It was my toddler grandson Billy who first noticed the hedgehog within the autumn of 2021, caught in a internet we used to clear particles from our pond. We tried to shake it free however it gave solely the slightest tremor. My husband, Kim, is the son of a Yorkshire vet and notably unsentimental about animals however one thing melted inside him when confronted by a hedgehog.

What was it? Something of Tolkien a few creature from elsewhere, discovering itself in peril? Something sturdy and good natured, however in peril? He took a comb and a jug of heat, salty water and tenderly cleared the flies from the hedgehog’s eyes.

Our grandson watched, from a cautious ­distance, camouflaged by his anorak and wellington boots. He carried a twig, hopeful of utilizing it as a type of defibrillator.

Then my husband stood up, checked his telephone, and mentioned he was going to take the hedgehog, whom we had named Horace, to a hedgehog hospital.

I laughed. There was no such factor as a hedgehog hospital and, certainly, no person would absorb a hedgehog on a Sunday night?

But there was one, Emma’s Hedgehog Hospital, on the outskirts of King’s Lynn close to our Norfolk residence. I found it was a part of a volunteer hedgehog community throughout the nation, a type of National Health Service for hedgehogs. And I got here to grasp how a lot these wild creatures, which, because of Beatrix Potter, we’ve come to think about as pleasant washerwomen, are a part of our nationwide story. There is one thing magically interesting about hedgehogs.

In a world so fractious and binary, it’s a topic on which everybody can soften and converse and be human.

If you want to keep away from the sound and fury of social media, you’ll at all times be secure discussing hedgehogs.

I additionally turned grateful to hedgehogs for representing one thing deeper.

Saving Horace the hedgehog, whose title was rapidly modified to Peggy as soon as she was examined at Emma’s Hedgehog Hospital, coincided with the mortal sickness of my father, Noel Harvey.

That similar autumn, he suffered coronary heart failure and was taken to King’s Lynn hospital. I went to the bungalow he shared with my mom, Susan, to fetch a sponge bag for him. There was his favorite armchair and, beside it, a aspect desk.

On it have been his studying glasses, his piles of books about birds or classical music or the Church and his binoculars.

A abstract of him, actually. Old-style Radio 4. The chair seemed starkly empty together with his imprinted kind, for he had at all times sprung up as I let myself in with a hearty: “Hello ­darling, how lovely to see you.”

Under Covid guidelines, I couldn’t see him in hospital, so I’d drop off little notes together with his day by day newspaper.

What ought to I write to him about? The fate of a hedgehog appeared about proper, not too severe, not too taxing, a narrative of restoration.

Our quick concern, each for the hedgehog and for my dad, was to get their weight and energy up for winter. We would give attention to the spring.

My father beloved the pure world and would watch from his armchair the birds outdoors the window on the feeder. It was removed from the cruel lighting and cacophony of a hospital ward. Emma on the hedgehog hospital mentioned that after Peggy had been cleared of ticks and maggots (not fairly the picture of Beatrix Potter’s hedgehog, maybe) we should always intention to launch her by spring.

As for my dad, I began to listen to from ­medical doctors the type of phrases chosen to pave the way in which for bereavement with out sounding too brutally sudden. “It could be weeks or months,” they nodded. My father was a person of religion however he was getting into the darkest ­valley. I consulted my sister, Joanna, who has at all times been solicitous in caring for my ­mother and father. If we didn’t get our dad out of ­hospital we’d not see him once more.

She agreed, however my mom was unwell herself and there was ­ no further room at their home ­for a carer, so we discovered a pleasant nursing residence close by which had adjoining rooms for each my mother and father.

Per week is a very long time in hospital and my father seemed skinny, scared and unshaven once we collected him. A nurse on a double shift helped us get him to the automotive.

I noticed a lot of this high quality of compassion over the following few months. It was the nice lesson of the pandemic. My mother and father had been married for almost 70 years. They had recognized the higher, and this was the more severe, the illness somewhat than well being. I arrange Alexa for them and performed a music from their youth: Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific. They checked out one another longingly throughout the room with craving and tears. As the late Roger Scruton put it: “Love is the relationship between dying things.”

Winter units in and Emma reported that Peggy’s weight was enhancing. She is as much as 896g having gained 45g in a single day. I really feel pleased with her.

The final time we might take my dad out was Christmas Eve. He was puzzled that his legs had began to present approach beneath him, and my grown son needed to elevate him over the brink. It was dad’s birthday, and the spotlight of his 12 months is the seasonal carol live performance from King’s College Cambridge.

I be taught later from the composer John Rutter that the rationale we are able to hear them ­on the BBC is partly all the way down to my dad.

The school was initially reluctant to have the broadcasting paraphernalia within the chapel, and their worst fears have been confirmed when a window was broken within the early days of the connection. It was my father, who joined the BBC from the diplomatic service, who calmed the scenario and persuaded King’s College to have one other go. We listened to the beginning of the carol service within the nursing residence automotive park within the fading afternoon gentle. My father bowed his head and tapped to the primary strains of Once In Royal David’s City.

He was in all probability considering of his son, my brother, the performer and composer Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who sang that verse as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral.

My mom gave him a pointy solicitous look, which she had began to do extra usually. She mentioned to me: “You just don’t expect this to happen at our time of life.”

I nod sympathetically after which we ­each begin laughing. What else do you anticipate to occur?

It was late February and I used to be at a diplomatic dinner in London, discussing the Ukraine disaster. A former secretary basic of Nato – coincidentally, the hedgehog is the image of Nato – was speaking of the fragile stability between energy and diplomacy and the significance of a united entrance, when a textual content pinged on my telephone.

Emma mentioned Peggy was able to be returned to the wild and it needed to be the following day. ­Her weight was proper, the temperature was optimum. I couldn’t argue with the perfect ­situations of survival so headed residence early to Norfolk. I put out kitten biscuits and water by a deluxe den I had constructed from twigs and moss in our again backyard and fetched her in ­a cardboard field.

I launched her into her twigs and moss residence in the dead of night moist night time beneath a full moon, switched off my telephone and snuggled into my mattress, considering of homeliness for ­each of us.

I awoke simply earlier than daybreak, nonetheless half dreaming, imagining I might hear footsteps on the gravel. Was somebody after Peggy? Then I heard footsteps developing the steps and knew it was not a dream. I flung open the bed room door, my coronary heart pounding. It was my older brother, Kit. “Darling. Your phone was off. Dad died in the night.”

Back on the nursing residence, the mild ­ceremony of dying came about, as my beloved father was become his checked shirt, and I used to be handed the watch which he ­by no means took off.

The nurses and carers shaped a guard of honour as his stretcher was carried out. The rooks sung their rasping requiem to him from the timber as he was manoeuvred ­into the hearse.

Later, I returned residence to bathe and seemed distractedly for Peggy. I couldn’t see her. My father gone, now Peggy gone too.

I reported again to hedgehog volunteers that I had failed even to hold on to her for an evening. One instructed me: “Just because you ­cannot see her, does not mean that she is ­not there.”

I repeat this to my mom. “Just because we cannot see them, does not mean they ­are not there.”

My dad is now a part of the pure world he so loves. He was absorbed by it, and now it has absorbed him. And I pledge to him that I’ll take care of nature in no matter kind it involves me.

• The Hedgehog Diaries: A Story Of Faith, Hope And Bristle by Sarah Sands (New River, £14.99) ­is ­out now. Visit expressbookshop.com or name Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P on orders over £25