STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

What does he say when people ask him what he does? ‘That I enjoy myself,’ he answers, sitting by his villa poolside on St Bart’s. ‘Then they ask me what I do, and I say that I live on a Caribbean island, snorkel, swim, read and lie in the sun for 12 months of the year.’ Will he never work again? ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’

Before leaving his job in March, he had been working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, jockeying between London and New York.

‘I was wishing my life away by working and being frustrated that I couldn’t do other things because I didn’t have time, or because I used work as an excuse for not doing them. I spent my time saying ‘I can’t do this, I’m too tired and I’ve got busy meetings next week’.’

HE HAS never married and has no dependents. ‘I’ve always been guilty of putting work first – to the detriment of relationships. But I’ve had relationships that have lasted a few years.’ So he decided to up and off. ‘I thought ‘I’ve got to do it when I’m young enough to keep my options open’. This isn’t a mid-life crisis and it’ll be harder to make changes as I get older. I’ve still got time to make mistakes and fall flat on my face.’ He called together the four most senior partners in the firm – with whom he had worked for 12 years – and told them he’d decided to resign. ‘I said ‘I want to live in the place I want to live in and do all the things I want to do while I’m young’.’ The partners were dumbstruck. ‘There was a great deal of shock. They didn’t want me to go and asked me to think about it.’ Stuart didn’t need to think. He sold his three-bedroom Victorian house in Richmond and decided to live off the capital and its interest. He didn’t have a car. And he didn’t mind leaving his friends. In fact, he thought he’d probably see more of them in the Caribbean. So as soon as he had completed his notice period, he jumped on a plane.

He is 6ft and work-out lean. He has the face of a hard-nosed litigator, and one that is also enquiring, intellectual and kind. He wears expensive clothes – Paul Smith, Armani and St Laurent – which now dangle disconsolately in his villa cupboards alongside his new daily clothes – swimming trunks. He’s even-tempered, reserved and solitary.

He was brought up in London’s East End. His mother was a teacher, his father an accountant. Stuart went to a comprehensive. ‘It was awful. I didn’t start learning until I was 19 when I went to Tottenham Technical College for a year to do A-levels.’ Then he did a University of London law degree. He has a first-class mind. ‘I did the Law Society professional exams on my own. I couldn’t see any point in wasting time travelling to and from Lancaster Gate when I was living in Hackney. So I borrowed the course notes off a friend who had attended – and I passed and he failed.’ AGED just 23, he went into the law and became a partner at the unusually young age of 28.

These days he lives in a huge rented villa with a maid and swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Every day he visits the patisserie, then swims, snorkels and lies on a beach with white sand, turquoise water and reefs. Then he’ll sit in a cafe, sip cafe au lait and read Emma, Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe or Pride and Prejudice. ‘I want to read all the classics I never read at school.’

His arduous morning is followed by a lunch of fresh local fish and an afternoon of sitting under a palm tree dangling his feet in glistening water or snoozing in the gazebo. He also draws, paints, learns French, does a strenuous form of yoga (‘hanging off walls and so on’) sees friends, travels and learns the lambada. When he tires of the island, he’ll move elsewhere. ‘I feel much better about myself,’ he says, ‘I’m living a more worthwhile and rounded life. I don’t have any regrets and I feel I’m going forward.’ But he is unemployed. Does he feel a loss of identity or self worth? ‘Not at all; I’ve never been worried about status.’

LIONA is 12 and has never smiled. She is physically handicapped, doesn’t speak and doesn’t play. Then she was taken to Thorpe Park on an outing. Suddenly her classmates gathered round her excitedly. Liona was smiling. This was Kids Out, an event involving thousands of boys and girls, including 2,300 from London. As Liona gave her first smile, other disabled and deprived children elsewhere were at 100 similar events.

This was an annual day out for children with special needs, started in 1990, organised by Rotary clubs and Littlewoods and funded with money from race nights, raffles and bands to sponsorship.

Putney Rotary Club President Alan Davies talked 150 businessmen into taking the day off work to drive 300 local children, with police escorts and orange balloons, to Thorpe Park. And the Metropolitan Police provided the lunch boxes they have when they go on uptown demonstrations: egg or corned beef sandwich, juice, Twix and apple.

I meet Alan at 9am at Paddock School, Roehampton. A girl sits in a wheelchair, head dropped backwards. ‘You are a pretty girl,’ says headmistress Nora Evans, affectionately. Another child stops and hugs Nora and strokes her hair. ‘Smooth hair,’ she intones. ‘Yes, very smooth,’ replies Nora. The child is autistic and suffers obsessions, the latest for smooth hair.

‘Where’s your hearing aid? We’re going on a picnic today,’ a teacher tells a youngster, in sign language. The child jumps, exuberantly. Nearby another is strapped into a wheelchair, his tongue lolling and his wrists bound loosely together. His face lights up with pleasure at the news. Four classes, ages 7 to 16, with severe learning difficulties and profound and multiple disabilities are coming on Kids Out.

In the car park by the windmill on Wimbledon Common we meet the others. Hundreds of youngsters, blind children from Linden Lodge, and disadvantaged ones chattering animatedly. A Rotarian clown squawks amid the parked cars and the mayor of Wandsworth looks on with her chain of office over her raincoat.

Eleven-year-olds Paul and Cally are in our black Audi coupe when I return. ‘This yours?’ demands Paul, cheerfully. ‘Well I gotta tell yer, you’re sitting in the back.’ Then he plays happily with the electric windows. ‘Put your head in the window. I promise I won’t chop it off.’ Paul looks at my fiance, Adrian. ‘So who’s this Adrian? You love him? You been to bed with him?’

These boys are from Chartfield School, Putney, a school for maladjusted children. (A ‘delicate’ school, says one teacher.) Cally is sensitive, gentle featured and reticent about his illness. But Paul is bullish about being dyslexic and asthmatic.

Three schoolmates in another car chip in. One has cystic fibrosis, another severe learning difficulties. ‘I was bullied at school,’ says the third, dolefully.

PAUL sings ‘Hit the road, Jack,’ as we set off. I say he is a groovy guy. ‘I ain’t gay,’ he responds, heatedly. Do they want crisps and chocolate? ‘I don’t have colourings, I’m allergic,’ he says. For miles up the A3 we can see nothing but cars with purple streamers and Kids Out balloons. Cally says that he wants to be a doctor, to save people’s lives. ‘Don’t,’ implores Paul. ‘You’re too short and won’t be able to reach the bed.’ They discover Adrian works in a bank. ‘Why don’t you rob it? I won’t tell anyone,’ says Paul, waggishly. ‘That’s bad,’ says Cally.

All the children are let into Thorpe Park for free. Their £10 ticket charge is waived and adult helpers pay less than half price. Thorpe Park is buzzing with children in wheelchairs, walking unsteadily, running chaotically and beaming genially. We go rowing, sit in a spinning tea cup, hazard a dinghy on the Depth Charge daredevil water slide, eat from the Sweet Palace and watch virtual reality. They scream with the thrill and the fear. Then they stand mesmerised by two ducklings. The Rotarians began in Britain in 1911, solid citizens and prominent businessmen dedicated to worthy causes. Normally straight laced, they have a fuddy-duddy image. The battle over female membership lasted seven years in the States. But they raised £67 million to immunise children worldwide against polio. And now Paul and Cally are standing joshing in front of me. Paul says he wants to drive home in a BMW or Mercedes. A jolly Rotarian offers his, ‘clapped out Peugeot with bank burgling equipment in it.’ The children look gleeful.

IF YOU want a rabbi to live with you for a week or so, at a charge of £1,000 plus expenses for seven days, Rabbi Martin Felt is your man. In America, the personal nutritionist has replaced the fitness trainer as the ultimate status symbol, and Madonna, Cher and Michael Jackson take theirs on tour. Now Martin, a 40-year-old American kabbalistic rabbi turned nutritionist, has brought the practice to London.

Frequently he lives with clients, whether individuals or families, for two intensive weeks. Sometimes he goes on holiday or business trips with them, as far afield as Los Angeles. Other times he flies to Bahrain or Kuwait to offer advice or rejuvenation programmes.

Martin is, for example, live-in personal nutritionist to businessman Avi Nissanni and his family in Hampstead. ‘I’ve lived with them for a week or two four times in the last six months. I’ve changed his body chemistry, massaged them, cooked for them, taught his family how to prepare food, looked after his wife, exercised with them, and taught them how to stretch, breathe and meditate.’ Martin, who is soon to accompany the family on a trip to America, has two dozen such ‘very wealthy’ private clients. Many of his clients (‘mostly women from SW1 and SW3′) simply lack a feeling of general well-being. Others suffer from chronic tiredness, anxiety or depression. But he specialises in degenerative diseases, and has worked extensively with cancer, arthritis and Aids. He believes food is the best medicine.

He has just published a book, Eat Yourself Fit with the Felt Formula, to help you ‘discover the food plan to change your life’, and promising immediate and extraordinary results. A questionnaire helps you interpret your symptoms and find your individual Felt formula for eating, to bring your body back into balance. But he prefers to meet clients, preferably for four hour-and-a-half consultations, at a cost of £70 each. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people over the years,’ he claims.

He came to Britain eight years ago to escape American health radicalism. He doesn’t believe in extreme diets or megadoses of vitamins, smokes ‘10 cigars a year and the occasional cigarette’, and eats his share of junk food. ‘I’m not a phoney food faddist.’

He sees outpatients in his one-bedroom, student digs-style flat, with posters of Indian deities on the wall, amid the alternative books and dirty crockery in the kitchen. He diagnoses with a conventional blood test (£59) and extensive questions. ‘Have you had any infection over the last few weeks? Any specific pain? Any gas, belching or flatulence? Are you short-fused, irritable or volatile?’ He is efficient and his diagnosis very precise.

He tells me not to mix proteins and carbohydrates (to aid digestion), cut down on acid-forming foods (the body stores toxins, which acid exacerbates), not to eat bread (yeast ferments in the stomach), and to take Solgar and BioCare supplements (food capsules represent a third of his treatment). MARTIN is dressed in dark colours, and has an intense face and curly hair. He’s extremely knowledgeable but weird and controlling. He talks, sometimes with his hands in the air, with his loud voice rising, saying things like: ‘You have the institutionalisation of the mythological basis of a culture anthropologically manifested in a country with a psychic nature phenomena.’ The phone rings incessantly and he talks at leisure: ‘Not a disturbance, nice to hear from you…’

His method is a sensible integration of Western and Eastern medicine. Later I followed some of his advice and found it made a positive difference. Atmospheric pollution and stress, he says, affect the chemical balances of our bodies, changing the genetic basis of health: everything is bio-chemical; most physical and mental ailments can be attributed to the food we eat; and eating yourself fit, alert and energetic, and to the correct body weight, is simply a matter of knowing what to eat and when. ‘The foods fuelling the body must be accurately and metabolically precise for whatever disease or stress imbalance is going on.’

Martin was brought up in Philadelphia where his father sold insurance and his mother was a university administrator; a ‘just above working-class’ family. He gained a degree in law, political science and history. Thereafter, none of his dietary research was carried out in an institution or university.

His system, which has taken 10 years to develop, stems from his training with his ‘mentor’ Dr Kaushik, an Indian medical doctor, ‘a Hindu and Buddhist’, who taught him Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, meditation, homeopathy and yoga. ‘I lived and studied with this man for six years in the Seventies.’

In addition, he’s studied herbalism, re-birthing, clinical nutrition, naturopathy, and body work from osteopathy to Rolfing. ‘I experienced all these things myself.’ There is, he says, nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades.

His work culminated in 1987 in a doctorate of divinity at Shiloh seminary in America, where he studied mysticism and the link between science and spirituality. He calls himself an ordained kabbalistic ‘rabbi’, ‘an esoteric and non-pulpit position’. This isn’t a rabbinical ordination recognised by Orthodox Jews, who compare it to a divinity graduate calling himself a ‘mystical vicar’.

Martin has three young children, all living abroad, by three different women. He’s not married to any of them, has already been married twice and supports the children. ‘My work has always been a priority.’ What’s he like? ‘I’m tempestuous, volatile, cataclysmic and mercurial.’ Can’t he transform himself with his food? ‘I am. Things don’t change overnight.’ Aren’t things meant to change radically and swiftly? ‘On different levels. I’m not holding myself up as a guru.’

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a fortune must be in want of an alternative therapist. At least that’s the world according to Princess Diana, who has just been seen stepping out of the latest fashionable foot doctor’s surgery, probably en route to Manolo Blahnik via a touch of colonic irrigation. But this is a truth on which the Princess and I agree. Because I am also a therapy junkie.

We’re the A Team – people with analysts, acupuncturists, accountants, architects, allergy therapists and Alexander Technique teachers. Been there, done that, got the green pesticide-free T-shirt. There! It’s out. (But only after major advisory consultations with my shiatsu masseuse, reflexologist and homeopath.) We’re the sensitive types who sit in offices (if we have to work) with an ioniser nearby to purify the air, a lumber roll, stocks of horse-sized vitamin pills and a water purifier from which to drink. Aromatherapy essential oils burn in a dish nearby to overcome our obsessive hatred of Gitanes.

We believe we’re all addicted (whether to chocolate, heroin, shopping or caffeine) and use words like rageaholic. We’re addicted to finding things wrong. We are also, of course, hopelessly self-conscious and obviously self-absorbed.

At home we hide books like Women Who Love Too Much and What Women Want. Almost any book on recovery (a key A Team word) while we wait for a book on self-help recovery. If we thought the neighbours couldn’t hear, we’d play music from Puerto Rican rainforests or New Age dolphin gurgles to help extend relaxation and awareness. We yearn for weekends in Tyringham Naturopathic Clinic eating grapes and soya bean casserole while sitting in a seaweed bath.

I have tried most of these things. I have acupuncture regularly, allowing a practitioner to play voodoo dolls with me and right an imbalanced liver which has a channel flowing up my big toe. I learned Alexander Technique until I almost died of boredom. (For weeks the tutor teaches you how to get out of a chair and sit down again. It was worse than the severe riding accident which got me there.) When I wanted to lose weight, I visited a Chinese kinesiologist (tests muscles to diagnose food allergies). I can’t remember what he said, but I bet I had some.

I’m hooked on Ayurvedic massage (two people massage you) and Indian rope massage (where a man swings from a rope to massage you with his feet). I’ve even been to Balham to have my feet done by a Metamorphic technique practitioner who says the foot from toe to heel corresponds to the pre-natal period from conception to birth.

Alongside Princess Diana, I’ve had reflexology, in which areas of the soles correspond to organs of the body and the feet are probably the key to the entire workings of your mind.

I’ve had colour therapy and gem therapy; pill-popped homeopathic remedies, taking substances so diluted they’re like a drop of liquid in the Baltic Sea; tried Bach Flower Remedies for negative emotional states; and been in a flotation tank with saline solution to stimulate the body’s production of happy hormones.

In Hong Kong, I tried herbalism and daily drank tea probably made of bull’s horn and fish ear, which proved handy for menstrual tension; resident in Sydney, I had iridology, which can diagnose the entire nervous system from the surface of the iris.

It’s easy to laugh. But whether you have spots, tennis elbow or major depression, it’s obvious to me that you need rolfing, past-life reconstruction or hands-on healing. If all else fails, you can have your aura photographed for a tenner or nip off for a self-realisation weekend workshop (another key word that, workshop, in the A Team) in the South of France. We don’t even mind too much if the therapist is unregulated and a former management consultant.

The big question is why? Is it too much money, time, lack of self-worth or guilt that has led the ladies who lunch (or work) to have reflexology instead of pasta in Beauchamp Place?

I’ve had my share of illnesses, operations and emotional traumas. But I suffer no more from physical ailments and psychic malaise than your average citizen. Probably less. I’m not a hypochondriac. But I believe in holistic treatment, in which the patient’s mind, body, diet, lifestyle and emotional state are considered alongside Western medicine.

We live in a society in which orthodox religion has been forgotten (priests no longer have the answers for our troubles). We often have a sense of powerlessness and lack of worth. So we search for answers and ways to fix ourselves, seeking remedies to help us feel in control of our lives. Religion gave us rules. Now there aren’t any rules so people have to find something else to give meaning to their lives. Eastern religion and gurus from America do nicely.

We no longer believe in original sin or spend our lives trying to atone for Adam and Eve’s hash-up. Now the onus is on the individual. Psychotherapy, which is all about realising the self and balancing the opposing forces of good and bad, has replaced religion. But psychotherapy is painful and hard work. Sitting under a purple pyramid is quicker. Instead of original sin, we now have to deal with childhood. Which is something we’ve set up as a false icon, thinking it should have been an idyllic period of innocence. (But ‘They f*** you up your Mum and Dad . . .’) So we’ve all had damaged childhoods and been abused (another key A Team concept). We’re all insecure and have an inner child who’s in a bad way. We need anything to help us get over the drama of having been a child. The problem is that we’ve forgotten that our difficulties are just part of the human condition. Even Princess Diana’s.

DIANA’S GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE THERAPY CHIROPRACTIC
She regularly receives treatment and in 1991 was made patron of the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic.

ACUPUNCTURE
Oonagh Toffolo has visited the Princess since 1989 to stimulate the body’s ‘meridians’ – invisible energy paths on the skin – with needles.

AROMATHERAPY
Receives treatment from Sue Beechey, of Aromatherapy Associates in Fulham, using different oils for different effects – eg citrus oils to stimulate; basil and camomile to relax.

REFLEXOLOGY
Yesterday it was revealed that the Princess has been having her feet massaged, stimulating the blood supply and nerves and relieving tension.

COLONIC IRRIGATION
In September 1992 rumours were rife after she attended the Hale Clinic on a day when colonic irrigation practitioners were offering treatment.

HOLISTIC MASSAGE
Stephen Twigg started providing deep tissue massage in the late Eighties as part of his holistic approach (the belief that the health of mind, body and spirit are co-dependent). Sacked in 1992 after talking to the Press.

ASTROLOGY
Visits Frederick Lyle, who has a reputation for making observations in psychological, rather than astrological, language.

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.’

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.’

There’s a police car outside the hospital tonight. In front of it, an alcoholic sits on a plastic chair, can of Special Brew in hand. His friend – a man with a savaged face – goes into the hospital, pushing through the transparent plastic swing doors.

This is the scene in casualty at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell one recent weekend night. It is one of the busiest accident and emergency departments in London.

It’s a deprived hospital in a deprived area, but is known for its excellent nursing and medical care. And it was here that they just had the Walworth Bell pub shootings – six shootings – six acute emergencies in one hour, and with new doctors who had been in the job for only three days. It’s 9.30 pm and already there is a queue of walking wounded that will take at least a couple of hours to deal with. A sign on the cream walls says: ‘There is a . . . hour wait to see the doctor. Emergencies seen first.’ The empty space has been covered with blank card.

The recent record time for someone waiting in casualty for a bed was 26 hours – with a fractured leg. But at the moment, things aren’t too bad. And people seem resigned to long waits.

The casualty patients – anyone who is not acute – queue on benches in front of a partition. A blurred and soundless TV is set up high and on the floor are cigarette stubs, drink cans and litter. A baby is crying: staff say they try to see children in half the waiting time. Alongside the infant, a cardiac case, with deathly face, is wheeled down the corridor. Just inches behind the casualty queue, the other side of the screen, are six patients lined up on stretcher trollies. One woman writhes in agony with renal stones. She has an ochre-yellow face.

Next to the trollies, in this smaller than small casualty area, people are examined in one of three curtained cubicles – discussing their problems with the corridor – or one of the three cubicles. Nearby is the emergency room, where they take the unconscious, diabetic, cardiac, asthmatic and ‘trauma’ victims – for example stabbings and shootings – who need to go to theatre.

There’s room for five here, but in the last few months they’ve been accommodating eight – more than 100 beds were closed last year due to financial restraint. If someone dies in casualty, it is here (with perhaps an asthmatic child to the left and a chap with stab wounds to the right) that the relatives come to view the body behind curtains.

The nurses take calls on the emergency red phone – one RTA (road traffic accident) and a young man who has been critically beaten up. Yet tonight they say it’s really quiet.

Behind the reception area, out of the view of patients’ eyes, there is a blacklist on the wall of regular hospital abusers. And on the door there is a memo concerning a bogus female doctor who is operating in the area. An Asian man with a public school voice and what looks to have been a bottle smashed over his head comes to reception. His ear hangs off. ‘Human bite,’ the receptionist writes on his form. His boyfriend bit him. They refused even to be admitted to the same accident and emergency, so his lover has gone to Guy’s.

It’s 10.30 and the tramps have started to arrive for the night. Two dossers are fast asleep on the cushioned bench in the hallway. The nurses sometimes let them sleep off their drink on the trollies behind the screen: rather that than the men go out and injure themselves.

Wiflred is a regular and this is his second home (whether his first home is a fixed address is unclear.) He doesn’t come to be seen by a doctor, and brings his dog and squirrel and bottle of meths. If a fight is going on, he protects the staff.

Now they’re bleeping security. A man with a shaved head and a tracksuit, late forties, is punching fisticuffs in the air. He’s drunk and with a face full of aggro. His friend got beaten up, so he wants to bash up the nurses. Someone calms him down. Then he proceeds to stand in front of every trolley that they try to wheel through. He tells the nurse that he’s come to the hospital because he wants to become a Christian. Then he lies on the floor, head down on the red tiles, in front of reception.

‘Come on, go and sit in the corridor,’ says one of the ambulancemen. The aggressive man paces, threatens to beat up the staff, lolls his tongue out at the nurse, red eyes rolling, and hits his head. (It later turns out he has a psychiatric history – as do many of the patients who make their way across the road from the Maudsley.) At 2.30am, a staff nurse attempts to discharge him, medically fit. Her voice is rising – and he is jerking himself off through his tracksuit while she talks to him.

The nurses rush around and despite the stressed working conditions, there’s an amazing feeling of dedication and supportiveness. Morale may waver according to the bed situation, but the nurses are in reasonable spirits. To alleviate the problems, the hospital opened an emergency admissions ward with 20 beds in August, which cuts down emergency queuing. They are also planning a rehabilitation centre, which will free up even more beds.

At 11.35 three undertakers, grim faced and charcoal suited, come in to pick up a body. A boy pushes up against the reception glass. ‘I’ve got bad sunburn,’ he says. A woman arrives: ‘I think I’ve sprained my wrist.’ In emergency casualty, a policewoman emerges from a cubicle. She’s wearing a plastic apron. The staff are pressurised and she used to work in A and E – an unusual occurence, this – so she’s helping clean up the body of a young boy battered to death. The sister says she sees about one serious assault a week. Back in the reception office, a policeman is on the phone. ‘We’ve managed to identify the body, it’s Mark . . .’

Outside, a teenager keeps getting up from a trolley. He has overdosed on heroin. ‘I want to go ‘ome.’ The security guard keeps bringing him back. They’ve admitted one overdose each night this week. ‘Fackin’ ‘ell,’ he says. ‘You take too long to see me around ‘ere.’ Later on he walks out, on his fifth attempt. ‘Oh let him go,’ says the nurse. ‘We can’t keep on watching him.’

An ambulance has just knocked down a pedestrian. They bemoan the fact that the vehicle is now going to be off the road for three hours. The 999 calls are stacking up. They’re legally allowed only one patient in an ambulance – but a nurse says she saw seven getting out of one vehicle after a fight on New Year’s Eve.

Sid is one of the community of regulars. He has duly medicated himself before arriving. ‘Me and me mate was taking all sorts of pills.’ He has a cross tatooed on his forehead and a look of permanent mourning. He perks up to tell about the time he came to have his spleen taken out. That was when someone ‘who used to be a friend’ beat him up. Sid tells his war story with relish. He appears really to enjoy life – and its attendant attention – only when he’s ill. Tonight he’s in because he rode his pedal bike into a stationary vehicle when cycling around a corner .

His apparent enthusiasm is matched by that of Mr and Mrs Blidi, an Algerian couple, with their 22-month-old daughter Hannia. She wears Moslem head dress. ‘We all been here regularly,’ says Mr Blidi. ‘We go here, Guy’s or Westminster.’ Hannia fell down when she was in an aeroplane. She sleeps through her parents’ concern. One family bought their child in because she was having nightmares. The trouble is, GPs won’t go out in this area at night.

Nearby, a dear old lady – 90-plus with hennaed hair – lies wrapped in a red blanket. She looks spirited and her feet – bare and gnarled – protrude. She’s fallen over. The air smells deeply dank, of feet and the strong and acrid smell of anxiety sweat. There is no air conditioning. ‘Damn fool thing to do,’ her daughter, who lives with her, bellows. ‘What were you doing? Playing football?’ The daughter, wearing brick-coloured shorts and a vindictive expression, paces up and down. ‘People will think you’re loopy. They won’t be far wrong.’

It’s 3.45am. A lady who was mugged and has no money sits waiting for some coins from petty cash before she can go home. Inside, the nurses who work a nine-hour 23 minute shift remain. Outside, the police car has gone and three empty wheelchairs stand discarded.

JESSICA is pummel pummel pummelling Lucia’s bare feet, her face creased with concentration. She reaches over for a bottle and, splosh, pours orange and cinnamon oil onto her hands and returns to her massaging.

Jessica is two-and-a-half years old. And Lucia – who was wearing Ninja Turtle slippers before they began – is much, much older. She’s three and a half. Jessica is giving Lucia a reflexology massage in the sunny garden, touching points in her feet to get a balance in the body’s energy, but not quite understanding this yet. Some of them laugh when they’re having their feet done, learning to do it two pairs at a time.

These are little people at Little People, London’s first – and only – holistic nursery school, where they have daily massage from a grown-up and reflexology and organic lunches, along with a combination of Montessori and traditional education. Where touch is allocated as much time as pre-reading, pre-writing and play.

Downstairs, through The Messy Room and past four knee-high loos in a room with no door, is The Quiet Room. Alexander, just two and wearing nappies, is listening to taped dolphin and whale sounds mixed with wind instruments and getting an all-over body massage from a big person called Molly Molloy Madigan. (She’s Irish.) He’s being gently stroked with orange oil to aid his digestion and lies there sucking his thumb and occasionally giving a mini grunt of satisfaction. It lasts 20 minutes and he falls asleep.

If a child is finding it difficult to settle into a project, Molly picks him up for a massage. One didn’t like it initially, but soon got into it. ‘Sometimes another watches. Teaching them to do it is very important, so they can care for each other,’ says Molly.

She had the idea for her school four years ago, and opened it last September. We’re now sitting talking on wooden chairs that stand probably eight inches off the ground, made by a religious community in Surrey who dedicate their lives to making furniture for children.

Little People was formerly the ground floor of Molly’s home – light, spacious and jolly – in her Victorian house in Archway. The nursery smells of essential oils which she burns every morning, rosewood and bergamot today. They are summer smells which help to lift the spirits and keep us happy, she says. Certainly the atmosphere is calm and cheery, no tears even as the children are dropped off. (They don’t have a pick-up service.) Molly’s wearing Japanese massage sandals – you know, those funny things that have rubber spikes that stick up into the soles to do good works on your feet – and tartan-pattern cotton trousers. She is telling me about her brainchild.

‘I needed to go back to work after having my daughter Sarah. I wasn’t happy with what was available in the line of full day care, so I decided to set up what I would have liked to have found.’ Sarah is four now and has another year there.

Instead of running the short hours of nine until four, Little People suits big working people and is open from eight until six, five days a week. It costs £125 a week – which Molly swears is standard – but she negotiated a reduction for the twins and says she has helped parents with financial difficulties.

‘I didn’t go into the project with views on whether it would be a good business deal, but rather just wanting to give other children what I hoped to give my own daughter.’ There are currently 14 children and capacity for 25; half are male and the rest wee girls, aged from two to five. The infants are called names like Sasha, Jacob, Romilly and Zachary. All English and local to the area, they’re the sort of kiddies, she explains, who go to osteopaths and use herbal and homeopathic remedies. (Molly herself uses Bach Flower Rescue Remedy if they have a little bump or bang.) And their mummies and daddies are things like graphic designers, journalists and teachers.

And the staff? Well, there’s Molly herself, 35, from Galway and a state registered nurse; and Kris, a man with long blond hair, batik shirt and Montessori and early-years training; and Ann, a traditional junior and primary school-trained teacher; then Maria, who’s an artist, and then Patsy, the Jamaican cook who is also wearing Japanese massage sandals and does cooking projects and things like tie-dye too. The whole place is Right On, in the nicest possible way.

Molly came to England when she was 17. A non-practising Catholic and the eldest of 10 children – a fact she reveals with evident pride – she’s used to looking after little ones. She worked for 12 years in nursing, ending up at the Royal Free Hospital.

‘I was unhappy with nursing because I felt it was losing a lot of the care and healing, which is what I like to do now.’

She went to work in her husband’s architectural practice, got pregnant, started having massage herself, learned baby massage, thought about starting up a natural health clinic for children . . . and ended up opening Little People. ‘It’s hard work. But with nursing I was used to that.’ An average day at the Little People involves breakfast, then singing, games and noise followed by creative work, toilet visit and handwashing; then lunch, teeth cleaning, free play, rest and massage. Depending on the day, there will also be messy activities or rhythm and dance or something. Which brings us to their food. It contains neither colourings, preservatives nor any other gunk. Take Monday: ‘Vegetarian moussaka with roasted pumpkin seed and wheat salad followed by silk tofu and strawberry whip.’

Or Wednesday: ‘Mixed-bean casserole with wine, mashed potato with ground almond, black olives with avocado salad, stewed apple with soya sauce.’ If it sounds like a baby boom parody of the health boom (the minor Mung Bean Set?) the children apparently adore it. And they cheerfully set the tables, acting as two and three-year-old waitresses and carrying the food from the kitchen. Then they serve each other.

They don’t have a discipline problem. ‘Parents tend to ask how we handle children expressing their positive and negative feelings. Basically I let the child express what he needs to. To deal with a temper tantrum, you need just see where it’s coming from.’

If its origin is a dispute with another child, Molly – who’s done something called Parent Link, which helps in these matters of major litigation – shows them the best way of handling the problem among themselves.

She did a lot of research when formulating her ideas for Little People. She found many nurseries ‘disgusting, with appalling food and a poor quality of care’. But her philosophy is to develop the whole character of the child, so he leaves with his trust and self-esteem not just intact, but enhanced, and an inner confidence.

Are there any disadvantages to her new approach to childcare? ‘The only thing parents worry about is the atmosphere being too cosy and too cuddly and too loving.’ This sounds like a great problem. ‘But they wonder what’s going to happen to their child when he goes to his next school . . .’