A MUM-of-three had the shock of her life when she woke up in the middle of the night to find a fox running around her bedroom – and it wasn’t the Mr Fox she expected.

Leanne Morse, 29, of Park South, was rudely awakened by her Staffordshire bull terrier Rex, who was barking and chasing the wild animal around the house shortly after midnight on Friday.

At first glance, Leanne mistook the fox for a ginger cat but when she realised her error, she tried to get it out from under her bed with a piece of her son’s plastic toy car track.

But the fox ran straight into her eight-year-old daughter Maddie’s bedroom where it remained for the rest of the night, chewing her pencil case and Sleeping Beauty DVD and using the carpet as a toilet.

Fortunately, Maddie and her six-year-old brother Bryce had been sleeping in their older brother Corey’s bedroom while he slept at his nan’s.

Ironically, Leanne’s boyfriend is called David Fox, but this Mr Fox was certainly unwanted.

Leanne said: “I left my daughter’s bedroom door open and hoped that it would make its own way out downstairs, but that didn’t work so I changed tactics and shut it in the bedroom and opened the window, hoping it might climb out but that didn’t work either. “I went back to bed because I thought if I’m moving about it’s not going to go anywhere.

“It was quite aggressive – it was going for the car track when I was trying to push it out of my room, but when I woke up this morning I started to feel a bit sorry for it so I gave it some cat food and some water – it had chewed some of my daughters stuff and there is fox poo all over the floor, which I’ve got to clean up.”

The fox, which got in to the house through the cat flap, was rescued by John Warwick, from the Swindon and District Animal Haven, who took it to the vets because it had an injury to its head and eye.

And fortunately for Leanne, she saw the funny side to the incident the following morning.

“My boyfriend’s name is David Fox, so I text him and said ‘I’ve had one of your cousins staying the night’ and he just laughed at me.

“I have seen the fox in the garden before but it’s never been in the house, we get the odd tom cat coming in and out but never a fox. “It is quite scary really but it was lucky my daughter wasn’t in her bedroom at the time.”