Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton

I’ve been rushed to hospital once in my life. When I was six years old after an unfortunate incident on a seesaw. I was with my nanny while my mum was at work, thrill-seeking in Highbury Fields playground, pushing the health and safety limits of the apparatus as far as I could in the pursuit of a good time (old habits die hard). I asked my nanny to plonk herself down harder on the seat of the seesaw to help me fly off my seat, just for a nanosecond. With trepidation, she did. ‘More!’ I demanded. ‘MORE!’ She slammed her arse down and the handle of the seesaw went into my chin, splitting it open and knocking me straight off the seat and onto the ground. It is the first and only ‘cut to black’ moment of my life that I can recall (other than the time I tried absinthe). I felt the force of the cold metal in my face, then I saw the terrified, open-mouthed expression of a woman who had accidentally injured a child who was in her care, then I saw darkness.

The next thing I remember is two men who looked a bit like the Chuckle Brothers, one of them bandaging up my chin as I lay on the ground, the other scooping me up in his arms and walking me to the ambulance. I remember the man in the uniform doing silly voices and impersonations of my favourite TV characters all the way to the hospital. I remember smiling faces in the ward. Some stitches that felt like little pinpricks. My mum taking me home for fish fingers and oven chips. A good war wound and story for everyone at school. And a pinky-silver wobbly line of a scar that remains on my chin to this day.

Except that’s not what happened at all. I have since been told that it was an absolute horror show, my denim-blue dress soaking with blood as I lay crying on the asphalt in pain. I couldn’t speak, both out of shock and because the blow to my chin meant I was unable to move my face. The two men in the ambulance looked, apparently, nothing like the Chuckle Brothers. ‘I could hear your screams in my office and I rang home immediately because I knew something had happened,’ my mum says now – an example of her skill of telepathy that she sometimes likes to boast about (she also used this apparent ‘telepathy’ as a threat when I was a teenager, telling me she’d know if I’d lied to her about where I was going out).

And yet, I remember almost none of that. The kindness of the NHS workers, their commitment to keeping a terrified little girl calm and distracted as well as safe and cared for, worked. It eradicated nearly all memories of trauma. It is a minuscule moment in the grand scheme of what NHS staff have to see and do for their jobs – I am incredibly lucky that I haven’t needed to go to hospital for anything more serious. But I will always remember the staff who looked after me that day and feel utter assurance that no matter how big or small the reason that someone might need the NHS, we are always in safe and capable hands.

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