The long wait

Time passes very slowly on a cold petrol-station forecourt

On Remembrance Day as it was getting dark, I pulled into Sainsbury's petrol station on the Lower Richmond Road in Putney, where I had been sent by my wife to find supper. As I parked, I noticed an elderly lady at one of the pumps sitting on an office chair behind a blue Nissan Micra, two traffic cones at her side as if to protect her from moving vehicles. She looked tiny on the forecourt among the brake lights and exhaust fumes and so I went over to ask if she was ok.

She was Irish, close to 90, and spoke as if we were well acquainted. She explained the till-worker who'd carried her shopping had closed the boot of her car and by doing so locked the vehicle. Inside were her keys and her small dog. She seemed cheerful, although the cold had given her pale skin an ethereal quality and there were dark rings around her brown eyes. Her name was Jenny. She didn't have a coat, only a cardigan over her dress, and she held up an old Nokia phone with a look of deep mistrust. The AA seemed to have changed its number, she said.

I told her I would help and suggested while I did she go inside where it was warm. She wouldn't be separated from her dog, she said. I called the police first, hoping they might break into the car, but when they said it wasn't a job for them, I called the AA. I found the number effortlessly, using my iPhone.

A frail pensioner, a small dog, the November night setting in - the man on the other end of the line agreed it sounded like an emergency. 'Someone will be with her in twenty minutes', he assured me. Surprised, I gave Jenny the happy news and left her with the supermarket manager who had come to see how she was getting on, returning home to put my young children through the bath. Forty minutes later, I came back to find her still sitting behind her car, now looking rather less cheerful. A dark haired woman was talking to her. She introduced herself as Babs and said Jenny was still refusing to move inside.

The AA had gone to the wrong Sainsbury's. There had been many missed calls to Jenny's phone. 'Nah mate, I've gone to the right one', the driver said when the operator in the call centre connected me to him. 'I've gone to the one I was told to go to.' He was at a Sainsbury's in Richmond. He said his shift had now finished, his tone unmistakeably final. 'You'll have to get them to put someone else on the job.'

It was now after 6pm and Jenny was very cold. She'd been sitting behind her car for close to two hours. 'I don't feel it', she kept saying as she shrugged off Babs' male companion's attempts to put an insulated high-vis jacket over her shoulders. We talked about her daughters - one in Saudi Arabia and the other in America - and her love for her days working as a nurse at St George's Hospital in Tooting. While speaking she was transported sufficiently that the jacket could be fastened around her without her noticing. I went home to fetch her a woolly hat. The AA said they would be with her in under an hour.

As the minutes passed, we tried to break into her car. The supermarket manager fetched a chisel and a flat piece of Perspex used for signage. We slid both down the side of the driver's window, the way they do in films, but without success. The hour came and went. Jenny became incontinent of faeces. Babs brought her handfuls of paper towels. A black van pulled up at the next pump and two Polish builders got out. Did either by any chance know how to get into a locked car? One shrugged but the light in the other man's eyes seemed momentarily to change. A wire coat-hanger was produced and fashioned into a hook, which, after the driver's door was prised sufficiently open, was lowered toward to the internal handle. But it couldn't quite be done. He went on trying for another hour. At the front of the car his colleague, Babs' companion and I offered him words of encouragement. At the back, Babs continued to help Jenny. Inside, the shivering little dog looked out at us.

At 8:15pm, the AA man arrived and in no time had the car open. We clapped. After a wait of nearly four hours, Jenny could go home. We all said goodbye to each other. 'You make sure you warm up before you drive,' I advised Jenny. 'I'm so sorry for the incident', she called after me as I walked away, her eyes wide with mortification.