I'm rather ashamed to admit it, but I did have some preconceived notions of what a doula and her clients might be like.

I imagined it as a self-consciously hippy trend of middle-class mums with a bit too much money to burn, and that the doula herself would be an "earth mother" type, all bangles and baggy clothing.

In reality, Sharon Budworth is down to earth, clever and also – significantly – a very calming person to be around.

Her clients come from a real mix of backgrounds, and Doula UK, the body which trains doulas, even has a hardship fund aimed at people who really want the help of a doula but can't afford the fees.

For the uninitiated, a doula is a woman who is employed by the mother or parents to offer support, but not advice, before and during labour.

There are also postnatal doulas, who support women after the birth.

In many ways, the kind of advice and support doulas offer sounds like the kind of backup a woman would expect to get from her own mother.

Of course not every woman is close, either physically or emotionally, to her mum, but I wondered if Sharon's clients were largely people who could not rely on their mums for support, for whatever reason.

It turns out that it is a real mix, and often even if they are on hand, mums are not always the right people to support women during child birth.

Sharon said: "There are women that do have mothers close by but they find their mothers are too close to them emotionally.

"I think you find that sometimes you could begin to worry about your family or they could influence you in a different way but with me they know they've booked me and I'm there for them."

Sharon (39), who lives near Huntingdon, became a doula in 2005 and has helped out at 14 births.

To train for the job, she went on a course accredited by Doula UK and also had to be assessed for her first four births.

Being mother to Poppy (10) Florence, seven, and Seth, three, she also had a wealth of experience of her own to draw on.

It was after having Seth that she decided she did not want to go back to her job in HR.

She had supported friends through labour and decided that was the kind of thing she would like to do in her career.

At about the same time as she became a doula, she started training training to be a yoga birth teacher, and now runs classes several times a week, including at Alwalton Village Hall.

These classes encompass, as you might expect, yoga, but also breathing for pregnancy and labour, birth preparation, a bit of physiology about the process of labour, interventions, inductions and life after birth.

Many of these elements can be found in the preparation that Sharon does with clients when working as a doula.

Typically, clients can expect to meet Sharon two to three times before the birth, and Sharon feels strongly about working with the couple to ensure they are all ready for the big event.