Driving conditions were cold and crispy but not icy and as we were driving along the road to find the house we wanted to view, my husband spotted some miniature ponies in a field to our left. Tabitha was getting bored, so my husband called out to her to point them out. I turned round to look at her and saw she had started to get agitated for no apparent reason. I turned my head back round to the windscreen and as I did so the front left-hand wheel hit a patch of mud. The car immediately veered off to the left, got sucked into the grass and was flung back out again onto the road. My husband was braking furiously and I could see a burgundy-coloured estate car to our right, so I just grabbed the steering wheel with my right hand and pulled as hard as I could to balance the out-of-control car. I was successful, but then a female voice said to me, ‘Get the baby now!’
In a panic I turned to look and realized we were now heading straight for a tree. The vehicle was now totally out of control and I knew we weren’t going to brake in time. We were going to hit the tree at a speed of over 50 miles per hour.
I spun back round again to discover that Tabitha had opened her seatbelt and was in the process of climbing out of her car seat. She would almost certainly go through the window. She was already halfway out of her seatbelt, crying her eyes out and screaming at the top of her voice. I had to make an instant decision: either try and strap her back in again whilst my own seatbelt was undone or bring her into the front with me. In a split-second I hauled her into the front and put the seatbelt around us both. Then I put my feet up on the dashboard and shut my eyes.
As the impact happened I straightened my legs to take the full force of it. The massive jolt shot through my legs and body and I felt the seatbelt tighten and pain sear across my right shoulder and breast. Glass shattered everywhere.
As soon as we stopped I unclipped the belt with the intention of getting out of the car and away from all the wreckage as quickly as possible. Then I realized my daughter wasn’t breathing very well and was making choking noises. She was struggling to get air. Then, terrifyingly, she stopped breathing completely!
I was panic stricken. I screamed at the top of my lungs, ‘Someone help my baby! Please, someone help her!’ over and over again.
Suddenly a dark-haired lady appeared from nowhere with a blanket. I was puzzled as to where she might have come from. When I asked her, she indicated a nearby house.
Just then, an ambulance appeared from over the hill. Then I became aware of another car, a white car, which had stopped, and I saw a phone in the hand of the person in it, so I assumed they had phoned for an ambulance. The police then appeared also, but I was too intent on what was happening with my daughter to take in many details. All this while, though, the dark-haired lady who had been soothing Tabitha and who had brought her a blanket was calmly singing and hovering her hand over her chest.
I had never felt so helpless in my life! I could still hear my own voice begging and pleading for help. Then the back doors of the ambulance were flung open and the paramedics were there. My shoulder and breast were agony, but I handed my daughter over to them and climbed into the back of the ambulance along with her. I watched them rip her clothes off, hook the monitors up to her and give her oxygen.
In a panic I turned to the dark-haired woman and asked who she was. ‘I am a nurse,’ she replied. ‘Your daughter, she will live, don’t worry.’
I wanted to stop and speak to her, but the doors of the ambulance closed rapidly and the sound of the siren started blaring in the background. My husband remained at the scene, unaware if his daughter was alive or dead.
A huge team of paramedics and paediatric consultants was waiting for us when we drew up outside the hospital. I was told to wait in the relatives’ room as my daughter was whisked into the emergency room. As she was taken away, I just caught sight of her eyes as they closed in a look of sheer terror. I didn’t know if I would see my baby alive again. The agony of waiting seemed eternal.
Eventually a nurse came to get me and asked me to go with her. I ran up the corridor and burst into the emergency room. My little girl was lying there with her head turned to the wall. My heart stopped. Was she…? No! Suddenly, her head turned to me and she called out, ‘Mummy!’ and put her little hand out to me. I just ran to her.
The doctor told me, ‘She is one very lucky little lady. We thought she was a “gonner”, but she suddenly stabilized. She will have to be kept in for a few days for observation, but we are hopeful she will make a full recovery.’
‘Can I touch her?’ I asked.
‘Of course. She could probably do with a cuddle.’
I was so grateful. The doctors and the police said that if I hadn’t hauled my daughter into the front with me she would most certainly have gone through the windscreen and been killed. I had taken the full impact on my legs and this had saved her life. (My legs were massively bruised but not broken. My right shoulder and breast were bruised so badly that even I didn’t recognize my own body, but otherwise I was OK.)
The strange thing was that I still had the blanket that the woman had wrapped around my baby to keep her warm, but no one else at the accident had even seen her. Afterwards I went back to the area, but I never found the owner of the blanket. So I still have it—and the reassurance she gave me. That woman had cared for my baby and soothed her and wrapped her to keep her warm. I think I just might have had the privilege of meeting my daughter’s guardian angel!
Safely Steering
I think this next story has a little guardian angel attached to it too:
My late parents lived in a bungalow with a curved drive that carried on to the bottom of a slope and ended at a kerb. One day as they turned into the drive going down the slope the brakes of their car failed. Although the car was not going very fast, my father, who was driving, realized that without following the drive completely they would smash into a large glass window in the building at the bottom of the drive.
As he reached the end of the drive, to avoid going over the kerb, he made a split-second decision (which he never understood) to turn the steering wheel to the right, which took the car between a large brick wall and a waist-high wall on the left. In between was a set of about 10 concrete steps ending in a playground. Both my parents say they closed their eyes as they went between the walls and opened them as the car stopped. When they opened their eyes again the car had come to a complete stop and it was totally intact. Neither of them could believe it, as the car appeared to be much wider than the gap they seemed to have driven through.
After they had calmed down my parents fetched a tape measure to measure the gap, which actually proved to be narrower than the car itself. Also, a mechanic they asked to look at the car confirmed that the brakes were still not working! Neither of them had felt the car going down any steps, only feeling it stop at the bottom.
It’s a real mystery, but my mother always claimed she called out to angels as she closed her eyes. She always believed in them!
A Car Warning and Seeing a Brother
Elizabeth is from Australia. She can recall two different occasions when she felt her angels were with her.
She explained. ‘The first time I was driving to work and it was dark. It was 6 a.m. and the car coming towards me was overtaking another car.’
The car shot past Elizabeth in the middle of the road and gave her a bit of a shock because it seemed to come so close. She recalls:
I had to brake really hard and I was pretty shaken up, but then when I looked again, there were no cars on the road at all. I know I hadn’t imagined it, but I’ve no idea where the cars had suddenly disappeared to!
What had Elizabeth seen? She was confused. She told me, ‘I thanked my angel and proceeded on my journey.’
Elizabeth wondered if the experience was a sign of some sort. Maybe it meant she should slow down? She decided she would