Peggy, the hedgehog (Image: )<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n It was my toddler grandson Billy who first spotted the hedgehog in the autumn of 2021, caught in a net we used to clear debris from our pond. We tried to shake it free but it gave only the slightest tremor. My husband, Kim, is the son of a Yorkshire vet and notably unsentimental about animals but something melted within him when confronted by a hedgehog.<\/p>\n What was it? Something of Tolkien about a creature from somewhere else, finding itself in danger? Something sturdy and good natured, but in peril? He took a comb and a jug of warm, salty water and tenderly cleared the flies from the hedgehog\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n Our grandson watched, from a wary \u00addistance, camouflaged by his anorak and wellington boots. He carried a twig, hopeful of using it as a kind of defibrillator.<\/p>\n Then my husband stood up, checked his phone, and said he was going to take the hedgehog, whom we had named Horace, to a hedgehog hospital.<\/p>\n I laughed. There was no such thing as a hedgehog hospital and, surely, nobody would take in a hedgehog on a Sunday evening?<\/p>\n But there was one, Emma\u2019s Hedgehog Hospital, on the outskirts of King\u2019s Lynn near our Norfolk home. I discovered it was part of a volunteer hedgehog network across the country, a kind of National Health Service for hedgehogs. And I came to realise how much these wild creatures, which, thanks to Beatrix Potter, we have come to imagine as friendly washerwomen, are part of our national story. There is something magically appealing about hedgehogs.<\/p>\n In a world so fractious and binary, it is a subject on which everyone can soften and converse and be human.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n READ MORE: <\/strong> The secret double life of Jackie Kennedy: New explosive biography reveals all <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n If you wish to avoid the sound and fury of social media, you will always be safe discussing hedgehogs.<\/p>\n I also became grateful to hedgehogs for representing something deeper.<\/p>\n Saving Horace the hedgehog, whose name was quickly changed to Peggy once she was examined at Emma\u2019s Hedgehog Hospital, coincided with the mortal illness of my father, Noel Harvey.<\/p>\n That same autumn, he suffered heart failure and was taken to King\u2019s Lynn hospital. I went to the bungalow he shared with my mother, Susan, to fetch a sponge bag for him. There was his favourite armchair and, beside it, a side table.<\/p>\n On it were his reading glasses, his piles of books about birds or classical music or the Church and his binoculars.<\/p>\n A summary of him, really. Old-style Radio 4. The chair looked starkly empty with his imprinted form, for he had always sprung up as I let myself in with a hearty: \u201cHello \u00addarling, how lovely to see you.\u201d<\/p>\n Under Covid rules, I could not see him in hospital, so I would drop off little notes with his daily newspaper.<\/p>\n What should I write to him about? The fate of a hedgehog seemed about right, not too serious, not too taxing, a story of recovery.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sarah Sands with her father (Image: )<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n Our immediate concern, both for the hedgehog and for my dad, was to get their weight and strength up for winter. We would focus on the spring.<\/p>\n My father loved the natural world and would watch from his armchair the birds outside the window at the feeder. It was far from the harsh lighting and cacophony of a hospital ward. Emma at the hedgehog hospital said that once Peggy had been cleared of ticks and maggots (not quite the image of Beatrix Potter\u2019s hedgehog, perhaps) we should aim to release her by spring.<\/p>\n As for my dad, I started to hear from \u00addoctors the form of words chosen to pave the way for bereavement without sounding too brutally sudden. \u201cIt could be weeks or months,\u201d they nodded. My father was a man of faith but he was entering the darkest \u00advalley. I consulted my sister, Joanna, who has always been solicitous in caring for my \u00adparents. If we did not get our dad out of \u00adhospital we might not see him again.<\/p>\n She agreed, but my mother was in poor health herself and there was \u00ad no additional room at their house \u00adfor a carer, so we found a friendly nursing home nearby which had adjoining rooms for both my parents.<\/p>\n A week is a long time in hospital and my father looked thin, scared and unshaven when we collected him. A nurse on a double shift helped us get him to the car.<\/p>\n I saw much of this quality of compassion over the next few months. It was the great lesson of the pandemic. My parents had been married for nearly 70 years. They had known the better, and this was the worse, the sickness rather than health. I set up Alexa for them and played a song from their youth: Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific. They looked at each other longingly across the room with yearning and tears. As the late Roger Scruton put it: \u201cLove is the relationship between dying things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Winter sets in and Emma reported that Peggy\u2019s weight was improving. She is up to 896g having gained 45g overnight. I feel proud of her.<\/p>\n The last time we could take my dad out was Christmas Eve. He was puzzled that his legs had started to give way beneath him, and my grown son had to lift him over the threshold. It was dad\u2019s birthday, and the highlight of his year is the seasonal carol concert from King\u2019s College Cambridge.<\/p>\n I learn later from the composer John Rutter that the reason we can hear them \u00adon the BBC is partly down to my dad.<\/p>\n The college was initially reluctant to have the broadcasting paraphernalia in the chapel, and their worst fears were confirmed when a window was damaged in the early days of the relationship. It was my father, who joined the BBC from the diplomatic service, who calmed the situation and persuaded King\u2019s College to have another go. We listened to the start of the carol service in the nursing home car park in the fading afternoon light. My father bowed his head and tapped to the first lines of Once In Royal David\u2019s City.<\/p>\n He was probably thinking of his son, my brother, the performer and composer Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who sang that verse as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral.<\/p>\n My mother gave him a sharp solicitous glance, which she had started to do more often. She said to me: \u201cYou just don\u2019t expect this to happen at our time of life.\u201d<\/p>\n I nod sympathetically and then we \u00adboth start laughing. What else do you expect to happen?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was late February and I was at a diplomatic dinner in London, discussing the Ukraine crisis. A former secretary general of Nato \u2013 coincidentally, the hedgehog is the symbol of Nato \u2013 was talking of the delicate balance between strength and diplomacy and the importance of a united front, when a text pinged on my phone.<\/p>\n Emma said Peggy was ready to be returned to the wild and it had to be the next day. \u00adHer weight was right, the temperature was optimal. I could not argue with the ideal \u00adconditions of survival so headed home early to Norfolk. I put out kitten biscuits and water by a deluxe den I had built from twigs and moss in our back garden and fetched her in \u00ada cardboard box.<\/p>\n I released her into her twigs and moss home in the dark wet night under a full moon, switched off my phone and snuggled into my bed, thinking of homeliness for \u00adboth of us.<\/p>\n I awoke just before dawn, still half dreaming, imagining I could hear footsteps on the gravel. Was someone after Peggy? Then I heard footsteps coming up the stairs and knew it was not a dream. I flung open the bedroom door, my heart pounding. It was my older brother, Kit. \u201cDarling. Your phone was off. Dad died in the night.\u201d<\/p>\n Back at the nursing home, the gentle \u00adceremony of death took place, as my beloved father was changed into his checked shirt, and I was handed the watch which he \u00adnever took off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The nurses and carers formed a guard of honour as his stretcher was carried out. The rooks sung their rasping requiem to him from the trees as he was manoeuvred \u00adinto the hearse.<\/p>\n Later, I returned home to shower and looked distractedly for Peggy. I could not see her. My father gone, now Peggy gone too.<\/p>\n I reported back to hedgehog volunteers that I had failed even to hang on to her for a night. One told me: \u201cJust because you \u00adcannot see her, does not mean that she is \u00adnot there.\u201d<\/p>\n I repeat this to my mother. \u201cJust because we cannot see them, does not mean they \u00adare not there.\u201d<\/p>\n My dad is now part of the natural world he so loves. He was absorbed by it, and now it has absorbed him. And I pledge to him that I will care for nature in whatever form it comes to me.<\/p>\n [ad_1] Peggy, the hedgehog (Image: ) It was my toddler grandson Billy who first spotted the hedgehog in the autumn of 2021, caught in a net we used to clear debris from our pond. We tried to shake it free but it gave only the slightest tremor. My husband, Kim, is the son of a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1023],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farratanews.online\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Peggy,](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/39\/590x\/secondary\/4962667.jpg?r=1694811992357\" "\\"Peggy,")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n![\"Sarah](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/39\/590x\/secondary\/4962669.jpg?r=1694811992419\" "\\"Sarah")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/p>\n![\"Hedgehog](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/39\/264x\/4962655.jpg?r=1694811992469\" "\\"Hedgehog")
<\/source><\/source><\/picture>Hedgehog Diaries by Sarah Sands [New River]<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n