One real superboy

In the long hours before his son died, Andrew Fowle held him in his arms, stroked his hair and thought back over the boy's short, and often painful, life. Snapshots from the past seemed to illumine the dark hospital room: Ashley refereeing a school football match from his electric wheelchair; that infectious, lopsided grin; all the birthday parties they never thought they'd have, but did.

The images crowded in, but one - especially - precoccupied Andrew as he felt his son fading away. It was the memory of what he calls "the miracle", an episode in Ashley's infancy when impending tragedy was turned to hope and an inevitable death was forestalled. The miracle was made possible by the kindness of strangers and, at 5.07am, as he sensed his son's faint breathing had stopped entirely, Andrew thought of those people he had never known, but to whom he would always owe so much.

They buried Ashley two weeks ago at the cemetery near his home in Gravesend. He would have been 14 next month, but his family had known for a while that he was unlikely to make it to his birthday. It was the second time Andrew and his wife, Vivien, had been forced to come to terms with the fact that their son was dying.

Ashley was born in 1990, when his father was a police constable in the Essex seaside town of Clacton. The Fowles had two older children; their first child, Elizabeth, had died at four months, of cot death. At six months, it was clear Ashley was not well. By the time he was three, the cause became obvious: he had a long, finger-sized tumour at the back of his skull, over the spinal chord. He was taken for specialist treatment to Guy's Hospital. "They said the tumour was inoperable," Andrew recalls. "They said they would try radiotherapy."

Within three months, he says, the tumour had "ballooned". Andrew and Vivien were told their son had a matter of months to live.

There can be few more excruciating agonies than facing the loss of a child. It had already happened to the Fowles once and as Andrew talked about that time, there was a bleakness in his voice that surely echoed the despair he and Vivien had felt. He is a detective now and we talked in a brightly decorated interview room at his police station in Gravesend. In a corner of the room, for children who can't be separated from their parents, was a basketful of teddy bears.

Andrew believed Guy's was too hasty in its judgment. Vivien had found a magazine article about an American doctor who specialised in treating terminally ill children.

Andrew remembers the headline to this day: "I don't accept children have to die".

The doctor was Fred Epstein, a surgeon working at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Andrew and Vivien looked up everything they could on him, and found he had been credited with saving children through pioneering surgery.

"Suddenly, there was this feeling that maybe - just maybe - it wasn't inevitable," says Andrew. "We began to hope."

The couple contacted Dr Epstein. He requested scan pictures of Ashley. It was at this point that the Fowles began to realise there was resistance among the staff at Guy's about dealing with the American surgeon.

"They told us that his opinion was unlikely to differ from theirs," says Andrew. "They promised to send scans, but didn't. It was only when I said I would take them myself and put them in his hand that they finally sent them."

It was late autumn, 1994. The name of Fred Epstein was already known in British medical circles. The self-publicising, Ferrari-driving, extrovert surgeon who claimed he could succeed where others failed, had acquired a certain reputation.

A year earlier, he had published a best-selling book, Gifts of Time, which recounted his success in treating children with life-threatening cancers. For parents with sick children, he was a saintly figure, a man who told them never to give up hope. This was the message that had thrilled Andrew and Vivien, too. But in the more conservative spheres of medicine, Dr Epstein was viewed with a degree of suspicion.

By his own admission, he was "enormously expensive". He did not operate for less than $50,000 a patient. In 1994, that was around £35,000. And there were doubts about the efficacy of his "pioneering" methods. Andrew knew all this.

"Ashley was deteriorating by the day," he says. "We were watching him die and it was unbearable. Believe me, when you are in that situation you will do anything - anything - to help your child."

Guy's sent scan pictures of Ashley to New York. Andrew remembers precisely the moment his wife telephoned him to say Dr Epstein had called: "It was a Wednesday afternoon, I was in my office in Maidstone. Fred had said: 'I can operate.' Can you imagine what that meant to us? Now, for the first time, we could hope. We were, well, elated."

Dr Epstein had also said the operation would cost £35,000. It was money the Fowles did not have. Their house was fully mortgaged and bringing up their family had left them unable to save.

"I suddenly thought: where are we going to get the money from?," Andrew says. A kindly superintendent told him not to worry about work - but to get started on raising the cash. The next day, Thursday, officers from the Police Benevolent Fund met to discuss his case.

By that afternoon they had decided to launch a campaign. They called it the Ashley to America Appeal and put out a press release to newspapers, television and radio stations. An incident room, usually used by detectives investigating major crimes, was set up with a bank of telephones.

As soon as the story of Ashley's plight hit the newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, the phones began to ring.

"It was incredible," says Andrew, shaking his head as if he still finds it difficult to believe. "People we had never heard of - ordinary members of the public - wanted to help. They were ringing in with donations around the clock. Police officers were coming off duty, then volunteering to man the phones. It didn't stop for two-and-a-half days. By the Saturday afternoon they had raised £80,000."

The money had come from all over Britain. A businessman on a plane crossing the Atlantic had seen Ashley's story on an in-flight newscast. When his plane landed he donated £10,000. A shabbily dressed elderly man in Birmingham handed in £500 in cash in a grubby bag. And a police car on a routine patrol in Kent was flagged down by a man well-known as a local villain.

"We knew this chap very well," says Andrew. "When the car driver opened his window to see what he wanted, he pushed a tenner through and said: 'Give this to the kid. He can't help it if his dad's Old Bill.'"

In fact, being "Old Bill" helped a lot. "The Job", as Andrew calls it, gave him support he believes would have been hard to find in any other career. It made him feel closer to his colleagues and something else happened, too, during that explosion of generosity and caring from people he didn't know.

"I'd seen a lot of wickedness in my work," he says. "It's inevitable. As a police officer you tend to witness some of the worst that there is in people; you get to meet some real scumbags. It can give you an attitude. But during that week in 1994 my life changed. My whole perspective changed. I was seeing something that showed me just how much goodness there is out there. It's stayed with me."

On the Monday morning Andrew and Vivien, with their son Ashley, were walking towards Dr Epstein's office on New York's 32nd Street.

"As we got to the address we saw this huge billboard advertising a new film with Richard Attenborough. It was Miracle on 34th Street. We looked at each other. It seemed a good omen. It seemed our miracle was really happening."

Dr Epstein operated immediately. Rather than conventionally excising the tumour, which was perilously located on Ashley's brain stem, he employed a technique in which an ultra-high-speed vibrator was used to liquidise the tumour cells which were then expelled using a device like a dentist's aspirator. Dr Epstein tells his patients he got the idea while sitting in a dentist's chair.

He declared Ashley's operation a success. With the plastic surgery he advised, ancillary care and unavoidable expenses, the bill came to more than £50,000. The money was there, of course, and the remaining £30,000 was put into trust for Ashley's future medical expenses.

But the cost, by British medical standards, was very high. Was there not some justification for scepticism about Dr Epstein and his charges? Andrew refuses to accept that.

"I know Fred is not in it for the money," he says. "He has done operations for nothing. We have heard from people he has helped who were unable to pay."

Within months of returning to England, Ashley was like a child reborn. He attended a local primary school, and, several years later, passed his 11-plus examination and secured a place at the highly-regarded Sir Joseph Williamson Mathematics School in Rochester.

Physically, he was not strong, but he adored football and took part in school games as referee, whizzing around in his electric wheelchair. Academically, given the problems of mobility and dexterity he had to overcome, he was outstanding - "in the top 25 per cent", his father says. Ashley wanted to go to university, to study law. It was his ambition to become a lawyer.

In August last year, he began to get headaches. There followed many months of tests, of raised hopes, then despair. The tumour was growing again.

On 11 May he was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, where he was to begin a course of chemotherapy. He was weak and had contracted a serious chest infection, needing oxygen all day and night. As Andrew left Gravesend police station at 5.15 on Thursday, 13 May, his wife telephoned to say Ashley was close to death.

He arrived at Great Ormond Street at 6.30 that evening and held his son in his arms until the following dawn, when he died. As he recounts this, for the first time in our long interview, his voice breaks slightly, his eyes mist over. Then, shaking his head, he smiled.

"He was a lovely, kid, you know. I just wish there was some way to tell all those people out there, all those strangers, how successful he was.

"They would have been proud of him."