If you have a phobia about mice, Look Away Now.
If you are convinced that the only place for a mouse is in a field, with a hawk hovering overhead or an owl swooping in, this post is not for you.
Once upon a time, there lived a slightly bonkers young lady in her house on the edge of a cliff. Well it was about 100 yards away, enough to hear the seas crashing into the rocks below. In fact lying on the bed she would actually feel the reverberation up through the earth, rather than hear it. And on stormy nights the wind would hurl itself into a natural drainage channel carved into the cliff top, sending the stream of water skywards, and this set up a banshee wail, on a scale of notes so accurate she could tell the wind strength as precisely as the Beaufort Scale. This same wind was also stripping the paint off the windows, and sometimes ripped the vegetables out of the ground, so that next morning they were lying there, roots all nicely parallel, in rows, urgently needing to be replanted.
Now, in this house, which was really a ground floor three bedroom converted croft–cottage, there lived a mouse.
It was quite reasonable to find a mouse here, as the house was over a hundred years old and the walls were made of stone, about two feet thick (if you’ve been brought up on centimetres, I suggest you go and look it up, but glancing at the length of an adult’s arm will do for now) and just imagine all the nooks and crannies and alleyways and quite possibly town squares that there could be in mouse town! But for the moment there was only one mouse.
You’re thinking No, No, No..... There is never, ever, only one mouse, like there is never only one rabbit. But for the moment, one mouse was all that the house declared.
It must have lonely, this mouse, because it wasn’t long before it brought home a little friend. And together they played in and out of the nooks and crannies, noisy as a herd of buffalo.
They were happiest in the kitchen, perhaps because there was always the smell of food, even if they never actually found any accidental leftovers. (Remember that word – accidental.)
The problem with mice is the inconvenient downside. They pee everywhere, nearly all the time. So the worktops were cleared of all bits and pieces, bar the little telly at one end, and the cleaning cupboard under the sink got emptied into the utility room. Finally, it was clear that the cutlery drawer would have to evacuate too, so it went into jugs on the kitchen table. (Stocks and shares in cleaning materials apparently rose at this time.)
I know what you’re thinking.
The slightly bonkers young lady was actually completely off her trolley.
Well you might be right, but this is the same lady who as a child would go round the kitchen cupboards in the middle of the night with a long carving knife setting off the mousetraps so that her parents and grandfather could never explain why the cheese was gone, but never a mouse was caught.
Anyway.
So....
There’s the lady in her cottage, really quite delighted to have a pair of little ones to look after. (This is always a risk when you don’t have children.) (But I swear in this case it would probably have made no damned difference.) And because she was a kind lady, she let them have a few peanuts when she was refilling the bird–feeders. She also realised that they had a special love of candlewax. There was always a candle or two burning in the evenings, and sometimes little nightlights perched in tiny crevices in the stone walls. One wax in particular seemed to be the caviar of waxes. This was pink wax, precious beyond rubies to the little mice. Better than red, better than green, better than yellow and a mile ahead of plain boring white. One night the lady watched a mouse run up a pink candle hoping to chew a bit off the top, realised it was lit, ran down again, forgot, ran up again, ran down, forgot again and tried a third time.
Chocolate. Do we all love chocolate? Mice do, and so did the lady’s best friend (let’s call her Elizabeth) who came round for the evening bearing a couple of Galaxy ripple things.
They sat talking at the kitchen table, and the lady of the house decided to save part of her chocolate for later. She laid it on a side table by the wall, lying on its wrapper. Ten minutes later the wrapper began to slide slowly backwards under the houseplant. The chocolate was rescued just in time, but Elizabeth thought she’d try to see the mouse for herself, and laid a fat crumb of chocolate on the table where the wrapper had been. She sat talking, never taking her eyes off the crumb for a second, and suddenly – “It’s GONE! And I never blinked….” What she didn’t know was that the mouse had been christened Speedy, as in Gonzalez.
The lady’s neighbour in the nearby cottage suggested it might be a good idea to get one of those plug–in deterrents which emit a high frequency signal. Oh dear oh dear and bollocks. Fail. The little mice joined hands and danced round it, singing little mouse songs, probably high as kites on a special rave-mouse-party frequency.
You probably know how mice like to keep little stashes of food, and these mice had oodles of places to choose from. Since the lady of the house usually had bare feet, it was easy to walk over the rugs and feel something nobbly underfoot. Three peanuts under the corner of the mat. Together with a lump of pink wax. Two peanuts down the toe of her boot. Peanuts under the phone. One morning there was a peanut under her pillow, which she thought was probably a thank you present, but gave it back to them anyway.
One day she opened the cutlery drawer, forgetting she never used it now. There were crumbs, some leftover bits of peanut, and a whole nightlight still in its casing. They’d obviously been celebrating something with a special candlelit dinner.
The day came, as it surely must, when the two mice had a little family. And the teeniest tiniest feet you ever did see were running along the top edge of the cutlery drawer under the worktop. The meeces could not be seen, just their miniature feet.
Oh what fun they had, chasing each other round and round a white lump of rock on the windowsill, playing I’m the King of the Castle and trying to knock each other off the top. Then they’d run up the side of the secondary glazing window, and like a sailor on the yardarm they’d reach out to the fuschia plant hanging high up there. One little teenage mouse was on the plant when he slipped and hung there by one arm for a few seconds. The lady rushed to catch him but he fell off before she got there, and just ran off, completely unhurt.
Once in a while the lady came home from work so late at night that she brought fish and chips in with her, and there were always too many chips. The mice got the rest. They hauled them one by one under the sink and the lady pretended not to notice, half–watching her little tv in the corner. Then she realised the row was getting louder and louder. It sounded like a whole cinema full of people eating crisps with their mouths open. What a racket! She couldn’t even hear the telly properly.
And while we’re on the subject of food, did you ever see a Spaghetti Mouse?
Sitting upright on his haunches, tiny hands clutching a length of spaghetti flavoured with tomato, garlic etc, for all the world as if smoking a hookah. And as the lady watched, the length of the spaghetti magically got shorter and shorter, until there was nothing left and the mouse trotted back under the sink, wiping his paws and whiskers.
One sunny afternoon the lady went to a wardrobe where she kept blankets and spare curtains. On the top blanket she had carefully laid two oystercatcher wings, salted and dried in the open position, separated from the body (road kill, unfortunately) with all due ceremony, the body being given to the ravens to eat. (Ravens lived around her house on the cliffs.) (Why she preserved the wings is another story.) Sliding the wardrobe door open, she saw the two wings had been dragged to the back behind the blankets and were now pointing skywards. How curious, she thought.
Moments later, a little mouse ran along the edge of the blanket to the front of the wardrobe, wondered whether to hold its nose and jump, thought not, ran back, had another thought and ran forward, got scared and ran back, and forward and back and forward and back and suddenly, ever so bravely, took off into space past the lady’s shoulder and was never seen again.
The lady gently pulled away the blankets, and found a soft nest at the back, lined with tiny feathers nibbled off the wing edges. And a pair of earrings, a heap of peanuts, choice morsels of candle wax, a large bead missing for weeks, a paperclip and the spare link from her watchstrap.
