A letter to the editor in The Times today details an unusual lifesaving technique from a quick-thinking shepherd.

Sir, Atul Gawande’s article “How a checklist saved a little girl’s life” (Opinion, Nov 22) reminded me of an event in the late 1970s, when an infant fell into the garden pond of one of my neighbours. On hearing an anguished scream followed by pleas for help, I and an elderly neighbor dropped our gardening tools and struggled over the hedges and fence that separated us from the commotion.

The three-year-old girl was at the bottom of the pond; I jumped in, pulled her out and passed her lifeless body to my neighbour. He lay her down, got hold of her ankles, lifted her up and began, in a lunatic fashion, to swing her around his head. Horrified and paralysed, the child’s mother and I watched as, moments later, water poured from the child’s mouth and nose, and she gave a loud cry.

I asked my neighbour where he’d learnt to do such a thing. He said he’d been a shepherd for 30-odd years, and when lambs were born “dead” it was the standard way of making them breathe and of ridding their mouth of birth debris. But for the grace of this old shepherd, Aaron, that child would not be alive today.