When her father was taken to hospital last month after a car crash, Caroline Phillips prepared herself for an NHS horror story. What happened was very different.

“The doctors and nurses in intensive care were superb – honest but supportive”

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Equally, with the NHS, you don’t know what you’ve got until you need it.

On May 9 this year, my 79-year-old father, Ronald, careered off the M4 at over 70mph. He hurtled across three lanes on a busy Friday at 2.30pm, down a verge and hit a tree. Miraculously he missed all the other vehicles around him.

It was an hour before emergency services were able to cut him out of his car; then a helicopter landed by the motorway and airlifted him to Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. I only heard about it at 4pm. “Dad’s been in a major car crash,” sobbed my younger brother, Simon. “He’s got serious head and leg injuries …”

In the emergency room, we found our father: a frozen lump with a face the size of two footballs. He was on a ventilator, sprouting wires, bags and drips and tethered to monitors. He’d sustained fractures to his pelvis and one foot, a deep ankle wound and fractures to 10 ribs and his sternum – giving him a life-threatening flail chest [where the rib cage compresses, rather than expands, on breathing]. We were told he might also have had a heart attack, plus brain and internal organ damage.

“There’s only so much we can do,” warned the anaesthetist. “We’ll try to get him to breathe on his own later – but he has to want to help us.”

I’ve had a complex relationship with my father, a sometimes tricky, adorably eccentric and essentially kind family man. Now he was dying, with so much left unsaid. “You can talk to him,” said a nurse, sympathetically. “We think hearing is the last thing to go.” I whispered thanks to him for looking after me since I was 13 when my mother bolted; for my great education; and for being an incredible grandfather. I told him that I loved him. I begged him to live.

But standing amid the artificially ventilated bodies with my anguished half-sister, Dara, I was terrified – my fears fuelled by all the scare stories I’d read about the NHS. Weren’t these doctors exhausted and incompetent? Wasn’t Dad destined for a hospital-acquired infection? At his age, wouldn’t our father be a low priority? Wouldn’t these medics just leave him to die? Frantically, I phoned consultant friends in London, trying to engineer the best possible care.

Yet, while I panicked over the state of the health service, the John Radcliffe’s staff worked with professionalism and dedication. We were kept constantly informed. A doctor phoned and briefed my consultant friend so that I could discuss the prognosis with someone I trusted; the anaesthetist urged our family to eat: “You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

At midnight, Dad went into theatre. I prayed that my elder brother, David, flying from New York, would see him alive.

By 2.30am our father was in intensive care (ICU), off his ventilator – to the astonishment of doctors – conversing intelligently and joking. It was a miracle. And surreal. He had, according to doctors, defied all odds by surviving. The nurse showed me a Polaroid of his car, a Toyota. It looked like a foil wrapper crunched in the fist of a giant. He had only been saved by his airbag.

He stayed in ICU for a week. For four days, Dara slept in the relatives’ waiting room. My father’s condition remained critical, his breathing difficult, his heart irregular. There was the possibility he would contract pneumonia. Then he would have died. “It’s far harder being a relative than a patient in ICU,” remembered David, who had experienced intensive care after a spinal operation.

For 17 consecutive days, I drove the round trip from London. (In order to fit everything in, Simon would get to his desk in the antiques gallery founded by our father, at 5am.) It was physically and psychologically exhausting. Illness aside, Dad’s occasional morphine-induced confusion was frightening. “Did you put my V&A invitation in the orange juice?” he asked. Another time he smiled: “I’m on a boat.” (He’d been on a bedpan.) With the stress, my hair started to fall out in clumps; when I told Dara she said the same had happened to her.

We became part of a hidden community, patients’ relatives riding a terrifying roller-coaster. The young woman, careworn after three days of waiting to see if her sister was brain-damaged. The Lancashire couple, living in their mobile home in the car park, and despairing for their son whose pancreatic operation had left him on life support. “You don’t expect people to get infections in hospital,” said his father, tears welling in his eyes.

But, despite all my preconceptions, the nurses and doctors in ICU offered superlative medical care. They were also psychologically astute, honest but supportive. They always went the extra mile. One day, attaching an oxygen supply and face mask, they put our father in a wheelchair to enjoy the sun on the terrace. A nurse also put up with our touching belief in alternative therapies – decrying it as anecdotal, while authorising our use of Bach Rescue Remedy.

It was a tough decision whether to take our children, aged 12 and 10, to visit their grandfather at a unit where one woman wailed as if in permanent labour and many patients were wearing contraptions (metal halos) on their heads that looked better suited to a carpenter’s bench than a hospital. But the girls, distressed at not seeing him, wanted to go. Sensitively, nurses shielded them from the brutal sights by pulling the curtains around patients’ beds.

The demands on us as a family have been high. We’ve divided our father’s affairs among ourselves – as if dealing with a death but without the funeral arrangements. Paying bills, sorting insurance, cancelling appointments, arranging visitors, researching future medical care, taking him food and tending his dog, Pingu, who’d been in the accident with him and had a ruptured spleen. (A witness whisked him to the vet’s where, unbelievably, they performed an emergency splenectomy. Pingu is 14 – 98 years old in human terms – but his old age did not preclude treatment either.)

And as we faced the possibility of parental abandonment, rivalry, stresses and strains came to the fore. “It’s a myth that dysfunctional families suddenly pull together in a time of crisis,” said one friend, a family therapist. Instead, events have highlighted our family’s maladjustments. Perhaps a positive way to look at it is that we’ve had a dress rehearsal for a parent dying and can make changes before the final curtain.

Our father remained for two weeks in the trauma ward, one of the best in the country, where overstretched staff are as attentive as possible, efficient and reassuring. His private health insurance policy with Saga Health Plan proved to be a saga: he’d paid thousands, but at a lower premium because of agreeing to accept NHS care if the state could treat him within four weeks – thereby effectively nullifying his access to private healthcare for this condition. So he had to wait to be “repatriated” (as medics dub moving a patient to their local hospital) to Chelsea and Westminster on the NHS, as there wasn’t a bed for two weeks.

Meanwhile I’m counting my blessings. Sixty years since it began, we’ve experienced the NHS at its best. And this episode has enriched my relationship with my father. There’s the chance to love him for longer. His dog visited him yesterday: one patient hobbling on four legs, the other unable yet to stand unaided on two. Above all, staff at the John Radcliffe deserve nothing but praise. So, too, our father who, thanks to the NHS, has foiled the Grim Reaper this time.

FIRST there was Penny Hughes, Coca-Cola’s 35-year-old UK president who, newly pregnant, decided that motherhood was the real thing and abandoned her position and £250,000 salary.

Now the glossy magazine editors – the prototype You Can Have It All And More women – are, in the gleeful eyes of Tabloid Man, succumbing to the pressures of running home and magazine, getting their priorities straight and chucking in the latter for the former or, at least, for lower-paid freedom.

On Saturday Amanda Evans, editor of Homes and Gardens, quit for her home and garden. The week before, Linda Kelsey, the original Cosmo woman turned editor of She (the magazine to reclaim motherhood and help women juggle their lives), left, suffering from stress and wanting to spend more time with her son. And remember the recent exodus of five other female editors from National Magazine, publisher of Harpers & Queen to Good Housekeeping? You could imagine the babes at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Tatler and House and Gardens, cocking a snook and nappy at their National Magazine competitors. Instead, shivers have gone down their well-bred spines at the misogynist cries of ‘told you so’ and ‘you can’t run a company/magazine and raise a child’ in the Press.

Don’t you know, ask the Conde Nast girls, that Annie Holcroft, publishing director of Vanity Fair, brings her kids to the office? They watch Wombles videos while she negotiates million-dollar deals and sews name tags in their clothes. And that Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has an eight-month-old baby, a 12-year-old live-in stepdaughter and husband and the most glamorous job in the universe?

ALEXANDRA, 37, has Mother Earth’s long hair and ample breasts, Mama Nature’s clean face, grey cashmere jumper and high snakeskin shoes. The walls of her voluminous turquoise and peppermint office display not photographs of Linda and Naomi, but of her son, Sam. She is clever, she is successful. And she’s paid, partly, to meet glamorous people, to party, wear heavenly clothes and receive bucketloads of flowers. ‘Some days I think ‘having it all’ means that I am so lucky. Other days I think it means, ‘why have I got all this dumped on me?” laughs Alexandra, who was up at 5am with Sam. Does she think she’s good at her job? She pauses. ‘Sometimes.’ But her job is stressful. ‘I have to be available for people to talk to constantly, which is draining. Responsibility is stressful, as is travelling two and a half months a year, and trying to pack everything in so as to have time with Sam.” Alexandra says her husband Paul (writer Paul Spike) is probably the one who gets it when she gets home.

‘I sympathise with what I’ve read about Linda Kelsey,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been severely anxious twice in my life. Suddenly everything becomes too much and you decide to take time out. I’ve now learnt breathing techniques and how to notice when things are seriously pretty difficult. But I get terrible pressure headaches. Lavender oil and Rescue Remedy are very good.’ She crosses her arms self-protectively.

She believes the idea that women work because they want to have it all is a fallacy. ‘You work because you’re paying bills. That’s what most married women with children here are doing.’ Alexandra employs a daily, gardener, nanny and laundry woman. ‘Practically my whole salary goes on paying for help and my share of the mortgage. The nanny has more money to throw around, by far, than myself.’

That salary, it should be said, is not your average London career girl’s. ‘It’s under six figures!’ she protests. Paul also pays for the upkeep of his two children by a previous marriage. Alexandra took four and a half months’ maternity leave. ‘I looked after Sam non-stop and spent most of the time breast-feeding. The rest of the time I spent solidly trying to find a nanny. I interviewed millions of people.’

What were her feelings about work while she was on leave? ‘Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with coming back. I thought I’d miss Sam and be unable to do the job. On leave you become quite unconfident. But the transition was easier than I thought and ultimately I don’t have any desire to be at home on my own with a baby day after day. I’d become bored, unconfident and depressed.’

She was raised by a working mother, the etiquette writer Drusilla Beyfus. ‘I was brought up by the person I’m now becoming, only she was better organised. So I know exactly what it’s like having a working mother. Until I was about seven my mother didn’t have much to do with me. She had a nanny at weekends and nights and lots of other staff. I suspect that as a baby my relationship with her was not as it should be.’

BEING a working mother is difficult. ‘We’ve got it wrong in many ways. It’s not really feasible for women to work incredibly hard, be good mothers, lovers, wives, housekeepers. The more we try to do, the worse it is for us. The whole question of men and women’s roles in the partnership is something that hasn’t caught up with such developments. There is no other area in your life so unclearly defined.’ Sometimes, ‘like everybody’, she feels desperate to quit work. ‘A lot of the time I’d like a peaceful life. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you’re rushing so much of the time. Probably all of us have looked at more flexible, alternative, freelance or whatever ways of working. But money plays a great role in that. I’ve never been career-orientated. But I’ve always been motivated by the desire to earn money.’

ANNA Gonta has been in labour at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital since 5am. It’s now 10am. Her baby’s heart is fluctuating. Anna, who’s had an epidural, says she doesn’t feel any pain. But Arthur, her husband, clutches his stomach. ‘I feel pain here,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have this with the first one.’ Anna smiles weakly.

Now it’s 2pm. Anna, pushing and moaning, looks anguished. ‘The baby’s getting tired and distressed,’ says the midwife, in a plastic apron. The baby is in a difficult position, with its head facing upwards. Suddenly its head starts to appear. The midwife performs an episiotomy, cutting the perineum, but the cord is wound tightly round the baby’s neck. A bell is rung frantically.

Suddenly there are eight of us in the room. The baby’s heart rate is low, its breathing poor, its face blue-grey. It doesn’t cry. It’s not responding. It looks dead. The paediatrician rushes the baby over to a resuscitating unit, giving it oxygen, massaging it. A short time later the baby is well, pink and crying happily.

Next door Lindsay Bull is having an easier time. She’s had no pain relief. ‘Good girl, keep it coming,’ coaxes midwife Fiona Allison. Her husband sprays Lindsay’s face with Evian. Now she’s kneeling and wailing. Now pursing her lips. ‘Put your hand down and see what’s there,’ says Fiona. The baby’s head. ‘Oh my God,’ says Lindsay. The baby, her first, is born after just four hours. What are they going to call him? ‘Bradley?’ Lindsay replies, quizzically. ‘Er, all right then,’ says her husband, blankly. Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital (QCCH) is one of the world’s foremost maternity hospitals, a place of pioneering research and a centre of excellence, which has trained a third of the country’s consultant obstetricians and gynaecologists. And where they delivered the progeny of Patricia Hodge, Cilla Black, Karen Keating and the Aga Khan. But it’s also a hospital with an uncertain future – of not knowing whether it will be merged with Chelsea and Westminster or relocated to the Hammersmith. The problem is, of course, money.

In 1990 QCCH had a deficit of £1.5 million and faced closure because the governing body was unable to finance its relocation. Now the Hammersmith Hospital NHS Trust – of which QCCH is part – has a deficit of £8.5 million. The redoubtable Bunty Lewis, immaculately dressed and coiffured, looks as if she could run the hospital single-handed. Instead, she administers the appeal office on a full-time but voluntary basis. ‘I probably subsidise it a bit,’ she admits. She resurrected Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball and runs a ‘Babies’ Bawl’ children’s tea party for 300, raising £600,000 in six years for research and equipment. But hospitals should not rely on Bunties’ and debs’ photo-calls for funds.

We visit the Special Care Baby Unit – pronounced ‘Scibu’ in nursespeak. ‘Hands must be washed on entering and leaving unit,’ warns one sign. ‘Switch off all mobile telephones,’ alerts another. Kylie Ross, wearing floral dress and mournful expression, strokes 2lb Bailey’s back. Her baby is attached to tubes and breathing apparatus.

Joanne Tucker sits between incubators containing her two seven-week-old babies. She had given birth to triplets. ‘The third passed away after 14 days,’ she says. Now Joseph is 3lb 7oz and George five ounces lighter. ‘They’re my first but not my last,’ she confides. ‘Never again,’ stage whispers Joanne’s mother, Daisy Webster, joking. ‘I’m getting her sterilised.’

Nearby is the neo-natal ward. Here newsreader Pamela Armstrong’s son, AJ, lay 18 months ago. ‘When my baby was born, he wasn’t breathing and he didn’t have a heartbeat,’ says Pamela. He was rushed into a nuclear resonance magnetic imager – a magnet the size of a room – to check for brain damage. ‘Happily he was all right. But soon after he looked like spaghetti junction, millions of tubes going in and out. Other babies weighed less than a bag of sugar. They looked like stick insects.’ Miraculously most of these 11b babies thrive.

Sister Christina Tom-Johnston, a kindly midwife, counsels bereaved parents. ‘When a mother is about to lose her baby, I’m called to see her at the delivery suite,’ she says. Recently she saw someone whose baby was anencephalic (born with no brain). ‘Due to her religious beliefs, she didn’t want a termination.’

When a baby dies, Christina helps arrange the funeral, accompanies the parents to it, and follows up by telephone. She also runs support groups, and annual remembrance services at Acton Hill Church. ‘We had a congregation of 150 this year, representing 50 dead babies over three years,’ she says. ‘I give the parents daffodils and a candle bearing their baby’s name. The parents come forward when I call out the babies’ names. I’m usually crying myself by this time. Then I light the candle and put it on a table and it burns until the end of the service.’

Fortunately new-born deaths are a rarity. For 99 per cent of the babies born at the hospital – nearly 4,500 babies a year – the outcome is happy. QCHH is a world leader in fetal medicine, boasting Britain’s largest Centre for Fetal Care. Here Professor Nick Fisk’s team has become the first in the world to offer ‘tele-medicine’, which allows the transfer of distant ultrasound scanning images down phone lines to waiting specialists. They received one of the country’s first Siemens scanners allowing detection of any foetal abnormality before the 12th week of pregnancy, often permitting it to be corrected in utero. Here they showed last year for the first time that the unborn child can feel pain in the womb. And here Dr Michael de Swiet, one of only two obstetric physicians in the country, specialises in the medical problems of pregnancy.

It’s also QCCH that pioneered ultrasound; fetal heart monitoring; screening expectant mothers for rubella; Maggie Campbell’s innovative One-to-One midwifery practice – allowing the woman the same midwife throughout her pregnancy and post-natal period for continuity of care – human milk banks, special care baby units, fetal blood sampling, in utero blood transfusions, the mobile epidural; plus the country’s only post-natal depression clinic. This month they’re also starting the country’s first clinic for teenagers, allowing them to discuss gynaecological difficulties in confidence.

Now senior obstetrician John Malvern is running an antenatal clinic, wearing white coat and name label. His current patient, 26-year-old Carol Brown, is on her sixth pregnancy since 1989. ‘A decent sort of gap between pregnancies,’ says John, with an ironic smile. He’ll need his sense of humour. He’s delivering my first born in June.

I’M ON MY back on a bed with my legs over a woman’s shoulders. She pulls my supine body. Suddenly a man in an anorak appears on the roof outside the window of her first-floor Beauchamp Place room.

“Oh, don’t worry about him. They’re all fur coat and no drawers around here,” the woman responds curiously.

The woman is Chryssie Fitzgerald, Princess Diana’s personal health therapist. Yesterday she was exposed in the News Of The World as a former Madam and dominatrix.

Chryssie, 45, was convicted by Marylebone magistrates in 1983 for running a brothel. Now she runs an alternative health clinic in Knightsbridge and is married to Keith Rodrigues, who taught Diana kick-boxing.

I met Chryssie last month for my first and only treatment. As she pulled my legs over her shoulders, she said the position would help elongate my spine and alleviate my back problem.

It wasn’t a technique that had been used on me during four years of physiotherapy and osteopathy, but no matter. At least I was fully clothed. And I assume the man on the roof was inspecting the gutter. My appointment had been hard to get. I was six months pregnant, suffering from sinus and reckoned reflexology would be kinder on Junior than antibiotics. Outside the clinic is a sign displaying the Chinese word for health. You ring the bell to be let in at street level, then knock to have the door upstairs unlocked. Chryssie has a genial, caring presence but surprises with her looks. She has neither a trim figure nor radiant complexion to make a client envy her therapies. But she has a rousing manner that would enthuse the residents of an old people’s home. The room contains a little bit of alternative everything, apparently in the hope that something might work. I saw a huge amethyst trained, I think she said, on the pituitary; a framed poem (or was it a prayer?) to the colon; feng shui mirrors; statuettes of cats; certificates for her non-surgical facelifts and some unpronounceable Chinese treatments.

Chryssie starts massaging my feet to release blocked energy, hoping to fight disease in related parts of the body.

She treats the person as a whole, attending every acupuncture point. “Bless you little toe, ah, bless you,” she whispers, pummelling my toe. She looks me straight in the eyes and is a friendly, no-nonsense type. She asks me what I do. I say I am a journalist, and ask for an interview. She agrees, sets a date and suggests I have colonic irrigation – an idea at which I balk. I can do without the introduction of warm filtered water into my intestines.

I look out for Princess Diana in the waiting room as I leave, but she is not there, neither is another client, Rula Lenska. Instead there are a couple of rastafarians.

I pay £40 for my appointment. Chryssie gives me a hug and tells me to sit down and drink a cup of fruit tea. It takes away the nasty taste of the Bach flower remedy, a potion made from plants to deal with my emotional symptoms.

Later Chryssie’s receptionist cancels our proposed interview an hour before we are due to meet. “Chryssie had a miscarriage four, I mean two, months ago and needs time to get over it,” she explains. I call five times subsequently, but she does not reply. The next I hear of her is in the Sunday papers.

IT IS undisputed that hospital admission for asthma has increased steadily in Britain over the past 20 years; for children, the admissions graph goes uphill at 45 degrees. One in 10 suffer from asthma, a huge increase over the past few years. Nitrogen dioxide from exhaust fumes has been similarly increasing in the air: twice as high as 20 years ago.

Children on bicycles, engulfed in a cloud of exhaust smoke from a passing bus, accompany worried articles about our smelly and damaged world. It is surprising, then, to hear from two world experts that the incidence of asthma is no higher in cities than it is in the country. A recent survey in Scotland found that it was just as bad in Skye as in the centre of Aberdeen. Another survey compared post-Cold War industrial East Germany to clean West Germany and, again, found levels just the same.

And as for the hated ozone layer, Peter Barnes, Professor of thoracic medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital, says: “You’d expect the ozone level to be higher in cities, but it’s not. Ozone is formed by nitrogen dioxide and oxygen coming together, catalysed by sunlight. In the city, the ozone reacts again with the nitrogen dioxide to form oxygen. So the levels of ozone are actually higher in the country.”

Really knowledgeable people, like Professor Barnes and Dr Andy Bush, Senior Lecturer in Paediatrics at Royal Brompton, are willing to admit ignorance. The underlying cause of asthma remains a mystery, and the two experts do not pretend otherwise. “There are two issues,” said Dr Bush. “What is causing asthma in the first place; and if you’ve got asthma, what makes it worse?

“There’s quite a lot of evidence that pollutants can make asthma worse if you’ve got it, but I suspect they’re not actually causing asthma.” But the disorder attracts theories from the under-informed as irresistibly as cot death, anorexia, ME or any other mysterious medical horror of modern life.

Anti-pollutionists blame the increase on exhaust fumes; anti-smoking campaigners point to women smoking during pregnancy; anti-stress obsessives say it is overwork and anti-central-heating fanatics blame house-dust mites, a warm, modern house being a breeding paradise.

In trying to find answers, volunteers – asthmatic and non-asthmatic – undergo grim tests. They endure up to six hours in various kinds of polluted air in an exposure chamber, sometimes working on an exercise bicycle. “The tests are controversial,” said Professor Barnes, “because to get any effect you have to use high levels of pollution. If you do tests with nitrogen dioxide, you can’t detect the effects; but what seems to happen in real air is that if you have nitrogen dioxide mixed with sulphur dioxide, then you do have an effect.

“That’s the concern: pollutants are amplifying each other, and the combinations are what cause trouble.”

WHAT is clear is that asthmatics are all different and no one theory will account for all cases. Sylvia Dowding is south-east regional organiser for the National Asthma Campaign. Its aims are to fund research, build awareness and offer support. Her son, 25, had severe childhood asthma which is now controlled. Mrs Dowding feels that pollution can be a trigger. “If asthma is there already, pollution can bring it on. But when my son was young he had to spend a night in London for some tests. We thought the city air might be dreadful for him, but actually we had one of the best nights ever. It just shows how individual the problem is.”

The pollution theory is positively harmful, she says. “People might think, well, there’s nothing to be done, and give up taking medication, or give up trying to find the true reasons for it.”

Her son has been a smoker since he was 15, with no ill-effects on his asthma. “You need a tube to soothe the tube” as the wry asthmatic Joe Follows says to the hero of Ferdinand Mount’s novel Of Love and Asthma – a charming love story written by a man who knows just what it is like to be “a member of the great community of the bronchially strangulated”. The smoking asthmatic, like the chocolate-eating fatty or the one-lunged long-distance cyclist, is simply putting two fingers up to health theorists. Surely a good thing, even if it is medically slightly mad?

Dr Bush, though, has a thing about smoking and is convinced – though it is still only a theory – that passive smoking is an underlying cause of asthma. He cites a study in the Isle of Wight which showed that women who smoke in pregnancy are more likely to have babies with childhood asthma. In the second half of pregnancy, the baby’s tubes increase in size, but they don’t if the mother smokes. “The Government has breathtaking hypocrisy when campaigning for the health of the nation while allowing cigarette advertising,” he says. “Smoking in front of a child is a form of child abuse. My 15-year-old son tells me that about three-quarters of his friends are smoking.”

What the great doctor says may well be true, but there is a whiff of the hobby horse in his words.

Asthma is also being diagnosed more than it used to be and doctors admit that this is part of the reason why numbers are going up. ‘A lot of grown-ups say, ‘I always had a bad chest’,” said one south London GP. ‘Now almost any child who gets slightly wheezy at night is said to have asthma.” PROFESSOR Barnes said: ‘But an attack is an attack. You can’t hide it. And the increase in hospital admissions shows that asthma is getting worse.” In the waiting room at Dr Bush’s paediatric clinic, there were different things said about the pollution question.

The mother of Toni Watson, 16, from Shoreham-by-Sea, said: ‘We moved to the coast: we thought it would be the end of Toni’s asthma. But it’s been far worse. Perhaps it’s the main roads nearby, or the factories. We don’t know. We took Toni to Disney World in Florida in 1993 and for that whole fortnight she was fine. My other daughter has no problems with allergies in London, but when she stays with us she’s always coughing and sneezing.” The mother of Esther Grew, 13, said: ‘I do believe pollution makes it worse. We live at Wallington in Surrey. It used to be a village, now it’s so busy with cars going through to Croydon, it’s disgusting.”

Mike Lacey, father of nine-year-old Rasmus, said: ‘We live at Heston, three-quarters of a mile from the runway at Heathrow. We moved from Denmark last year. Rasmus hadn’t had any trouble there but it’s been really bad here.”

Farah, 11, who goes to Graveney School in Tooting, added: ‘I always take my inhaler before games: swimming and PE bring my attacks on. My asthma’s about the same in the town and in the country. But I’m allergic to cats.’ Mrs Turner, mother-of-three from Chingford, said: ‘My son has hay fever, my daughter Robin has asthma and the baby has the first signs of eczema. I’ve asked the doctor, ‘Where should we live? I want to get rid of this’. But there’s no simple answer. And you can’t get a doctor to tell you that traffic pollution’s bad for asthma. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy, to stop everyone moving out of towns into the country.”

The diary of a sufferer JOE Pitura-Riley (now three) would shout, scream and cough at night, and awaken at least six times, writes Caroline Phillips. His mother Annette was exhausted and could never sleep more than two hours for being at her son’s side.

If ever Annette or husband David, a corporate video presenter, allowed Joe into the chilly garden, he’d be wheezy and chesty. If Joe even ran to the bottom of the garden, he would gasp and rasp. And whenever he caught a cold, it would go straight to his chest and he’d have to be hospitalised. Joe was admitted to Guy’s hospital six times between the ages of 18 months and eight years.

The first time Annette took him to hospital, he was eight months old. She was traumatised. ‘I asked the doctor whether Joe was going to die,” says Annette, 33, a literature student.‘He had started to turn blue and looked so scared. I felt so helpless for this little baby who couldn’t get air into his lungs.”