Mary Berry Revealed This Disturbing Detail About Her Medical Emergency
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone that cooking and baking fans love as much as Dame Mary Berry, Britain's Queen of Cakes and a former judge on the "Great British Bake Off." At (just) 86 years old, she's written over 75 books (via Waterstones) and can count royalty like Prince William and Kate Middleton's family as fans. A couple of years ago, Middleton told Berry that "One of Louis' first words was Mary because right at his height are all my cooking books in the kitchen bookshelf ... he would say 'That's Mary Berry'... so he would definitely recognize you if he saw you today" (via BBC).
What we might not recognize today is the sight of Mary Berry with a walking stick and a small limp, the remnants of what sounds like a bad summertime accident that we wouldn't wish on our parents or grandparents. Berry told the Daily Mail, "We have raised beds in the garden, and on a Sunday afternoon I'd gone out to pick the last of the sweet peas when I tripped over some bricks and went down really hard." At first, she said she thought nothing of it. "I had a new knee a few years ago and I thought, "Oh, I've hurt my knee."
Berry revealed that it was her son-in-law Dan who finally picked up her call for help and rung the ambulance service. "They said, "We're very, very busy." It was Sunday afternoon and there were lots of football injuries and whatever."
Berry endured a 3-hour wait for the ambulance
While Mary Berry said she was happy to wait, we can't imagine she would have anticipated how long that wait would be. "Dan went into the house and got lots of coats and put them all round me ... We waited for three and a half hours, until 6 pm, and quite right too! I was perfectly happy. There may have been a road accident," she said (via Daily Mail).
It turns out that the Queen of Cakes had broken her hip and had surgery the next morning to repair the damage caused by the break. While the U.K.'s National Health Service, or NHS, has been the subject of complaints from both patients and medical practitioners (via the BBC), Berry says she was treated like royalty.
"So I haven't a single complaint. Even the girl who cleaned took a pride in it," Berry recalled. She had that while she was welcome to ring for help, she avoided it because she didn't find it necessary. "Everything was first-rate. And I was so lucky. It was all NHS and I had my own little room – maybe they thought I'd be trouble [she winks] – but they were always popping in," Berry said.
The accident happened in August, and we may never have heard about it if Berry hadn't spoken to the Daily Mail about her new book. As she would say: "Things don't always go exactly to plan."