Wensum Column: Wife’s injury in Wales led to appreciation for East Anglia Air Ambulance

In his weekly column, Fakenham writer Jim Harding discusses his wife’s injury which led to a growing appreciation for the air ambulance service...

I have just received my regular sheaf of spring raffle tickets from the East Anglian Air Ambulance.

This is a charity I have supported for many years and will continue to do so with no particular expectation on my part of winning one of the cash prizes.

Of course, that would be a very acceptable outcome – but I cannot forget our family’s debt to the Welsh branch of this amazing group which came to our rescue when we were on holiday over there.

My wife and I, along with our youngest son, had driven out to a favourite bit of countryside on a day following some wet weather.

We parked by the roadside above a steep-ish slope and I made my way down towards a fast-flowing stream, with youngest keen to accompany me. Alison started out soon after.

We’d just about got to the river when I heard a cry for help just above me. Alison had slipped on the very wet slope and caught her leg underneath her as she fell. Unable to walk and obviously in serious trouble, it was emergency time – so I scrambled back up to her and the road to seek help.

There was no phone contact in that isolated spot, but I managed to stop a car and sought their help to call the emergency services in the next village just a few miles along.

This they did while we took refuge together and hoped for the best. Amazingly, and within an hour or so, a helicopter came into sight and hovered above to decide a course of action as to where it might land.

There was little flat space, but considering the emergency of the situation they needed to be as close as possible. In the end the helicopter put down on a marshy patch by the river within some forty yards of where we were stranded.

I had never thought this would be possible, but in quick time a stretcher party scrambled across to us. After some injury assessment, they were able to carry Alison to what was, in effect, an ambulance.

It quickly took her on board and then took off for the nearest trauma hospital which was, in fact, across the border in England. Her broken ankle needed an operation to pin the bones and she had to stay for a week to recuperate.

We had just finished our holiday week at a favourite farmhouse and were due to transfer to another location not too far away for a second week. Plans were all of a sudden in disarray.

Despite her situation, Alison insisted we two go ahead with the holiday and do our best to visit her in hospital. As it happened, this worked fairly well – and with the distance not too demanding we were able to make a couple of trips to cheer her up.

My son and I otherwise made the best of a bad job to enjoy our second holiday home and explore its surroundings. Sometimes the best laid plans can go awry and this was one of those occasions.

So if you have stayed with me so far, you will know why I try to keep faith with the East Anglian branch of the Air Ambulance, to do my best to support the invaluable work they do right around our county.

One of my favourite travel writers is Levison Wood, who has walked his way over vast distances and through quite a few countries also familiar to me in my younger days as a rucksack traveller in the Middle East, the Far East and both Central and South America.

You get the gist of his themes from the titles of his books – ‘Walking the Himalayas’, ‘Walking the Americas’ and ‘Eastern Horizons’. Having read them all, I’m still wondering how this tough adventurer into the unknown is still alive.

Risk-taking is part and parcel of every ‘expedition’ and he seems to have survived more than his fair share of crisis moments. Rather than acting as a deterrence, these setbacks only seem to have spurred him on.

In an early book when he sometimes sought a lift, he made this remark: “Hitchhiking was unpredictable and often down to sheer luck but it was a great way to meet people.”

It might well be a dangerous game these days, and I rarely spot hitchers any more on our roads or elsewhere. In the 1960s and 70s, however, it was almost a way of life for many young people – and I would certainly not have got around the world the way I did without so much help and kindness from so many strangers.

There were a couple of accidents, but all in all the whole exploit was not only memorable but included some of the best experiences of my life.