My cousin Sally Becker had a strange recurring nightmare during childhood. Someone was about to remove her leg in hospital and she needed to escape. It instilled in her a long-term fear of losing a limb. But it somehow never stopped her from putting herself in countless situations where this might come to pass.

Given the existence she has led in the past three decades, repeatedly entering war zones to save the lives of children caught up in bloody conflicts, it feels like a small miracle she’s here at all. Since her early 30s, she’s been shot in the leg, inhaled chlorine gas, gone on hunger strike in a Kosovo jail and crossed borders under sniper fire. She has helped evacuate civilians from Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza. Witnessed the worst of human suffering and carried on, even when her freelance humanitarian missions threatened to become engulfed in red tape and resistance.

Facing her for the first time in her tidy sitting room in Hove, East Sussex, I’m struck by how much like the rest of my family she is in appearance and manner. And yet how unlike the rest of us, hurling herself into life-threatening environments from which most would recoil in horror.

She was dubbed the Angel of Mostar when she first came to prominence during the Balkans conflict in the early 1990s. The story of this plucky British woman driving an ambulance across the frontline in Bosnia to evacuate sick and injured children captured the public imagination.