Tales of the Heath and Pond

A little story about Peter Rabbit

Back in April 2020, during the first Pandemic Lockdown, I was wandering through the Heath in the early hours of the morning camera in hand when I came across a clearing in the woods… Propped up against a tree was a big teddy bear and at his feet two little identical smiling Peter Rabbits… Nearby was an old discarded blanket and a carrier bag with another big teddy bear… Instead of it being a magical moment, I felt sad. I thought some younger sibling’s cupboard had been raided for this purpose and I wanted to take them all home and give them a good clean, but with the pandemic in full swing I was reluctant to touch or pick anything up… I left them and revisited them a few days later. The carrier bag had gone but the threesome remained.

Then one day not long after, as I headed back home through the woods, I came across devastation. The Teddy and the Rabbits had all been set alight and lay burnt on the ground with kapok stuffing strewn everywhere and I couldn’t bear to look; it broke my heart to see such heartless, wanton destruction of such sweet soft toys … One of my early morning Pond friends, J, had also been photographing them and showing the pictures to his elderly parents who loved bears; he was also visibly upset and angry and hadn’t the heart to tell them…

Several days later I returned again to find someone had covered the remains in the old blanket and I once again walked away feeling so sad. Eventually they disappeared, but I could never walk past that clearing without remembering…

On Tuesday, 23 February 2021, during the third Lockdown, I was once again wandering through the woods back home when I saw something under a bush; I bent down and two sad, frightened eyes stared back at me… when I pulled away the branches, there sat a very dirty, burnt, legless Peter Rabbit. I propped him up, took his picture and walked away … But as I did so, I had this overwhelming longing to go back and “save” him…. Well that’s what I did next day … taking with me another friend, V, to whom I had told the story… when she saw him, she completely understood my reaction as I scooped him up complete with debris, a piece of burnt wood fused to the back of his little blue jacket and kapok seeping from the big hole in his lower body …

Back home, I gave him the once over and lay him on a piece of newspaper as I tried to detach the wood from his charred jacket as little insects crawled out… Maybe it was my imagination but as he lay there his little face gazing up at the window, was there almost a glimmer of a smile? Inside the piece of wood was a nest of insect eggs, so they found a home in my bin as well as the sad remains of his tattered legs and one hand. I removed the kapok from the torn remnants of his upper body, and then it was into a bowl of Stergene gentle hand wash where he had his first bath in ages, and as the dye from his little blue jacket mixed with the suds and the dirt, he came back to life forever gazing up at me….

I hung him up to dry on the bath rack in my bathroom once again letting him gaze up at the daylight through my bathroom window …. and then went back to my photos and retrieved the original picture I took of him with his twin and the big teddy back almost a year ago…

I will restore him as best I can and then pop him into a little waist high pot and he can keep me company in my workshop, forever watching me with those big soft toy eyes that pierced my soppy heart…..