A HORRABRIDGE woman has thanked her village’s repair cafe for giving a new life to her husband’s woebegone chiildhood teddy bear.

Julie Campbell took husband Nick’s bear to the repair cafe in Horrabridge Village Hall, not expecting a miracle.

The cuddly toy, which had comforted the former Royal Marine, now 62, as a little boy at boarding school was looking the worse for wear, after years in a trunk in the attic and subsequently being chewed by the couple’s dog.

His ear had fallen off, one eye was missing and one of his feet had been pulled away.

But the repair cafe achieved great things. When Julie went to collect the teddy, she couldn’t believe the transformation volunteer Jennie Dunstan had achieved. ‘He had one of his eyes missing and had his ear totally ripped off, a scar across his face and his foot was broken,’ she said.

‘He was quite badly damaged. I felt so sorry for the teddy bear and it was so sweet the way they repaired him. Jennie has given him new eyes and she went online and bought a pair of glass eyes for him. He has a bandage around his neck. He wasn’t scarred around the face but he was scarred everywhere else, so she put the scar on his face there for fun.

‘They are amazing at the repair cafe, I don’t know how they do it, and they do it for nothing.’

The repair cafe takes place on the third Saturday in the month between 10.30am and 12.30pm. It is run by volunteer Neil Wylie and an army of volunteers, who fix everything from record players to clocks and lampshades and even a horse massager.

‘We just love doing it,’ he said. ‘It is rewarding to fix things. We often work as a team and if we are not sure how to fix things there is a conflab about how we are going to do it. Sometimes you have to a go a little bit out of the box to do it.’

Pictured is Julie Campbell with the teddy bear, patched up with love and care.