These days, it is very rare that I get a call that I haven’t heard before. It seems that there are a finite number of ailments in the world and that the same ones come up again and again. There are some, like chest pains and old people fallen over in the street, that I will without fail take several times per shift. There are some, on the other hand, like the old woman stuck in a dustbin, the rape victim and the young man who dropped dead for no apparent reason during sex with his girlfriend, that I’ve only taken once. I have, so far, never taken a shooting or a complicated birth but I expect I shall at some point. Anyway, yesterday I heard something I’d never heard before. The caller was a young man from south of the river and he sounded panicked and out of breath.

“It’s my girlfriend’s baby, she’s one — I just went to check on her and she was caught up in some trousers — they were caught round her neck. She looked all blue and floppy!”

“Oh, sh*t!” I thought to myself. I didn’t say it out loud, obviously. I clicked the “strangulation” button, which instantly gives the call a Red-1 category, the highest you can get, and then ploughed on, thinking that this poor baby was a goner.

“Is she conscious?” I asked. “Is she breathing?”

“Yes! Yes!” said the man. “It didn’t look like she was at first, but I unwrapped her, and she started gasping, and she’s looking kind of normal now.”

Inwardly, I did a little dance and jumped up and down shouting “hooray”. Dead baby calls tend to spoil my day…

The rest of the triaging part of the call was fairly standard — the man answered all the questions properly and the call went down to a Red-3, which is still a category A, but a lesser kind of category A. Since the man and his girlfriend were in a big panic I offered to stay on line in case there were any changes. I could hear the baby crying in the background, and from their descriptions she was obviously fully alert and breathing normally, so I wasn’t unduly worried. As far as I could tell, the man had averted a tragedy by checking on the baby when he did — they were very lucky.

Glancing at the log to see how far away the ambulance was, I noticed that dispatch had called the police on the request of the ambulance crew. Now, I get a lot of calls where there has been some kind of foul play and usually, they stand out a mile. The general public made very bad liars. They usually try to cover up by going down one of two routes, which are polar opposites. Some turn defensive and give as little information as possible: “It’s a serious head wound! Why are you asking what happened? Just send the ambulance! You’re wasting time by asking for details! You don’t want to help! If she dies it will be your fault!” etc, whereas others will give an improbably detailed account containing details that are utterly irrelevant to an ambulance dispatcher, but make it clear that it wasn’t their fault: “So I was in the bedroom, which was upstairs, talking to my girlfriend on the phone - she can tell you that herself - and I heard a noise from downstairs. The child slipped on a green toy car and banged her head on our Toshiba washing machine, which came from Argos. We got it in 1992 and I don’t think it’s safe because it has very hard edges.” I was quite satisfied the man was telling the truth in this case, and I felt I ought to prepare him for the other kind of emergency service turning up.

Taking a deep breath, I announced “Don’t panic, but the ambulance crew have asked the police to come. It’s just routine — they haven’t heard this call, all they know is that they’re coming to a baby who has been accidentally strangled and they want to check it out.”

The man’s first reaction was to ask if we were still sending the ambulance, to which I replied yes, of course we were. I don’t think that would have been the reaction of an attempted child murderer either. After this he started to worry a bit (”how will they know that I didn’t hurt her?”) and I did my best to reassure him that there were plenty of ways they could find out. I felt dead sorry for him — as if he didn’t have enough to worry about with his stepdaughter having a narrow escape, he would also have to be questioned by the police too. Still, I suppose it is better that innocent people get questioned than guilty people get given the benefit of the doubt. I just hope there is evidence that he was innocent.

… of course, his face may be appearing in next week’s papers with the headline “South London Baby Murder Psychopath Confesses All” and then I may have to eat my words.

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