From a distance, I could tell by the way his body was slumped and ever so slightly convulsing that he wasn’t as “fine” as the stranger over the phone had assured me he was. Hers was not the first phone call I’d received like this, but it was the first I’d taken from a complete stranger.

My son Sam is 16 and autistic. There’s a lot going on in that beautiful and brilliant mind of his but, even on a good day, he can be very easily overwhelmed. Throw in a dash of diagnosed anxiety, a pinch of the inability to read social cues, and an unexpected change to his daily routine and you have the recipe for a very public meltdown.

'This woman not only went to check on him, but brought him inside her shop, calmed him down, pried my phone number from him, and called me.' Credit:Shutterstock

It was Sam's very first day at high school. We’d set up a game plan for how he’d get home (I’d pick him up outside the bakery near his school at 3.30) and I’d naively believed it was foolproof. But the perfect storm brewed and I wasn’t able to warn him to take shelter.

With the combination of a dead phone battery (his) and a dead car battery (mine), I was running late and unable to communicate that to him. As a result, he was left alone and – it breaks my heart to write this – extremely frightened. From there, he had a very distressing meltdown outside the bakery, exactly where I’d told him to wait.