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.

As Europe’s largest arts festival draws to a close, Caroline Phillips braves the mud and rain to rub shoulders with the clever, the famous and the passionate

‘Bill Clinton said Hay is like Woodstock of the mind’

The venue for drinks with the “man who used to be the next president” is Top Secret – for security reasons. Guests are to be taken (blindfolded?) by bus to an unknown destination. Given directions just minutes before it starts, I go by car. It’s easy to find. Outside the “secret” location flies a state-sized American flag and security men stand ready to prevent, er, blood and gore.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president and self-dubbed “recovering politician”, is on the lawn outside the Penrhos Court Hotel, an organic establishment where they serve nettle soup. He’s hotfooted it here from Cannes where his documentary about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, was showing. Now he’s come to persuade audiences at the Hay Festival – Europe’s largest arts festival – of the dire consequences of global warming.

He could also be a presidential contender for 2008, despite assurances that he’s a “recovering politician”. “Are you planning a relapse?” I inquire. He grips his champagne glass tightly and then breaks into a smile. “Very unlikely,” he replies.

Gore is a large man – six foot three-ish with a girth to match – and sports a black suit and cowboy boots. “Cowboy boots!” I point rudely but as he and I are both Hay virgins, I feel we’re kindred spirits.

“I came prepared,” he responds. “Bill [Clinton] said the Hay Festival is like the Woodstock of the mind. There was a lot of mud at Woodstock.”

The festival, brainchild of the energetic and clever Peter Florence, artistic director, started in 1987 with 15 speakers meeting for a weekend in the tiny Brecon Beacons village. Now it attracts megawatt guests – aside from Clinton, Paul McCartney, Susan Sontag, John Updike and Donna Tartt have all been lured here. (When the late Arthur Miller was invited to talk, the response came: “Is Hay-on-Wye a sandwich?”) It is now a scorchingly hot social event – a sort of Serpentine Gallery summer party in Wales.

My first discovery about Hay is that it takes 700 hours to get there in half-term holiday traffic. Some put the time to good use: Bloomsbury editor Bill Swainson bought the UK rights to Gore’s latest book by Blackberry while sitting in a layby.

I was unprepared for the sheer scale of Hay, a Glastonbury for colour supplement readers. Two years ago, the festival moved from the village to a vast tented metropolis in a field. This year, there were more than 80,000 visitors and nearly 400 events with guests including Seamus Heaney, Simon Callow, Zadie Smith and Sebastian Faulks. Virtually everything sold out.

One rule of Hay is that it always rains. There’s a tractor to help vehicles out of the paddy fields. On site, even the Guardian came with a pac-a-mac, which pre-empted jokes about wet liberals. If there are any inaccuracies in this article, it’s because most of my scribblings were washed away. “Being in the mud and rain brings out the best in Brits,” Margaret Atwood told me. At least, I think that’s what my notes say.

Mostly, the weather dictates the dress code. Anoraks and boots. Boots and anoraks. Literary agent Caroline Michel went a little further in waisted lime-green coat dress and, minutes later, a pale silver outfit with heels as high as the Brecon Hills.

Meanwhile, Tanny Gordon, wife of John (he’s the grand fromage of achingly fashionable Intelligence Squared, which runs university-style debates for London’s chattering classes) stepped into the mud in satin Marni pumps. The couple were accosted every step of their regal way with offers to speak in John’s debates.

Hay is a melting pot for political, socio, economic, arty and literary ideas, and its audiences are super-informed. Scary. David Hare gave a stimulating talk on theatre and politics while a few muddy steps away abstract painter Howard Hodgkin “talked” to Simon Schama. Hodgkin answered in monosyllables. Antony Gormley stayed for two minutes then joined the throngs walking out.

In another tent, professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens was in mid-brilliant discourse on Thomas Paine and the rights of man when someone’s mobile rang. “Who the f— is that?” he asked the thousand-plus audience. “We know where you live. We know where your children go to school.” Then he lit another cigarette, drank yet more whisky and donned sunglasses. The line worked less well in his afternoon gig. Ring, ring. “We know where you go to school,” said Hitch, staring unsteadily at the offender.

This ideas fest was punctuated with a visit to Giffords Circus, a psychedelic, bohemian annual spectacular. Even the audience was surreal. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager whose experience of genocide was powerfully told in Hotel Rwanda, sat beside Joanna Trollope and Sheila Hancock. Germaine Greer arrived late, with steam coming out of her ears.

Channel 4 held its elegant party in the grounds of Hay Castle. Security was tight because Gore was on the guest list. But the circus troupe crashed it disguised as “distinguished authors” – all elected to come either as Rosie Boycott or Atwood. Inside, there was a buzz about Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a film inspired by the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers’ drownings.

I’m very glad I lost my virginity. Just like Gore, I can envisage a comeback.

As an infant, Anna Rose O’Sullivan had pigeon toes – now she is a pirouetting princess. Caroline Phillips reports

When Anna Rose O’Sullivan was 10 months old, her mother, Jacinta, feared that her daughter might never walk properly. The infant’s feet turned inwards and she walked on her ankles. Jacinta’s mind was filled with visions of splints, braces and corrective shoes. In severe cases of pigeon toes, she discovered later, remedial surgery is required.

This weekend, Anna Rose, now aged 10, will dance the lead role in the London Children’s Ballet revival of A Little Princess – standing on her tip-toes and turning out her feet perfectly for the demanding part of Sara Crewe, a little girl left orphaned, penniless and at the mercy of the wicked Miss Minchin. She dances for most of the 90-minute performance.

“One week, we rehearsed for five hours every day,” says Anna Rose. She has also just taken over as Cosette in the long-running musical Les Miserables.

“It’s quite a big part,” says Anna Rose, proudly.

The sitting room of the O’Sullivans’ modern Uxbridge home is filled with silver ballet trophies.

“Upstairs,” says Anna Rose, “I have 24 ballet medals.”

Pigeon toes – also called in-toeing – occurs when the front of the foot is turned to face the other foot, and – like bowlegs, flat feet or knock-knees – is a common condition in children.

“Pigeon toes is a general term. It’s nearly as unspecific as `backache’,” explains John Strachan, who worked as orthopaedic surgeon to the Royal Ballet for 31 years. “It usually has postural or anatomical roots. For example, if the hip isn’t positioned correctly, the foot will turn in to compensate. The toes themselves aren’t usually deformed. It’s just a description of gait and the position of the feet.”

Rarely, the condition is caused by a twist in the thigh or shin bone, or an abnormal curvature of the foot (metatarsus adductus). In most cases of in-toeing, the problem corrects itself naturally by the time the child reaches school age – which was the case with Anna Rose. As muscles strengthen and the bones grow, they straighten out.

Nobody knows for sure why the condition occurs. One theory is that it is the result of crowding in the uterus. When a baby’s hips, shins or feet are squashed in utero, they may turn in as they develop. This is more likely if the mother is carrying her first child or twins, or has reduced amniotic fluid.

“Anna Rose was a big baby – nine and a half pounds,” says Jacinta.

Generally, in-toeing doesn’t affect athletic ability. But, in serious cases, it can cause a child to trip and fall. In the past, special shoes, splints and leg braces were used, but they are rarely prescribed now, as they have had little effect in speeding up the natural, slow improvement.

Typically, in-toeing appears between the age of a year and 18 months, when the infant begins to stand. Jacinta noticed the problem when Anna Rose started to walk.

“Two of her adult relations suffer from it, on both sides of the family,” she says. “So I was terrified it was going to be a permanent condition.”

“If there’s an anatomical problem, it could be genetically linked, but this is rare,” says Strachan. “For Anna Rose, it sounds more like a coincidence.”

Jacinta took her daughter to the family doctor. There, her fears were dispelled. Anna Rose’s in-toeing wasn’t severe.

“The doctor thought her knee turned in, making her walk like that,” says Jacinta. “He said it might correct itself when she came out of nappies – because wearing them distorts the way you stand. Then, I worried about it cosmetically. It was very unsightly.”

The GP suggested that Anna Rose should wear sturdy boots with ankle support and an arch to strengthen her insteps. He also recommended regular foot massages and advised Jacinta to take her to ballet classes as soon as possible.

“Every time I changed her nappies, I’d massage her feet from inside ankle to toe for a few minutes,” says Jacinta.

Just before Anna Rose’s third birthday, Jacinta started taking her to ballet twice a week.

“Standing in an out position helps strengthen the muscles and makes your feet and legs strong,” says Strachan. “Ballet helps as long as there’s no underlying anatomical problem – which is generally the case. It’s important because the child is doing something enjoyable, but learning to walk with the feet facing out.”

Earlier this year, Jacinta took Anna Rose to a ballet physiotherapist. Ever greater dancing demands are being made of her and Jacinta wanted reassurance that her daughter had no anatomical problems that might one day prevent her from dancing.

The physiotherapist stretched and manipulated her feet at length, then declared her body to be perfect for ballet.

“More than anything,” says Anna Rose, “I want to be a prima ballerina with the Royal Ballet when I grow up.”

A Little Princess is at the Peacock Theatre, Sadler’s Wells from tonight until Sunday.