I have always been overcome with weariness, bordering on disdain, when people bore on about allergies – “I’m wheat-intolerant”; “I cannot be in a room with a latex glove”; “I have to avoid mouse droppings at all costs”. I’ve lumped them with those who proudly order “caffeine-free skinny soy latte” as though their choice of coffee implies they’re blessed with an interesting past.

Which, I suppose, made me people-with-allergies-intolerant. Until last week. I was staying with friends and family at a house in a sublimely remote part of Italy, when my 17-year-old daughter turned up to join us. Ellie had been acting in a film in Ireland for two months and had then embarked on a sort of choir-busking trip through Burgundy with a group of friends – and I could see she was utterly exhausted.

I attributed this to the perks of being an unchaperoned teenager – eating crap, not sleeping much, having access to drink and cigarettes and God knows what else. Like many parents, I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the assumption of liberty that often comes at 17 – and teenagers’ capacity for folly. A sort of emotional hoodie-ism can take place, where you are attacked for your fuddyduddyness and then mugged of your authority.

So I felt exhaustion was Ellie’s comeuppance for premature independence. When she took to her bed, feeling terrible after a swim, I duly made her drink lots of water, take an aspirin and try to sleep. When she grew hotter and started to cough, I started to interrogate her about the possible excesses of her lifestyle and talked – rather smugly – about consequences. Gasping for breath, she tried to repudiate my accusations, but was suddenly overwhelmed by wheezing and a terrible itching in her mouth.

At this point, something shifted in my reluctant Florence Nightingale pose. Going downstairs to a room full of friends and family, I announced: “I think this is serious.” The general reaction was that I was getting hysterical and my daughter was just overtired. But our friend Jane, who was feeding her newborn baby, pulled her from her breast and ran upstairs.

A mother’s instinct – my God – it is not to be underestimated. By the time we had put my daughter in a cool bath, her pulse was dropping, hives were appearing all over her body, she was having difficulty breathing and her lips and mouth were swelling. I knew we had some antihistamine tablets in the bathroom cabinet: Jane and I thought that it might be a good idea to give her one – or some. Or then again, maybe not. Who knew?

It was a Sunday. I had no idea where there might be a hospital. I had no doctor’s number. I didn’t know the number for emergency services in Italy – and neither did anyone else. In the heat of the moment, I couldn’t even remember where I’d left my phone – and anyway, you could get reception only if you stood near a distant fig tree and jumped up and down. We helped my daughter downstairs and into the car – which, amazingly, had some petrol in it.

Various people in bikinis arriving from the pool looked on, bewildered. My son became tearful because he and another guest had made a bolognese for lunch and I was ruining everything. I drove towards the nearest medieval hilltop town, with Jane in the back holding my daughter and trying to keep her conscious.

As I raced up the tiny roads, I realised that we had no money and no means of communication – and I had no glasses and therefore could not see properly. Eventually, we found a man by the road and yelled: “Opitalee!” He replied something in Italian. I cursed the fact that despite visiting Italy repeatedly I had never bothered to learn the language – assuming in my arrogance that everyone spoke English.

We drove on. At last: a little police station; I ran ran inside, yelling: “Emergan-see! Opitalee! Fillee!” and mimed gasping for air with extravagant arm gestures. It struck me how funny my daughter would have found my terrible charade and how she would have probably said: “I’ve got it! That octopussy thing in Doctor Who!” (If she’d been able to see properly through her swollen eyelids.)

Fortunately, a young policeman instantly phoned an ambulance. The paramedics arrived within five minutes, unloading various machines and asking questions in Italian. They asked about insects (I think). So I tried to act out: “Maybe – but no obvious signs.” They asked about snakebite (I think). I shook my head. They then said something like: “Mangiare?” And I said: “Special K” – which was all Ellie had eaten that day.

This provoked a frenzied discussion and a ripple of panic among the paramedics. It dawned on me that they thought Special K was some kind of illegal drug. (I later discovered that it is, in fact, a nickname for the street drug ketamine – a horse tran- quilliser.) With little hope of being understood, I was shouting: “No, no, she’s had it before – flavourless, cornflakey things,” as they stretchered her into the ambulance and began attaching an oxygen mask and lots of drips.

For some reason, they couldn’t find her veins and kept digging needles in different places. Ellie started to moan and one of the paramedics snapped: “Pazienza.” No sentimentality. Their job was to save her life and pump her full of any drug that might reverse her potentially lethal reaction to – what?

Then they pushed us out of the ambulance and told us to follow them. Ellie looked distraught. A paramedic said: “Ospedale Siena”, and with that, they all raced off, with the siren drowning out the church bells that were ringing out behind us. I knew from a previous trip that Siena was about 50 minutes away. For just a moment, I closed my eyes and prayed – hoping that the fact I had never really believed in anything would not come between God and his mercy if he existed.

Then I tried to follow the ambulance, but a flotilla of testosterone-fuelled Ferraris got between us. Everything was too blurry without my glasses to risk speeding, and I was on an unfamiliar side of the road. We lost the ambulance. Jane wasn’t insured to drive the car; instead, she became my eyes – yelling when lorries were about to overtake, reading out the road signs and so on. We couldn’t go on the fast toll road because we had no money. We couldn’t let anyone back at home know what was happening because not only were we phoneless but we didn’t know anyone’s number.

We didn’t even know the address where we were staying. Jane found a sat nav that appeared to be built into the car, but it kept misdirecting us. All through our nightmare journey, a jaunty home counties voice kept telling us to “turn around where possible”. After an hour, and another stop at another police station, we found the hospital. We parked the car under a clamping sign and ran towards Emergency.

The ambulance was outside and the paramedics looked grim. I felt my knees crumble. One of the paramedics touched my shoulder and said: “Okay – Special K, okay.” Ellie was still on lots of drips but looking better. The doctor, who spoke a bit of English, was professional and brusque but gave me some of his own money to get some water and food. She’d had an anaphylactic reaction to something, he explained, and we needed to find out what it was. However, he could not test her because she was now so full of drugs. He asked me if she had ever had any allergies – nuts, fish, wasps, pollen.

I remembered that her legs had swollen up a bit at school after an insect sting, and that I’d made a mental note to have her checked out but had never got round to it. I also remembered that someone had once mentioned an EpiPen (a syringe for treating anaphylactic reactions) but I had paid no attention. Six and a half hours later, we were told we could take her home. They gave us follow-up drugs to try to give her immunity for a while to . . . whatever it was. Ellie smiled wanly and then we both wept.

On the way home it dawned on me just how irresponsible I had been, and how unprepared. Especially on a family holiday. When I returned to England, I talked to Dr Adam Fox, a leading consultant and pae-diatric allergist, who told me that almost 40% of children in Britain have allergy problems of some sort.

Yet there are alarmingly few allergy specialists. And without specialists, there can be no diagnosis and therefore no preventive action – surely something the NHS needs to deal with. We also talked about the fear in society today of being held accountable for anything – and how this can prevent people from dealing quickly with the consequences of an allergic reaction.

Yet action can mean the difference between life and death. And, as Dr Fox pointed out, there is no precedent for anyone being sued for being a good samaritan. Immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, can double or treble the chances of survival if the allergic reaction causes someone’s heart to stop. And an unconscious person with a blocked airway can have only four minutes to live – unless a bystander steps forward and does something as simple as tilting the head back. I also now know that having and knowing how to use an EpiPen or Anapen is vital.

So why isn’t it compulsory for all schools to teach first aid as part of the curriculum – progressively as knowledge and capabilities increase? Why isn’t it taught in the weeks after exams, when children are so often sent home to catch up on all the television they’ve missed?

I must confess that I’d often thought of doing a first aid course but had never got round to it – preferring Pilates or life drawing instead. The danger of a convenience society is that we don’t like to trouble ourselves with the inconvenient.

Possibly, there is another reason many parents, so careful about everything else to do with their children’s safety, somehow avoid doing first aid courses. The thought that your child may one day be in a life- threatening situation can be too painful to contemplate. Most people can’t bear to think about death – which is probably why so many otherwise responsible citizens fail to make wills.

When the group I was with in Italy pooled its medical knowledge, the result was alarming. We all knew that if someone had an epileptic fit, there was a spoon involved at some point but we weren’t sure how; one person even thought the remedy was a spoonful of sugar. Some of us knew the phrase “Heimlich manoeuvre” but not exactly what it was. We agreed that if an object was lodged in the body, it was either crucial to pull it out or crucial you didn’t. We all had a different idea of the recovery position – and so on.

We were all parents who invested vast quantities of time worrying about our children’s salt intake, diet, nits, television- watching, vaccinations, exam results, degrees, careers, pension plans – so much time worrying about drugs, paedophiles, sexually transmitted diseases, knives, terrorism – yet not one of us had done even a half-day first aid course.

I like to think that I will now – but, in truth, I haven’t booked one because we’re going to Cornwall, and then we have all these dentist appointments, and then . . .

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