Last Updated on June 20, 2026 by admin
The gap was four inches wide. A grey cat was wedged at the bottom of it, pressed between two brick conservatories, somewhere he should never have been able to fit. He had last been seen at around 3am, and by the time anyone reached down for him, he was too far in to touch.
This was Madeira Road in Portsmouth, on the morning of 15 March 2026. A neighbour had spotted someone peering down the narrow channel between the houses and gone out to see what was wrong. What she found was a cat she half-recognised — the one who had been straying around the gardens for ages, the one she and others had been quietly feeding.
She couldn’t reach him. The gap was too tight and he was too deep. So she called the RSPCA.
The cat at the bottom of that gap had a name, though nobody on Madeira Road knew it yet. He was Alfie, and he was ten years old. Nearly four years earlier, in July 2022, he had vanished from home shortly after his owner, Mandy Davis, moved house.
Mandy had searched. She had hoped. Eventually she had done the thing every owner of a missing cat dreads, which is to quietly accept that he wasn’t coming back. “I honestly didn’t think I’d ever see him again,” she said.
What none of them knew — not Mandy, not the neighbours leaving out food — was that Alfie had been surviving the whole time just two roads away.
RSPCA Animal Rescue Officer Sarah Whatton was the first to arrive. She could see the problem at once. Alfie had likely fallen from a first-floor roof and dropped into the 10cm (4in) gap between the two conservatories, and there was no angle from which a person could reach him.
“We were concerned about the cat because the caller said he was last seen at around 3am, so he could have been stuck in the gap for some time,” Sarah said. Despite the hours wedged in the cold, he was bright and alert — but stuck fast.
One officer wasn’t enough. Sarah called in a colleague, Morgan Ellison, and then Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. The light was starting to fade. They were running out of options, and out of daylight.
With no way to lift him out by hand, the team called a local vet, who agreed to sedate Alfie so he could be freed without injuring him in the cramped space. The officers rigged up a makeshift contraption just to deliver the injection down into the gap.
Then came the part that turned a rescue into a race. “The vet told us once the sedation took effect we had one minute to free him before there was serious risk of breathing difficulties,” Morgan said. One minute. Three people. A four-inch gap.
“It took all three of us to pull him out,” Morgan said, “and by some absolute miracle he came out unharmed.”
He was safe. But he was still, as far as anyone knew, just a stray who’d got himself stuck. Then a scanner passed over the back of his neck and found a microchip.
The chip had a name. It had an owner. It had a phone number. And the address it pointed to was barely two streets from where Alfie had spent four years as the neighbourhood’s unofficial cat.
When the RSPCA called Mandy, she could barely take it in. “I couldn’t quite believe it when the RSPCA called to tell me they had him, and he’d been found just two roads away from our house,” she said. “It still feels like a bit of a blur.”
Alfie is home now, settling back into the house he disappeared from in 2022. Footage released by the RSPCA and reported by ITV News Meridian shows the moment he was reunited with his family — a ten-year-old cat, none the worse for a four-year detour, back in the one place he’d been quietly circling all along.
The single thing that made it possible was the microchip. Since 10 June 2024 it has been a legal requirement in England for owned cats over 20 weeks old to be microchipped and registered to a database a scanner can read in seconds, as the RSPCA’s cat microchipping guidance explains. The chip itself is about the size of a grain of rice and sits under the skin at the back of the neck; you can read how the procedure actually works here. Without it, Alfie would simply have been released back outside as an unidentified stray — and Mandy would still be wondering.
Two streets. Four years. One scan. Some cats find their way almost all the way home and just need someone to read the chip.
Has your cat ever turned up somewhere you never expected? Tell us where in the comments 👇