The Luckiest Man Alive ‘Without Her I'd Be Dead'

A Rescue Mission Sparks An Accidental Friendship.

- Julie Jacobson

Amy Symes and George Scott are a most unlikely pair. At 29 and newly engaged, Amy is a St John first-aid tutor and volunteer ambulance officer, while George is a hard-living cockney from East London. A former risk manager turned part-time farmer and artist, at 62, he’s more than twice her age.

But they are kindred spirits who have forged a forever friendship through the most horrific of circumstances.

The pair met – if meeting is the right word – earlier this year. Amy remembers it vividly. George doesn’t remember it at all.

It was early morning, Saturday, May 25. Amy had just clocked on when a call came through to the St John’s Helensville base.

A car had ploughed off the road, through a fence and into a paddock on the outskirts of Kaukapakapa. The driver had suffered a heart attack.

That driver was George. Bystanders recalled seeing a vehicle driving erratically down the road and George slumped over in the driver’s seat.

Two eyewitnesses rushed to help. Smashing a window and using bolt cutters to detangle fence wire that had wrapped around the car door, they pulled George out of the wreckage. While one cleared his airway, the other started CPR. Firefighters arrived and hooked up an oxygen mask, but George was clinically dead by the time the two St John crews arrived, comprising Amy, Connor Sinclair, Dan Spearing, Murray Baird and Amanda Horlock.

It was a hugely emotional moment for Amy. Her dad Alistair had died in similar circumstances when she was just 13. Seeing George lying in the paddock that morning in May brought memories of her father flooding back.