Foxed by an uninvited visitor

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Jun 02, 2007 

All down one side of our inner-city rectory, in the chasm between the huge basement and the garden-that- used-to-be-a-cemetery, is a deep gully. It is accessed only by a small gate and you have to jump down into it. Once you're in, your head is level with the flowerbeds and there's no more than an elbow of room. Though it might have made sense in Victorian times, it's an annoying space for us now, mainly because it fills up with litter blown in from the street - leaves, polystyrene takeaway cartons and the blue plastic bags native to the area. And, now, a fox.

It's a young fox. I see him first, curled up tight asleep among the litter, his side gently heaving up and down. He looks unlikely and impossible - like a child's soft toy accidentally dropped from a bedroom window. Our garden used to be full of foxes, until our two dogs chased them all away. But how did he get down in the gully?

"Is he injured?" Chloë, 16, has rushed downstairs to have a look.

"He looks OK." He's not mangy like many of the foxes round here - smooth coated and bright-eyed, a teenage fox probably.

"Can we keep him?" Chloë asks, only half-joking. "I'd look after him, I swear. I'd have him on a lead and feed him and everything. I'd call him Henry."

We all laugh.

"We can't keep him," I say and go to look for a number for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

I dial and am held in a queue. I don't know what I'm ringing to ask really. How do I tell if he's injured? Should we try going down there? (Please, not me.) Is there an organisation that rescues young foxes?

After eight minutes of hanging on, I give up and go back to sneak a look in the gully. Henry is walking around, sniffing. He's not injured but he's not alert, not running away. Something's not quite right.

"Look at his cute black ears and paws!" says Chloë, who is torn between staying and going back upstairs to drink lime cordial and listen to The Fratellis. "I say we keep him."

"Sure," I say. "Like we can really afford to take on another living thing."

"He could live in my room and

go to school with me. I'd show him the ropes!"

Chloë tramps back upstairs and I notice that Henry is eating something.

"Chloë!"

"What?" Her hair hangs down between the bannisters.

"What's he eating?"

"Dunno."

"Yes you do."

"Well - uh - I might have given him a dried apricot."

"You mustn't feed him!"

"Why not?"

"Because then he'll become a pest. We can't have a fox always at our back door asking for food."

"Well, you see," Chloë comes back downstairs slowly, "he asked me if I had any meat and I said: 'Sorry, mate, we're vegetarians. You pitched up in the wrong gully.' So I asked him if he'd maybe like an organic dried apricot and he said that would do fine . . . Oh, and I gave him a handful of dog food too.'

She sits down on the stairs, chin in hands. "Can we really not keep him?"

"The cats are really going to love sharing their space with a fox, right?"

I remember from my childhood the serendipitous, almost hypnotic feeling you got when a wild animal showed up at your door. It was like you'd been selected or singled out in some way - and it was no more than your duty to act.

In my favourite children's book, Pookie, a rabbit with wings flies in through a girl's window one night and she takes him in her arms and gives him love and he ends up staying with her for ever and sleeping in her sewing basket. That picture of Pookie, tucked up and blissfully, safely sound asleep in that basket - home at last! - still gives me a tight feeling in my chest.

As a child I "rescued" mice, voles, baby blackbirds who had fallen out of the nest and, once, a moorhen. I fed them milk, bits of bread and biscuit, water from a doll's bottle. I made them nests in cardboard boxes. I watched over them with the idea that they might end up like Pookie - mine for ever. They all died.

I try the National Fox Helpline. It's a 24-hour service - except for weekends. Henry should have known not to get trapped on a Sunday.

"Are you sure we can't go down and try picking him up?" Chloë says.

"No," says her father. "We don't know if he's ill or stuck or both. Or he may just be perfectly OK and scramble back up into the garden later."

"Scramble how exactly?" says Chloë. "No fox could scramble up out of that place. It's way too deep."

Chloë's going out to the cinema with a friend and seems to have forgotten about Henry. I have work to do. We eat supper, watch a DVD. Last thing, when we let the dogs out, there's no sign of him. But it's quite dark in the gully.

"We'll see if he's still there in the morning," we tell each other, "and then we'll decide what's best."

In the night it rains for the first time in ages and the morning is dark and blowy. I open the back door and look down into the gully. Henry's body is spread out, on his side, flies crawling over his eyes. I shut the door quickly.

Chloë wanders down in her pyjamas, eye make-up smudged, hair fuzzy with sleep. She sees my face as I put the kettle on.

"What?" she says.