To the RESCUE!

I was retrieving a parcel from my eldest daughter, Yvonne, that the postman had hidden by the back gate, when I spotted it.

I gasped and my heart thudded. Clasping my hands together, I inhaled. ‘Pull yourself together, Maureen,’ I said out loud. ‘It’s only a hedgehog.’

The bundle of spikes was wedged into a piece of plastic pipe that emerged from the ground midway up my garden path. Having only moved in two weeks earlier, I hadn’t noticed the piping before, although I knew from the solicitor’s moving documents that it was designed to dispel radon gas away from the house. Apparently, Devon has a high concentration of radon, whatever that means.

Although the weather was surprisingly mild, the hedgehog should have been hibernating, but it was clearly stuck and had no way of climbing out of the pipe or even turning around.

I was flooded with guilt. I should have put a grill on the pipe as soon as I moved in. Billy