Full of life, the transplant girl whose heart beat the traffic

But in two-year-old Laura's case, the roll of honour also includes a resourceful ambulance driver and council worker Margaret Rollinson and her old Volvo saloon.

They played key parts in a dramatic dash across London that nearly ended in disaster.

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Just a month after surgery, Laura Whitworth, right, is back home with her sister, Lucy, four

Laura, who had a serious heart condition, was fighting for her life in London's Great Ormond Street hospital when doctors heard a suitable transplant heart had become available.

It was flown into Luton airport and an emergency ambulance unit sent to fetch it.

The driver faced a tight deadline to cut through London's morning rush hour before it would be too late to use the organ. He was less than eight miles from the central London hospital when things went wrong.

A car pulled out in front of the ambulance, forcing it to swerve. It hit a kerb - and two tyres burst.

Repairing the damage was out of the question and there was no time to call a back-up ambulance.

So the driver flagged down the first car he saw - Mrs Rollinson's Volvo.

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Laura before her transplant operation

With the box containing the heart on the back seat, he directed the 56-year-old grandmother on a dramatic dash to the nearest police station.

For the first time in her life, Mrs Rollinson went through a red light and drove, briefly, on the wrong side of the road.

At the police station, the precious cargo was transferred to a patrol car which finished the journey with sirens blaring.

Laura was already in the operating theatre and the five-hour transplant surgery was mercifully completed without further hitches.

Now, a month later, Laura is back home with her parents Andy and Julia and sister Lucy, four, in Mirfield, Leeds, and unrecognisable as the sickly child who was being kept by an artificial heart.

Builder Mr Whitworth, 38, said the speed of her recovery had been incredible.

"She's come on leaps and bounds," he said. "She really is a miracle. She's itching to get going - it's like putting a battery in."

The ambulance driver, who works in the specialist organ retrieval service of a London-based private ambulance firm, is keeping a low profile yesterday, but Mrs Rollinson praised his calm actions under pressure.

She said: "He is the hero, he was composed and had the presence of mind to work out what to do. When he flagged me down I thought at first he was a policeman wanting to do a spot check on my old car.

"The traffic was fairly heavy and I couldn't do more than about 40 or 45 mph. But by the time I pulled up outside the police station I needed to stop for a few moments to catch my breath."

Laura had been diagnosed with a serious condition - dilated cardiomyopathy - which left her with an enlarged heart.

She was put on the transplant list at Easter and flown by helicopter to Great Ormond Street to wait.