“YOU are the worst mother. Ever,” said my 12-year-old son, last Monday. It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. Having five boys, I have had my many shortcomings pointed out to me on a regular basis over the years. Just as well I have a thick skin.

On this occasion, the main grievance was that I wasn’t prepared to leave him at home alone on the Thursday, when his dad would be away, while I had to go to a parent-teacher evening with his 15-year-old brother: “You’re going to have to come with us,” I said.

“But I’m 12! You left the others alone when they were 12,” he raged, as he stormed out of the kitchen, slamming the door. “No, I didn’t,” I shouted after him. “Not for three hours.”

The door opened again, briefly: “I’m staying here on my own and that’s that,” he pronounced. The door slammed again.

He had a point. I have popped out to the shop, butcher’s or doctors’ surgery in the village briefly when the others were that age and left them on their own. And he is at secondary school now.

But still, I felt uneasy about it: “Remember, we don’t have any immediate neighbours here. You can only see their houses across the fields. And it’s going to be dark by the time we get home, after 8pm. It’s not as if I’m just five minutes away, in the village. School is a 15-minute drive away.”

He wasn’t having any of it: “You don’t trust me. What can go wrong? All I’m going to do is watch TV.” And then came that old, familiar lament: “All my friends are allowed.”

Eventually, he was sent to bed, still insisting that he would be staying in on his own, and that I was now, officially, the worst parent…EVER!

Little was I to know that someone was making their way towards our house who would settle this argument, once and for all.

It was about 10pm when my brother rang. As I sat down to have a chat on the phone in the kitchen, my husband went upstairs to bed. After I’d been talking a while, I heard shouting outside in the distance: “Help me, help me,” followed by loud banging on the back door, then a panic-stricken voice at the door pane: “Please let me in. I don’t know where I am.”

I looked out to see a woman in a clearly agitated state, shouting and banging on the door: “It’s so dark, I can’t see anything,” she shouted. I froze. Was she a genuine victim? Or could she be a drug addict, someone who was unstable? It even crossed my mind that she could be one of a gang, trying to get me to open the door, so that they could barge their way in.

Unlikely as all this seemed, I felt I should be cautious. Without opening the door, I told her I would get my husband from upstairs.

What I didn’t realise was that the boys had heard the shouting from their bedrooms and had peeked through their curtains to see a figure appearing out of the darkness from the field behind the house, and climbing over the fence into our back garden. They were terrified.

When my husband appeared, he ascertained that the woman was trying to get to a farmhouse about a mile away from us and her car had broken down nearby. With no street lights, she had made her way across the fields in the dark to one farmhouse, where they told her to go away. Frightened, cold and alone, she crossed another field to reach us.

It turned out that the poor woman was a Macmillan nurse from Leeds, on her way to do a night shift at a patient’s home. On top of everything else, she was concerned her car had been left in a dangerous position in the middle of the road.

We gave her a cup of tea, phoned the home of the family who were waiting for her to explain what had happened and helped move her car, while she called her boss. Eventually she got to where she was supposed to be.

By this stage, the boys must have fallen asleep. Next morning, the first thing they asked was: “Who was that woman we saw?” So we told them the story. “She sounded really scary,” said Albert. “I know, but she was just scared,” I explained.

I asked him what he would have done if he had been home alone and she had arrived at the door. Albert shrugged: “I don’t know.”

On the Thursday, when the time came to go to the parent-teacher evening, he jumped in the car without even being asked. And his apparently indisputable right to be allowed to stay behind in the house on his own has not been mentioned since.

Sometimes these things have a way of working themselves out…