When Jack Daly claimed that he was too ill to go to school and his GP could find nothing wrong, his parents were sceptical. At the age of seven, their buoyant, cheeky and intelligent son appeared to be rebelling, and his father came down hard, sending him back to the classroom.
Over the coming days Jack, who had at times seemed unsteady on his feet, started vomiting. Allan and Helen, his parents, rushed him to hospital. When again the doctors said that they could find no obvious cause, they refused to take him home. “He was lying limp in my arms,” Mr Daly said. “I said to the doctor, ‘Imagine this was your son’.” That day, Jack was found to have a medulloblastoma — a