The animals in the wall

When I was small I used to visit my grandparents in Derbyshire. They had a huge back garden filled with damson trees, berries and currants and long rows of runner beans. My grandma kept bees in neat white hives in the waste ground near the rhubarb patch at the end of the garden.

Outside of the back door was a patio. At the edge of the patio where the lawn began was a dry stone wall.

It was no ordinary dry stone wall. It had animals in it. Stone sheep, stone pigs, and stone dogs. Sometimes I could hear the sheep bleating. When it was dark, on the nights that the animals came out of the stone, my father and my grandmother would take me out onto the porch to see them. I’d hold the flashlight up to their faces, and there they’d be. Bleating and snorting in the wall.