Every year in Britain, more than 6,000 babies are stillborn or die within the first four weeks of their life - and in half of these cases the cause of death is unknown.

The effect of such an event on a marriage and family can be devastating, as Dr Robert Graham, a professor of creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, tells Good Health.

The stillbirth of his daughter Laura in 1994 nearly caused the breakdown of his marriage. Robert, 50, lives in Manchester with his wife, Rachel, 43.

At Manchester's Southern Cemetery, there is an area dedicated to the graves of stillborn and newborn babies. It is here that my daughter lies, under a simple headstone that reads: 'Laura, Born Asleep.'

Every year, on the anniversary of Laura's simultaneous birth and death, my wife and I visit the cemetery to lay flowers. We often stop at these other graves too, both to think of the child who is gone and to wonder what stage of the difficult journey that follows a stillbirth these other parents have reached.

After Laura's stillbirth, Rachel and I nearly broke up. At a time when we should have been bonding over our new daughter, we became, almost overnight, virtual strangers. It is hard for me to think we've been able to draw anything positive at all from the experience.

But Rachel has become a volunteer with the stillbirth charity SANDS and I have channelled my experiences into my first novel.

Although we went on to have two more children, we will never forget Laura and it is because of her that we recently adopted a little girl from China. It wasn't until my wife, Rachel, went into hospital to have our first child that anyone realised there was a problem.

The pregnancy had gone perfectly, and Rachel and I arrived at the maternity ward in January 1994 full of excitement and expectation for our child who was about to be born. But as soon as we got to Manchester's Withington Hospital, the doctors seemed to know something was wrong.

After saying something about 'foetal distress', the doctors whisked Rachel away into an operating theatre for an emergency caesarean while I waited for news.

At first, I wasn't too worried. I wasn't expecting anything bad to happen and was sure the doctors would be able to resolve whatever was wrong.

So it was only when a doctor came out and said firmly that the baby's life was endangered and they were doing all they could to save it that I started to take the situation much more seriously. I was thunderstruck.

All I could think to do was to pray desperately for the child to live. But it was no use. Two hours after we arrived at the hospital the doctor told me that the baby, a girl, hadn't lived. Our child - my daughter - was gone.

Rachel was wheeled out of theatre, looking white and dazed. I took her hand and told her what had happened, but having being given morphine she was barely conscious and wasn't in any state to understand.

I, too, could barely absorb what was happening. As the doctor described to me that the baby had probably been caught up in her own umbilical cord and mentioned formalities such as a post mortem, all I could think was how surreal it felt for nine months of pregnancy to end so brutally.

Stunned, I followed Rachel's trolley into a little room with two beds. Thankfully, we had it to ourselves - I don't know how we would have coped if we'd found ourselves back on the maternity ward with all the other mums and their healthy newborns.

Because of her anaesthetic, Rachel slept, but I'm pretty sure I didn't. I think I was in denial. Rationally, I knew that Laura Iris, which was the name we'd already decided on for a girl, was dead, but it was impossible to believe it.

The dawn came up grey and miserable, and Rachel awoke in tears. For three days, we stayed in the hospital. Much of the time, Rachel and I sat on the bed, holding each other, crying.

Then there was Laura. On that first day, the midwives bought her out for us. Both Rachel and I had wanted to see her, but in those moments, sitting holding our dead daughter, the first cracks opened up between Rachel and I.

Rachel could draw comfort from holding her, but seeing Laura more than once and holding her wasn't something I was enthusiastic about.

I'd just wanted to know what she looked like. I couldn't see what was comforting about going from looking forward to having your first child to holding a tiny frozen corpse.

Rachel asked her family to take photographs of us holding Laura, which I found a bit ghoulish because the body was kept in a freezer and her little mouth - and determined bottom lip just like mine - had turned almost black.

From the outset, it was obvious Rachel and I felt differently. For me, the worst thing was having my hopes so high and then crushed so cruelly. I didn't miss Laura as I knew nothing about her. Instead, I felt hard done by that I'd lost my father when I was just eight years old, and now my daughter, too.

But having carried her for nine months, Rachel had already bonded with our daughter and her grief was overwhelming.

About a week after Laura died, we held a funeral. We put some things in the coffin with her: some cuddly toys and a tape of Disney songs I'd made her while Rachel was pregnant.

Laura had a tiny coffin which I carried in my arms from the hearse to the graveside, where we held a short ceremony. I hoped the funeral might bring some closure, but it didn't.

While I became aware that my strongest urge was to get on with life, and put as much distance between this pain and myself as I could, Rachel's response was the opposite. She wanted to pick over the wreckage, cry every tear and put words to every feeling.

While it helped Rachel to talk things over with a stillbirth support group, I couldn't face going because I didn't want to keep raking over the whole thing. I'm sure she felt unsupported.

We later learned that one couple in four breaks up within a year of stillbirth; I can understand why. Not only had the hoped-for child been snatched away, but grief was driving Rachel and I further and further apart.

Neither of us blamed ourselves for Laura's death, but we were never really able to understand why she died. After her death, both Laura and the placenta were examined to determine this.

Sometimes with stillbirth, what went wrong is clear. The most common causes include placental abruption, a condition in which the placenta peels away causing heavy bleeding and depriving the baby of oxygen. This is more common in women who smoke or take drugs during pregnancy; Rachel did neither.

Other problems with the placenta can prevent it from supplying the foetus with enough oxygen and nutrients.

Between five and ten per cent of stillborn babies have abnormalities involving their chromosomes, the tiny thread-like structures in each cell that carry our genes. This can cause death during the pregnancy. Other stillborn babies have structural malformations that result from genetic, environmental or unknown causes.

Bacterial infections are another important cause of foetal deaths that occur between 24 and 27 weeks of gestation. These infections often cause no symptoms in the pregnant woman, and may go undiagnosed until tests are conducted on the placenta after birth.

But as is the case with around half of all cases, there was no explanation for Laura's death. The doctor had suggested the possibility of an accident involving the umbilical cord, but the post mortem drew no firm conclusions.

It may sound brutal, but Rachel's grief wore me out. It was as if she were a dead weight keeping me anchored to the pain I was so anxious to flee. I thought she was never going to stop crying and become frustrated with her daily tears. I also struggled while watching my normally happy and energetic wife become so pale and depressed.

Desperate, I tried to chivvy her along, by taking her out to dinner and suggesting walks or theatre trips. I even took her to Paris for a weekend in the month following Laura's death, hoping a break might help her.

How naive that seems now. No matter what we did, Rachel was utterly sad and I felt utterly helpless.

Within months, Rachel was determined to become pregnant again. I could understand this — it was a reasonable reaction to what we'd been through — but at times it felt a bit strange, she made me feel like little more than a sperm donor. I was prepared to do anything to help Rachel feel better, but the gulf between us was widening.

The only thing that drew us together was a documentary we watched about little girls in orphanages in China. We decided we'd try for our own children again, but in the future we would adopt a Chinese girl. We both felt it would be a way to bring something positive out of what had happened to Laura.

As we thought about it, we realised there had always been a Chinese strand in our relationship. We had our first date in Manchester's Chinatown, where I went on to propose. Long before losing Laura, we always went to the Chinese New Year celebrations, too.

The summer after Laura died, Rachel fell pregnant again. This time, it was impossible to feel the same joy we had done when Laura was conceived. I don't think either of us wanted to express any hopes.

Rachel was convinced that she would lose this child as well, although deep inside I always felt this child would live.

Because of Laura's death, Rachel was closely monitored throughout the pregnancy. She was also advised to do a daily 'kick count' starting around week 26 of the pregnancy. If she counted fewer than ten kicks in a day, or felt that the baby was moving less than usual, she was to go straight to the doctor.

Although the pregnancy seemed totally normal, we both held our breath throughout. We couldn't believe it was going to be all right until we heard our daughter Poppy - her name means 'my consolation' - crying in the midwife's arms in February 1995.

Becoming happy again began at that moment. You can see that in the photographs of us taken during the first minutes of Poppy's life — we're both glowing in a way we hadn't done for more than a year.

Watching Rachel caring for a newborn, exactly what she should have been doing a year earlier, I suddenly felt full of love and pride for her again. Finally too, Rachel was able to stop crying about Laura.

In 1996, I decided to write about losing Laura. My novel is about a man called Joe Porter, a father in his mid-30s, who loses one of his two little girls in a park.

Creating a fictional protagonist who loses a child, albeit in a very different way, was a way of confronting the submerged emotions connected to my own loss. I expressed a lot of my anger and frustration about what happened with Rachel and I through my characters.

Looking back, I think we were lucky to survive as a couple. Laura's loss hugely damaged our marriage. Without Poppy to bind us back together, I'm not sure what would have happened.

Our son, Noah, followed in 1998, and our family would have seemed complete, were it not for the fact that neither Rachel or I forgot our promise to adopt a little girl from China. Poignantly, the anniversary of Laura's death often coincided with the Chinese New Year, adding to our belief that Laura would somehow be linked to any Chinese baby we adopted.

We applied to Social Services to adopt in 2001 and the administration, which usually takes two years, ended up taking five. But eventually, in February this year, all four of us went to Wuhan in the Hubei province of China, and returned with Maisy, who was 15 months old and living with a foster family. We collected her on Valentine's Day.

The occasion was happier and easier than we had expected. Maisy took to us straight away, she's full of beans and laughs a lot.

We've never forgotten Laura, but she brought us Maisy and for that we're grateful.

I think it's wonderful to be able to look back at that grey dawn the morning after the death of our daughter who never experienced life and know that we have got through it. The laughter and happiness of our home today is something that then I never would have dreamed possible.

Interview by NATASHA COURTENAY-SMITH.

For information and support on stillbirth, call SANDS on 020 7436 5881. Dr Robert Graham's novel, Holy Joe, is published by Troubador, priced £8.99.