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.