Mark Henley Photography

Marie in her 80s, on her way to bingo, distracted by her handbag snagging on a bush, not seeing the pothole in the pavement - something that locals say that they had repeatedly complained to the council about. She was there, hidden by the bushes for half an hour before someone found her, and raised the alarm. An alarm that fell flat – the strained emergency services insisted that she should not be moved until the ambulance arrived. It’s just that the ambulance wasn’t going to be there for three hours – three hours in which the pain Marie was in – half trapped by her chair – was only going to get worse, and the consequences greater. In the end, they set off her alarm, and the police came, and were, when I left, in the process of putting pressure on the ambulance dispatch to come more quickly. In the foreground is Viki who came from Lithuanian 12 years ago. It was she who found Marie, and then stayed to brief the police while others drifted away.