Grandfather took girl out of Kent school and to the doctor’s without realising he had wrong child.

AT what age do all policemen look young? At what age do all children look the same? We ask because a grandfather sent to pick up his granddaughter from Napier Primary School in Gillingham, Kent, went off with the wrong child. And he never did notice.

Staff presented the man with the wrong child, who had the same first name as the right one. She had a doctor’s appointment. So. the man took the six-year-old on a bus to the Gillingham Medical Centre a mile away.

There, she was prescribed liquid paracetamol. He picked up the medicine inside the centre and dropped her back at school in Napier Road.

The girls’ then went home and told her father “here’s my medicine”. Says her father:

“My daughter’s been known to tell a tale or two so I took her to the surgery and the doctor said ‘I saw her this morning with her grandfather’. I went ballistic. I was boiling inside. The first thing I thought was the worst. I had to ask my daughter the sort of questions no parent ever wants to ask, ‘did he do this, did he do that’. When your daughter has been walked round town and taken on a bus by a strange man it makes you sick to the stomach. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare…”

Says her grandfather:

“I couldn’t believe it. Why are they sending someone who can’t even recognise his own granddaughter to pick her up?” 

Because the woman he thinks is his wife was busy working behind the bar in EastEnders…