Flabbergasted Pam Chapman broke off a first aid course to rush to her pregnant daughter's home - and ended up delivering her granddaughter.

Within minutes of arriving she found she was a stand-in midwife - with no experience.

"It was my worse nightmare," said Mrs Chapman. "I've never done anything like this before and they don't teach you how to deliver babies on the first aid course - I nearly had a heart attack."

"I have always said Sarah has never been a minute's trouble to me - then she went and did this."

The drama started when Mrs Chapman - who works as a nursing assistant at a private nursing home for mentally handicapped people - received a call from her son-in-law James telling her that Sarah had started contractions.

"I was on an in-house first aid course when he rang asking me to go straight round to look after their other two children while he got her to hospital," she said.

"He opened the door when I got there and said she had started and I said: "Don't do this to me".

"I walked in and Sarah was lying on the toilet floor - and I could see the baby's head."

But 52-year-old Mrs Chapman, who has another daughter, Joanne, 32, went into action at their home in Marquis Avenue, Oakenshaw, and within a short time she was introducing mum to new daughter.

The cavalry arrived a few minutes later, firstly in the shape of the midwife, who was making a routine ante-natal call on Sarah after her baby failed to appear on time last Friday, and then an ambulance.

Sarah and James, both 29, went straight to Bradford Royal Infirmary while Mrs Chapman sat down for a rest with the couple's other children, 18-month-old Keira and son Bradley who is four.

"It all happened so quickly - one minute I was walking in the door, the next minute I was holding her," she said.

Sarah, a telesales operator, was proud as punch with her mum and her husband.

"They were both brilliant," she said.

"Neither of them panicked. Mum got started - and James was white as a sheet.

"It's something you read about or see on the TV but you never think it's going to happen to you.

"From start to finish it was about 45 minutes to an hour. I didn't have time to think - it was all over so quickly."

James, a printer, was in the process of phoning for an ambulance when the birth started for real.

He spent most of the time relaying instructions from ambulance dispatch receiver Sue Thornton to his mother-in-law.

"She was telling us what to do and I was passing it on - it all went very well," he said.

"Then there was a knock on the door and it was the midwife. She asked how Sarah was and I said she had had the baby.

"She said 'congratulations' and I said 'No - she has just had the baby now' and she ran into the toilet to help."

Mrs Thornton, who has worked at the ambulance control in Birkenshaw, Bradford, for more than two years, said: "He did very well. Every time I said something he relayed it clearly - there was no problem.

"There weren't very many instructions I could give because the baby had already been born.

"I could hear it crying in the background which was a relief.

"It was more a matter of after care and keeping them calm until the ambulance arrived."

As for Elise - who weighed a healthy 7lbs 14.5 ozs - she was wrapped in a towel in her mum's arms having a snooze, unaware of the commotion she had caused.

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