My toddler, my wife and the sitting room car crash

18/05/2009

It's not everyday my sitting room is the site of a car crash. Now, fortunately, I can't claim that a vehicle crashed through my front garden, breaking the structure of the brickwork before coming to a standstill just beside the sofa, but I can claim that the accident did result in the least suspecting of pedestrians suffering personal injury.

Are you perplexed? Well, if so, you're not the only one.

The car crash in question involved a rather a rather exclusive vehicle and the driver (to stretch a definition) was only three years old.

Now, before anyone arrests me for letting my son take control of a vintage Jaguar Daimler, I would like to preface news of the incident by saying that it was only a Burrago model. He had been playing with it at the top of the stairs, making excited "broom, broom" noises when, like most toddlers, he couldn't resist the temptation to push it from the precipice. Problem was that instead of steering a straight course, it careered sideways, bursting through the balustrade, from where it dropped four feet to land on my wife's head.

My wife, who just the same afternoon had been due to have an important meeting was now clearly not going to make it. In fact, for a while I wasn't sure whether she would make it at all…

Her tongue moved to the front of her mouth and her eyes rolled to the whites; she had completely lost consciousness.

Now, one can imagine the distress involved - not only for wife and I, but also for the "perpetrator".

He went as pale as my wife herself. And just as quiet. Slowly, through the silence of his shock, a soft and sorrowful whimper began to emerge. I guess you might call it the sound of repentance, were it not for the fact that it was really only an accident: one cannot hold a toddler to the same standards of liability as one would an adult.

Still, as most of us would do, he held himself completely responsible. "Is mummy dead?" he asked, before answering his own question, "I've killed mummy."

Fortunately, my wife began to glaze into consciousness. Soon - though after what seemed hours - she started to blink, bringing my anxious face into view and with no recollection of what have happened.

We called NHS direct and followed their advice to watch for alarm signs. She seems okay now and is even up to some mother-son bonding again.

I guess our greatest worry now is our son. It was the kind of incident that has the potential to be truly traumatising, as traumatising perhaps even as a real car crash. He must have said sorry today more times than he has in the past twelve months and, for once, he really sounds like he means it.

Can I claim?