David Baddiel

David Baddiel

It was Christmas Day 2015 when my partner cut her finger off. She didn’t do this festively. She didn’t do it peeling sprouts or slicing turkey: all that (plus a nut roast for her and my vegan daughter) had already been lovingly prepared.

We were literally about to sit down to Christmas dinner when the finger came off. This was in Cornwall, where my partner Morwenna Banks – writer, actor and Mummy Pig in Peppa Pig (always complicated for a Jewish bloke) – is from. We were staying in an old house by the sea. It was, as the maritime stories say, a wild and stormy night.

Outside that property is a shed, which operates as a utility room. Morwenna, always keen to utilise spare time, had thought, ‘Dinner’s nearly ready; I’ll just go and get the clothes out of the dryer.’ But on coming out, as she was trying to close the ancient and clunky shed door while holding a basket of clothes, the wind took the door and slammed it shut on her left hand. She came back into the house and very calmly told me that the top of her left index finger had been taken off.

At first, even though there seemed to be a lot of blood in the sink after she washed it off, her calmness made me think she meant perhaps a tiny sliver of skin. However, when I went out to examine the scene of the accident, I saw on the ground outside the shed door what unquestionably was a proper, joke-shop section of finger. Swinging the torchlight onto it was as close as I’ve come to being in a horror film. Until coronavirus transformed all our lives into something a bit like Dawn of the Dead, of course.

Back in the house, I did the obviously right thing: I put the bit of finger on some ice in a Jiffy bag and left it in the freezer (on top, I think, of an inordinately large tub of Roskilly’s vanilla ice cream). That, I knew, would mean that, should it be needed in the future, the fingertip could be sewn back on, no bother. We called NHS Direct. The woman at the other end of the line was worried. She said we should go to hospital.

But Morwenna wasn’t keen. Morwenna is a selfless person and absurdly stoic. And one thing about Christmas 2015 was that my mum had died on 20 December 2014, which had cast a bit of a shadow over our festivities the previous year. Plus Morwenna’s mum had died very soon after, in January. So there was a lot of pressure to make Christmas 2015 especially brilliant for our still-young children. Perhaps I can make this clear through our then eleven-year-old son’s tearful response to the door accident: ‘I just want to have a Christmas where no one’s finger gets cut off and no one dies!’ Which frankly was closing the stable door after the horse had bolted. And probably, in so doing, cutting off the stable-owner’s finger.

This was why she very much wanted not to spoil Christmas for the kids this year. Plus, I, who am not selfless, had cooked the turkey and was really looking forward to eating it (mainly brown meat for me). So we bandaged up her hand as best we could and had Christmas dinner. Towards the end of which, it became clear to me that Morwenna couldn’t pass the brandy butter without fainting.

We called NHS Direct again. The same woman told us now that because the door was old and rusty, and because Morwenna was starting to feel woozy, we HAD to go to hospital, as there was a danger of sepsis. Which meant that, after a certain amount of apologising to the kids for another ruined Christmas, we got in the car.

When I say the car, what I mean is MUD. We go to Cornwall a lot, and earlier that year I had invested in a car to keep down there, in Morwenna’s cousin’s garage in Falmouth. The term ‘invested’ is being used very loosely here. With two kids and large distances across a county to travel, I should of course have bought a second-hand Ford Focus or Clio or something else reasonably reliable. Instead I bought a fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Golf convertible. In my mind this was a classic car. It wasn’t. It was in fact neither a classic car, nor a reliable second-hand runaround. It was a piece of shit. It cost me a thousand quid. It often – very often – did not work at all.

What was particularly crap about MUD (so called because those were fittingly the first three letters of its registration) was its canvas roof. It leaked, badly. I had dealt with this not by getting it fixed in a garage but by taping a shower curtain under the roof in the places where I thought the leaks were. Which worked brilliantly. Except when it rained. Which in Cornwall, on Christmas night 2015, it was very much doing.

We got in the car – me, Morwenna and the children, Ezra and Dolly. I heard Morwenna, through her pain and wooziness, say: ‘My seat is really wet.’ I made a mental note to perhaps tape two shower curtains to the roof in future. I turned the key and, amazingly, MUD did at least start.

We were staying quite far south on the Lizard peninsula. We had discussed which hospital was best. Treliske in Truro was the biggest but it wasn’t that near, compared to smaller ones in Helston and Penzance. We headed first therefore to Helston, where there is a Minor Injuries Unit; we decided, optimistically, that this was what had happened to Morwenna’s hand. When we got there it was one minute to eight in the evening.

We rushed in. It was Christmassy. There were fairy lights. A woman on reception was dressed as an elf. Another woman, a nurse, had plastic antlers on. However, the Helston Minor Injuries Unit shuts at 8 p.m. (this, you see, is why I remembered the very specific time in the previous paragraph) and they were in the process of doing exactly that: shutting. They said: it’s not a minor injury. Go to Truro.

So obviously we went to Penzance. This is because, by now, the wind was really bad and the rain was coming down heavily, and Penzance A&E was a bit nearer than Truro. The roof was leaking so badly by now that the whole family was sodden: it was like I had chosen to drive on through a storm with the convertible roof down.

When we got there the hospital was, at least, open. I proudly showed a doctor who came to examine Morwenna the fingertip I had remembered to bring, still in its Jiffy bag. He looked at it and said, yeah, you may as well throw that away. Apparently, the best thing to do with a bit of your body that’s been cut off is to keep it warm. Icing it up kills all the nerves. I think he actually threw it in a bin in front of me.

Morwenna was taken to a cubicle and given gas and air. She told me afterwards that while she was in there waiting, she heard the duty doctor say to another woman, behind the next curtain, ‘So … is this a regular problem for you? Cystitis?’ I stayed out in reception with our disconsolate children. Eventually, she came back and said: we have to go to Truro.

They had cleaned and properly bandaged the finger. But it turned out she had broken the bone in the top of her finger and Penzance Hospital did not fix broken bones. Just to be clear, for those of you who don’t know the geography of Cornwall, Truro is in the opposite direction from Helston to Penzance. We had driven about an hour in the opposite direction of where we actually needed to be. So we then had to drive two hours back across the county to get to Treliske Hospital in Truro, where we could have gone in the first place. I began to wonder, truly, if the shower curtain was going to survive.

By the time we got to Treliske, it was about 10 p.m. We sat in A&E for some time. The thing I remember most clearly is that they had a big telly in A&E up on the wall and Michael McIntyre’s Christmas Comedy Roadshow was on. I like Michael. But I have never hated his jolly, smiling king of light entertainment face more. After another hour, Morwenna was taken away; this time, it transpired, for the night. Because here, finally, the doctors could fix her finger, or at least, they could, as they put it, ‘nibble the bone’ – at which point I thought I was going to faint – down so that it might one day work as a finger again. But it would require her staying in for the night and not coming out until Boxing Day evening.

Me and the children said a tearful goodbye to Morwenna, got back in MUD, and drove another hour back to our house in the Lizard. I’m an atheist, and Jewish, and I spent most of it praying to Baby Jesus that the car, whose engine was now sounding worse than someone with a COVID-19 dry cough, make it back. We did, but by the time we arrived, it was well past midnight, which meant that Christmas Day had ended for my children somewhere on a rain-lashed A30 in a shit car under a shower curtain that was now more of a shower than a curtain.

I’ll be honest. I’m not sure it was a better Christmas than the one when my mum died.

So. Despite it being Christmas, this isn’t a story about miracles. Nor about the NHS being miraculous. They didn’t keep the Minor Injuries Unit open for us at Helston. They couldn’t fix Morwenna’s finger in Penzance. In Truro A&E they wouldn’t even switch off Michael McIntyre’s Christmas Comedy Roadshow, no matter how many times I asked.

But those women dressed as elves and reindeers in Helston had been working all day – all Christmas Day. The doctor in Penzance was patient and kindly spoken, and betrayed almost no sign of incredulity at having to deal with a woman who had come into A&E on Christmas Day with cystitis. At Truro, they fixed Morwenna’s finger and by Boxing Day she was out, with a huge bandage all the way up her arm, and Christmas continued. Her hand, in the end, was fine. And perhaps most importantly, that woman, whose name I will never know, but who, again on Christmas fucking Day, was working the line on NHS Direct and who told us to go to hospital or else Morwenna might get sepsis – she may well have saved my partner’s life.

And frankly, if Morwenna had died, it really would’ve been a shit Christmas.

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