s deputy farm manager on her father’s 11,500 acre estate.

She’s been there for eight months, which is a long time for someone who has moved house four times in as many years. She house-hops because just as she begins to settle down in one her father sells it. ‘Basically, I go where I’m told, which is wherever my father wants me to go,’ laughs Lady Henrietta. ‘That’s why I never got around to doing anything much to the other houses. But this one is different. It’s in the middle of the estate and dad will not be selling me off. This time it’s roots – I hope.’ She’s the divorced mother of two boys and militarily organised, which is why, when she was given three weeks to move from her last house into this one – a ‘Georgian one with bits added on’ – she coped.

Lady Henrietta, 36, is a hands-on interior decorator, who does the books, runs the company and counts among her clients society figure Paddy McNally. Her second book on decor is called Classic Decorative Details. She is slim and elegant with pre-Raphaelite hair and wears a Marks and Spencer waistcoat and “what has been described as a car rug” wrap-around wool skirt. She speaks with upper-class plumminess and has two black Labradors by her side like ancestral sentinels.

The house overlooks a valley. It hasn’t been a working farm for years, but retains its outbuildings. ‘The garden has gone mad because I haven’t had the time to attack it, but this spring I’m going to get the contractors in.’ On the opposite side of the valley is the house of her brother, one-time aristocratic junkie James Blandford. ‘James and I have always been very close.’ She visited him often in prison. ‘The Scrubs was grim, but Pentonville was worse. I didn’t feel embarrassed or ashamed about him being there. I just wanted to be supportive.’

She went into group therapy with her brother and the rest of their family. ‘We had to get to the root of the problem. That was probably very beneficial for me, too. You learn to cope with things.’ She is reluctant to talk more. ‘It has sometimes been ghastly and gone on for a very long time. But, hopefully, we are through all that now.’

James and Henrietta were brought up in Lee Place, a 17th century manor. Their parents divorced when she was one year old and they were raised by her father. She didn’t live in Blenheim until she was 12, when the 10th duke, her grandfather, died. ‘We used to serve in the gift shop at Blenheim and hide on the long balcony overlooking the great hall and make ghoulish noises to scare the visitors.’

It was at Blenheim that she designed her first room, when she was a teenager. On being given their stepmother’s permission to choose their own rooms, James settled on a tiny one stuck between two floors, facing north and with porthole windows. Lady Henrietta, whose style is altogether more airy, decided on one overlooking the lawns and decorated it in blues, pinks and creams. It is this gut feeling for colour and space that she eventually capitalised on in her straightforward and single-minded way. She went on to gain one A-level from St Mary’s, Wantage, followed by history of art in Florence and a course at the Inchbald Interior Design School. ‘I would have loved to have studied law and become a barrister. And I’ve always had a desire to become a detective or criminal investigator.’ In 1980 she married German-born banker Nathan “Booby” Gelber. They had two children – David, aged 13, and Maximillian, nine. ‘David is more like me in character. I’m quite introverted. I like people, but they’re not a priority in my life.’

THEY divorced in 1989 after Lady Henrietta became friendly with financier Richard “Groper” Andrew, who had separated from his second wife, Lady Serena – and they were named in each others’ divorce cases. ‘Everybody gets divorced these days. It’s not a big issue,’ she says frostily. Richard ‘is still a good friend. But I see lots of people. I lead a very independent life.’

Nowadays she lives alone. This is reflected in her home. Her decorating style is one of restraint and economy. The sitting room has sea grass, a gilt sofa and a wicker coffee table with coffee-table books. There are two oils of Cherwell and Palm Beach – ‘nothing very special, but sentimental’ – by her grandfather’s cousin, Sir Winston Churchill. She doesn’t keep ‘anything of value’ in her house. On the contrary, she is more likely to have an old armchair from a junk shop in Oxford. She delights in revamping a “good buy” in some exotic velvet. She gives old prints the same treatment, really believing in the value of impressive frames rather than the content. There are family photos, one of her mother Susan (whose family owns W H Smith) on a Bahamas beach in a billowing canary dress, and many of her children. On a table is a leather-bound order of service from her parents’ wedding. The next-door drawing room is currently being decorated. To make the dining hall she tore down a wall and ripped out a lavatory and woodburner. Now it’s painted National Trust green with Zoffany fabric curtains with puff-ball headings and a dining table piled with showcase books. In the corner is a blackamoor statue. ‘He belongs to an uncle, but has been in the family for a long time. They live abroad and I’ve ended up looking after him.’

The decor upstairs is untouched although she has just put in an upstairs bathroom. Her bedroom is lilac, which she’ll change to blue, and has watercolours by her ‘great, great, great-grandfather or one of my ancestors.’

She smiles. ‘I’m proud to be a member of this family. But it doesn’t influence my life. I’m perfectly normal.

IT IS undisputed that hospital admission for asthma has increased steadily in Britain over the past 20 years; for children, the admissions graph goes uphill at 45 degrees. One in 10 suffer from asthma, a huge increase over the past few years. Nitrogen dioxide from exhaust fumes has been similarly increasing in the air: twice as high as 20 years ago.

Children on bicycles, engulfed in a cloud of exhaust smoke from a passing bus, accompany worried articles about our smelly and damaged world. It is surprising, then, to hear from two world experts that the incidence of asthma is no higher in cities than it is in the country. A recent survey in Scotland found that it was just as bad in Skye as in the centre of Aberdeen. Another survey compared post-Cold War industrial East Germany to clean West Germany and, again, found levels just the same.

And as for the hated ozone layer, Peter Barnes, Professor of thoracic medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital, says: “You’d expect the ozone level to be higher in cities, but it’s not. Ozone is formed by nitrogen dioxide and oxygen coming together, catalysed by sunlight. In the city, the ozone reacts again with the nitrogen dioxide to form oxygen. So the levels of ozone are actually higher in the country.”

Really knowledgeable people, like Professor Barnes and Dr Andy Bush, Senior Lecturer in Paediatrics at Royal Brompton, are willing to admit ignorance. The underlying cause of asthma remains a mystery, and the two experts do not pretend otherwise. “There are two issues,” said Dr Bush. “What is causing asthma in the first place; and if you’ve got asthma, what makes it worse?

“There’s quite a lot of evidence that pollutants can make asthma worse if you’ve got it, but I suspect they’re not actually causing asthma.” But the disorder attracts theories from the under-informed as irresistibly as cot death, anorexia, ME or any other mysterious medical horror of modern life.

Anti-pollutionists blame the increase on exhaust fumes; anti-smoking campaigners point to women smoking during pregnancy; anti-stress obsessives say it is overwork and anti-central-heating fanatics blame house-dust mites, a warm, modern house being a breeding paradise.

In trying to find answers, volunteers – asthmatic and non-asthmatic – undergo grim tests. They endure up to six hours in various kinds of polluted air in an exposure chamber, sometimes working on an exercise bicycle. “The tests are controversial,” said Professor Barnes, “because to get any effect you have to use high levels of pollution. If you do tests with nitrogen dioxide, you can’t detect the effects; but what seems to happen in real air is that if you have nitrogen dioxide mixed with sulphur dioxide, then you do have an effect.

“That’s the concern: pollutants are amplifying each other, and the combinations are what cause trouble.”

WHAT is clear is that asthmatics are all different and no one theory will account for all cases. Sylvia Dowding is south-east regional organiser for the National Asthma Campaign. Its aims are to fund research, build awareness and offer support. Her son, 25, had severe childhood asthma which is now controlled. Mrs Dowding feels that pollution can be a trigger. “If asthma is there already, pollution can bring it on. But when my son was young he had to spend a night in London for some tests. We thought the city air might be dreadful for him, but actually we had one of the best nights ever. It just shows how individual the problem is.”

The pollution theory is positively harmful, she says. “People might think, well, there’s nothing to be done, and give up taking medication, or give up trying to find the true reasons for it.”

Her son has been a smoker since he was 15, with no ill-effects on his asthma. “You need a tube to soothe the tube” as the wry asthmatic Joe Follows says to the hero of Ferdinand Mount’s novel Of Love and Asthma – a charming love story written by a man who knows just what it is like to be “a member of the great community of the bronchially strangulated”. The smoking asthmatic, like the chocolate-eating fatty or the one-lunged long-distance cyclist, is simply putting two fingers up to health theorists. Surely a good thing, even if it is medically slightly mad?

Dr Bush, though, has a thing about smoking and is convinced – though it is still only a theory – that passive smoking is an underlying cause of asthma. He cites a study in the Isle of Wight which showed that women who smoke in pregnancy are more likely to have babies with childhood asthma. In the second half of pregnancy, the baby’s tubes increase in size, but they don’t if the mother smokes. “The Government has breathtaking hypocrisy when campaigning for the health of the nation while allowing cigarette advertising,” he says. “Smoking in front of a child is a form of child abuse. My 15-year-old son tells me that about three-quarters of his friends are smoking.”

What the great doctor says may well be true, but there is a whiff of the hobby horse in his words.

Asthma is also being diagnosed more than it used to be and doctors admit that this is part of the reason why numbers are going up. ‘A lot of grown-ups say, ‘I always had a bad chest’,” said one south London GP. ‘Now almost any child who gets slightly wheezy at night is said to have asthma.” PROFESSOR Barnes said: ‘But an attack is an attack. You can’t hide it. And the increase in hospital admissions shows that asthma is getting worse.” In the waiting room at Dr Bush’s paediatric clinic, there were different things said about the pollution question.

The mother of Toni Watson, 16, from Shoreham-by-Sea, said: ‘We moved to the coast: we thought it would be the end of Toni’s asthma. But it’s been far worse. Perhaps it’s the main roads nearby, or the factories. We don’t know. We took Toni to Disney World in Florida in 1993 and for that whole fortnight she was fine. My other daughter has no problems with allergies in London, but when she stays with us she’s always coughing and sneezing.” The mother of Esther Grew, 13, said: ‘I do believe pollution makes it worse. We live at Wallington in Surrey. It used to be a village, now it’s so busy with cars going through to Croydon, it’s disgusting.”

Mike Lacey, father of nine-year-old Rasmus, said: ‘We live at Heston, three-quarters of a mile from the runway at Heathrow. We moved from Denmark last year. Rasmus hadn’t had any trouble there but it’s been really bad here.”

Farah, 11, who goes to Graveney School in Tooting, added: ‘I always take my inhaler before games: swimming and PE bring my attacks on. My asthma’s about the same in the town and in the country. But I’m allergic to cats.’ Mrs Turner, mother-of-three from Chingford, said: ‘My son has hay fever, my daughter Robin has asthma and the baby has the first signs of eczema. I’ve asked the doctor, ‘Where should we live? I want to get rid of this’. But there’s no simple answer. And you can’t get a doctor to tell you that traffic pollution’s bad for asthma. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy, to stop everyone moving out of towns into the country.”

The diary of a sufferer JOE Pitura-Riley (now three) would shout, scream and cough at night, and awaken at least six times, writes Caroline Phillips. His mother Annette was exhausted and could never sleep more than two hours for being at her son’s side.

If ever Annette or husband David, a corporate video presenter, allowed Joe into the chilly garden, he’d be wheezy and chesty. If Joe even ran to the bottom of the garden, he would gasp and rasp. And whenever he caught a cold, it would go straight to his chest and he’d have to be hospitalised. Joe was admitted to Guy’s hospital six times between the ages of 18 months and eight years.

The first time Annette took him to hospital, he was eight months old. She was traumatised. ‘I asked the doctor whether Joe was going to die,” says Annette, 33, a literature student.‘He had started to turn blue and looked so scared. I felt so helpless for this little baby who couldn’t get air into his lungs.”

I SLAMMED on the brakes of the car in heavy Christmas traffic. Adrian, my fiancee, got out and walked off. So I abandoned the vehicle, door open, in the middle of Kensington High Street.

Motorists behind hooted. I yelled to Adrian that if he didn’t want his car left there, he’d better collect it. Then I hurled the keys to him – or at least to a place estate agents would have considered within his walking distance.

Passers-by, captivated by the domestic soap but looking discomfited, pretended they weren’t watching. I huffed off, collected later by the kindly Adrian in his retrieved car. He’d complained about my driving. Leaving the car to drive itself had seemed a perfectly rational way to react. I’m pregnant. We’ve had 13 weeks of this madness. I’m normally slightly Mediterranean, but never like this.

In the week of the abandoned-car incident we went to a Sunday service in St Mary Abbot’s, seeking a venue in which to marry so that the bun-in-the-oven doesn’t come from a single-parent family when his father is away on business trips. We’ve been together nearly five years and I’ve been wearing the Phillips rock for one, so it’s not so much shotgun, but more of an about-bloody-time wedding.

The service started, and my betrothed said something suspect. So what does a girl do? Say shhh? Course not. Stomp out, that’s what. Flying past the congregation in Ferrari-red coat, bereft of keys and money. Then spend the rest of the day, happy as Santa, visiting friends and forgetting to go home for our lunch party.

I knew I was enceinte when the pregnancy test – well, four actually – showed positive. It seemed to me that the first three came from tampered stock, thus necessitating a fourth test. I was several loaves short of a picnic even then. Luckily, the beloved, watching Silence Of The Lambs, was in cheery mood when I broke the good news.

Immediately I suffered the most common complaint of pregnancy. Worry. First worry was who to have it with, so to speak. I chose John Malvern who combines professional brilliance with a sense of humour and a senior post at Queen Charlotte’s. A rare combination in a man.

Since then, like a third to half of all pregnant women, I’ve suffered from the misnomer of morning sickness. More like morning, noon, afternoon and middle-of-the-night sickness. And show me a cigarette and I rush to the bathroom.

Then came the gas, heartburn, burgeoning 38 double-D cups, indigestion, emotional instability, crying five times in a day, reduced libido, wanting a Thai curry in the middle of the night and dizziness.

My sense of smell has become bloodhound strong. People smell. Not just pongy, body-odorous types, but everyone. A friend once told me she always knew when she was pregnant when she could smell women menstruating. I thought she was bonkers.