When Alison was an 18 month old child, she survived a freakish accident at her Grandparents' home in Connecticut in America ...
"I was the youngest of 9 grandchildren. As the story goes, my grandfather walked through the house and anounced that he was going off in the car someplace and issued a general invitation. The story is that I followed him out of the house and he didn't notice. He got into his big american car, and I can just imagine him sort of throwing this big automatic car into reverse, revving the engine and backing it out of the garage. I was on the driveway at that time. He felt a bump, stopped the car and got out and started to scream - because I was the bump. At that point I was pinned right underneath the wheel of about 2 tons of car.
The next thing that happened was my mother heard a commotion and came out and she was first on the scene. Very calmly she said to him to get back in the car and drive off me. He did that. She picked me up and I wasn't breathing … It seems amazing though … She picked me up and started to walk back to the house. The story as it goes is that my grandmother was just coming out of the front door at that time and mother carrying me, kind of marhcing up the driveway saying "Mummy call an ambulance, Alison's dead, and Daddy's having a heart attack.."
But a few seconds later Alison began to breath again, and her grandfather was, quite understandably, distraught, but not having a heart attack. Alison was driven by her parents to the local hospital and went home about 5 hours later. There was,astoundingly, no internal damage. "I think I was quite solid, burly little thing. There were tyre marks on my back! They stayed around for the whole summer and were quite notable. My eyes were quite red from the burst capilleries."
There were differing family views on the effect the accident had on Alison's grandfather, "My father, said, 'Oh it's OK. It's great. You survive, and no hard feelings.' But I also spoke my mother's sister about this, and she described it as a real turning point - his children and his wife really lost respect for him…"
Was Alison perceived as a rather special child by the entire family? "Yes, I think so - 'She came back from the dead - she survived That Thing..' although it's not really brought up now, it's a kind of family myth. The newspapers didn't pick up on it at the time, but something happened many years later which gave Alison a jolt and a taste of what kind of notoriety she might have had, "At a big museum opening, someone I knew introduced me to a woman, and she said, 'You're not the Alison Green who grew up in Stonington, are you?' I said, 'Yes, I am' And she said, 'Oh! You were the child with the tyre marks on her back!' It was very odd for someone to walk up to me in this context and know me for that reason.
How did it affect Alison in the long-term? Does she have a fear of cars for instance? "I'm a little bit claustrophobic in certain situations. One time I needed to get under my car to look at something dripping and I had a powerful feeling that I just could not do it, and I sat there 20 minutes struggling. I knew at that moment that it had some deep relationship to this event that had happened that I'd never really perceived before."
As she grew older, did Alison begin to realise how truly astonishing her survival had been? "I don't really remember it. I think my whole relationship with it is as a story, because of how it was told to me. I did have an experience when I saw a newspaper article tacked to a wall which described the same scenario of a car backing out over a child around my age - but with fatal consequences. Suddenly this story that I had been telling … it took on a different form. I'd told this as an amazing miraculous thing - as a bit of a dinner party conversation. But this article made me realise and it just blew me away!
