There’s a Rat in me kitchen…

I was roused from my slumber at 5.35 this morning with the terrifying words: “I don’t want to alarm you but…” tripping off my husband’s tongue.

If you don’t want to alarm someone, don’t say those words! For of course the first thing I am going to be is alarmed because you told me not to be.

I am going to be alarmed especially as those are the words you are waking me with when I should still be asleep.

It is amazing though how quick one can wake up.

At 5.35.15 seconds I was dimly aware that my husband was standing over me trying to wake me up.

At 5.35.16 seconds I was bolt upright in my bed going: “You WHAT????!!!!!”

Him: “I said I saw a rat in the kitchen…”

I quickly fall into a well-worn set of actions…

First Denial

Me: “Oh for God’s sake! No!”

Him: “Yes!”

Then…questioning

Me: “Are you sure it wasn’t a mouse?”

Him: “It was a pretty big for a mouse and it was by the Alpha [a kind of Aga], I didn’t have any shoes on…

Finally acceptance….of a sort.

Me: “Oh…why does not having shoes on automatically mean that the creature you saw was a rat and not a mouse?”

Him exasperated: “It was a F******! BIG! RAT! OK!!?? And I need you to give me a lift to the station …”

I get rapidly up and cautiously descend to the kitchen pushing the dogs in front of me. There are no rats cavorting across the kitchen table, there are no dusty toe prints across the shelves, there are no apples stacked neatly one on top of the other in a corner [the last rat to venture into the house had a penchant for taking apples and stacking them in corners; OCD complex? Not sure, but while endearing in a sick sort of eughh way it was rather annoying]

I look distrustingly at the neatly laid table and decide that it all has to be cleared and everything put in the dishwasher.

Charlie yells at me to get a move on as he’s now running late and we only have three minutes to get to the station 3 miles away.

I reluctantly leave knowing that as soon as I am gone the little blighter is bound to come out and scribble scrabble all over the house poking its whiskery little nose into everything, running over the cushions in my sitting room, piddling and peeing on the floor pooing in corners, scratching and squirming all over my things .

I try unsuccessfully to suppress my revulsion at the thought.

I hate rats

I hate their scaly tails.

Dirty. Nasty. Vile creatures.

In my house.

In my kitchen.

Over my food.

It’s too early to call the rat Man.

I have to repress my revulsion.

But I put his number on speed dial ready to hit it as soon as reasonably possible.

At 9.000 precisely I call him.

He says he won’t be able to get here until Saturday.

I say the rat is in me kitchen and I don’t DO rats…

He says Ok 6 pm earliest.

I say lunch

He says 5pm

We agree 4.30pm

So the rat man cometh….

The Rat Man cometh

rattus norvegius

“It’s not the rat’s fault it was born a rat.”

Not the words of comfort I wished to hear yesterday evening but I bit my tongue and showed the Rat Man the problem.

He said nothing and in the way of true countrymen got on with surveying the scene in utter silence. I tried an opening gambit but with a slow raise of his arm I was curtailed. I longed to spill out my woes, to make excuses for the chickens, but the Rat Man now moved swiftly round the pens his expert eye taking in all the detail he needed.

He gazed out to the middle distance, rubbed the ground with his feet, bobbed down to take a closer look at the hut doors. He peered under the sheds. Standing up he walked purposefully back to his stolid green Land Rover, opened it up and started to talk. Caught slightly on the hop, I rushed over to catch what he was saying and was about to apologise for not reacting quickly enough when I realised that he was in fact talking to his dog.

I was just beginning to feel superfluous when he started to hand out an array of large wooden boxes and a basket of the meanest looking traps I had ever seen in my life.

“I only want to kill rats,” I thought, “not men!”

“Now you mind those fen traps, snap your fingers hard they would. Make you cry.”

I smiled weakly and tentatively put the traps on the ground.

“So who’s going to help you then?”

I looked blank.

“Who’s going to help you with the rats?”

I was slightly non-plussed. “Err, you?”

“Well, I can, but it will cost you. Better if you were to do it yourself. I can teach you.”

“Oh great, “I thought, “I am going to have to deal with the buggers!”

“Oh! Yes!” I thought, “I AM going to have to deal with the buggers!”

Sometimes I have great ideas like calling the Rat Man but sometimes I just don’t actually think things through as much as I should. Of course I cannot have him come out here every day twice a day when I am paying him £32 an hour plus £22 travel.

For the next hour he carefully told me what I had to do and helped me set all the traps, patiently going over the routine several times as I struggled to cope with task at hand.

I have no qualms about disposing of the dead rats it was killing those that may not be dead enough that I know I would struggle with.

“Whatever you do don’t try to hold one that is alive,” he warned darkly.

I looked blank

“Quick as a wink it will bite you and it won’t be pleasant.”

I blanched.

“Best thing is to shoot it. Rats may be a problem but that doesn’t mean that they should be in pain when they die. The art is to do it quickly and cleanly as possible.”

I tried to look enthusiastic as I contemplated this philosophy. Perhaps I would be able to take it better if I did not keep looking at the empty chick pen.

“I don’t hold with poison except as a last resort; don’t want rodenticide to enter the food chain if we can help it," he continued. I nodded not completely with the program but coming round to the idea that like all true huntsmen, this fellow knew and admired his quarry.

“Now we can get on top of this infestation but you will have to get these pens sorted, a good foot of wire at the bottom of the pen should help all the way round, rats’ don’t like having to work too hard see. And put wire on the bottom of the door, they don’t like having to gnaw through it.”

I looked at all my beautiful newly built pens and started to calculate the cost of keeping my hens anew…

“And don’t expect to kill many initially; rats are Neophobic,”

“Well them and me both!” I thought as I wrestled with the fen trap while trying to control my fear of having my fingers broken in one quick snap.

Apparently rats don’t like new things and will avoid them at all costs but once they get used to them they accept them as part of their daily lives. Hence the fact that I could keep the traps where they are placed forever and still catch the rats for apparently they will not learn to avoid things they know will kill them as their fear of new things surpasses any other.

“The inside of a rat’s mind is unfathomable, a bit like the Rat Man’s.” I thought.

RATS!

Rats. I hate the f******s. I loath them. I really, really, loath them. From their beady black little eyes, their greasy coats and scaly tails. They are vile.
I hate them with a slow burning passion, an indignation and a righteious one at that.
Thye have killed my chicks. Taken from under their mother, dragged those poor terrified little things through the fence, killed them then taken them to their nest near the moat and devoured them. Not satisfied with that they have also got one of my poults through the raised slatted floor of the hen house by grabbing one of her legs as she sat on the floor, held it while they evicersated her then tried to eat her through the slats. I found her lying there feebly trying to get away this morning. I put her quickly out of her misery.
I don't like rats.
And I obviously have a rat problem.
I hate using poison but now I see no way round it. This unseasonably warm weather has helped the buggers to breed like mad and my chickens are suffering as a result. I will never get rid of them , nor will I ever get rid fo the grey squirrels, but I will get on top of the problem. I have to, or I will continue to lose more of my chickens and that I cannot stand. All the ones I reared in the incubator are now dead bar one and to be honest I don't hold out much hope for that unless I hold a vigilence all night to keep the rats away and I can tell you from experience the buggers are bold and my presence is hardly going to make them falter.
I was stil at college and working one Christmas on a farm where they had some beef cattle and  one or two dairy cows. I was there at a difficult calving. Thhe calf  was weak and looked as if it wanted to give up the ghost from the very minute it was born. But I wasn't going to let it. I nursed that calf all night and the next day, it seemed to grow weaker but I would not let it go. Every time it closed it's eyes and looked like it had decided to die I would thump it awake, keeping it alive but you'll never guess what. Even though I was there keeping this creature alive, the rats had started to eat it and I didn't even notice in the dark. They started to knaw on its tail. I couldn't at first work out what had happened and the calf was too weak to make any fuss.  I spent the second night keeping the buggers at bay as well as keeping that calf alive. I grew to hate them then, it was a personal thing. And it's personal now.
PS. As for the calf, he survived though his tail had to be amputated about half way up.

Rats on stilts....

There is a history of badly behaved dogs in my family, it's a fact I am not desperately proud of but a fact it is. Our dogs are not endearing either, I mean whippets aren't everyone's cup of tea are they? To us they are perfect, to others - well most say they are horribly skinny, shivery dogs but I think the best descrioption of them was something I overheard  in Wales such a long time ago now...

It was on a beach picnic in the mid 1970s there was me, Mum, my sister and two of the most badly behaved dogs ever. In their defence we were there first on the beach and it was quite empty to begin with but as the morning wore on and the sun became hotter and hotter, more and more families came to join us.

Now our two dogs Robin and Jay were northern whippets and like all whippets enjoyed sloping off to hunt whenever Mum’s back was turned. They were quite incorrigible and Mum had no control at all. From a distance she could see that her dogs were misbehaving badly. Instead of hunting up the grassy slopes away from the beach those two rascals had hit upon the best game ever - nicking everyone’s sandwiches and peeing on all the sandcastles and running like stink when people found out. It was pure heaven - for them!.

When you can do something really, really well you can’t help but show off and these two could run and it was so lovely watching them – although when I pointed this out to Mum she quite disowned them and said they weren’t ours. She rammed her sunglasses on more firmly, dug her nose more deeply into her magazine and studiously ignored the dogs.

I think this had a lot to do with the fact that there were two ample ladies in nylon flower print dresses looking disapprovingly at the dogs as well.

Creaking in their comfortable stripped canvas deck chairs one pursed her lips and said to the other: “Look you at those two dogs over by there – ooohhh, they look like rats on stilts!”

A romantic gesture….

Romance after years of living together is a bit like the once dizzying wallpaper you’ve become so used to it you wouldn’t notice if it bit you on the bum.
I forgot this important fact until this weekend when I suddenly realised that my father is possibly one of the most romantic men I have ever known. I don’t think Mum would actually agree on this one as the litany of forgotten birthdays, anniversaries and other such important occasions compounded by the purchase of inappropriate gifts stretches back some forty odd years - each forgotten tribute to be cherished in the annals of family folklore.
It was Sunday and Mum had trotted out to the outhouse to rummage in the depths of the freezer for something suitable for lunch before we wended our way to the pantomime at the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond.
I was warming myself nicely on the Aga, the Boy was playing being a witch in the other room and Dad was reading the Sunday papers and for the first time that weekend there was peace - oh for at least five minutes!
It was broken by a heartrending shriek from outside and Mum shot into the house screaming: “Oh! It’s terrible, terrible! There’s a rat outside. I can’t stand rats! They’re horrid things, oooohhhh!”
Of course, instead of comforting Mum as she collapsed onto a chair, we all - from the warmth and relative safety of indoors - peered out the windows to see if we could spot the terror of the outhouse. There was nothing to see.
“Honestly, you lot! It’s gone in between the outhouses among all those tiles you won’t find it now; I hate rats nasty, horrid, dirty things…” she went on for some time along this train of thought and as I listened with half an ear I was taken back in time to a trip we did while based in Brunei.
It was the ascension of Mount Kinabalu in Sabah – you know the thing you do as a happy family holiday at Easter time or as Dad would say a bit of team bonding, a character building pastime for all the family to enjoy.
From this you might be able to surmise that over the years I have a developed somewhat cynical view of my parents’ best efforts to engender the spirit of adventure into me, their eldest daughter.
We set off on a bright warm morning from the tourist camp to climb the last few thousand feet to the top. An exercise that Dad said would take about a day to the summit camp. Once there we would have supper and overnight it before the big push to the top at 5 o’clock in the morning returning for breakfast and our descent.
The hut at the summit camp was fairly basic – but luxurious compared to some of the places we had and were to visit with Dad on our travels. It was a bit like a long low bungalow and had slatted windows, which you could open when it got hot. There were lots of bunks and a rudimentary kitchen. Mum was on cooking duty and we, I think were helping ,I can’t remember exactly. But at some point there was a commotion from the kitchen area. I believe - but will no doubt be put right – that Mum had a problem with pests of the whiskered variety who quite literally sat in a row watching her every culinary move. I can understand that this might be quite unnerving as Mum had not even had the advantage of watching the acclaimed Disney movie Ratatouille, which in itself was not even a sparkle in the producer’s eye – in fact perhaps the producer was not even a sparkle in his own father’s eye – I digress.
Having been subjected to such scrutiny Mum was totally unhinged and such was her fear that she actually pushed me from the top bunk in order to sleep as far away from her tormentors as possible.
I lay in the bottom bunk too close to the floor for comfort and zippered up to my chin in an ex-army sleeping bag. I kept as still as I could in the moonlight in order to listen for the soft pitter patter of claws and the swish of long scaly tail on the floor. But it was not from the floor that they came but from outside, up the drainpipe and along the ridge to the bottom of the window at the foot of the bunks, I saw several of the little blighters scramble up the cantilevered window pains to the top where they were able to push their noses in and slither through to jump the short distance to the foot of the top bunk. Then they scrambled down the bed, dropt softly onto the floor and headed off towards the kitchen in search of food and other edible commodities.
It gave me a feeling of great satisfaction that despite my mother’s best efforts she still had rats crawling all over her that night. I, at the then tender age of 16, felt that I should have been on the top bunk and that her maternal feelings should have outweighed her baser instinct of self-preservation.
A movement in the flowerbeds near the bird feeder caught my eye.
“Dad, it’s there!” I whispered.
“Where?” he said craning his head over mine to get a closer look.
“There in the flower bed going towards the feeder…
The young brown rat lifted its nose and quested with its whiskers. It tensed, listening, then relaxed and started to skitter and jump about which I thought quite cute until I realised it was getting rid of the birds so it could eat the scattered corn on the ground. It looked sort of innocent and almost cuddly and I motioned to Mum to look at it. I could feel her shuddering disgust behind my back. I turned towards Dad but he had vanished.
When I looked for the rat again it was gone as well and I decided to get Mum a coffee to help calm her nerves. She continued to shudder for some time.
BLAM
A deep-throated retort and we all stopped, frozen, trying to work out what was going on. The Boy rushed in from the other room. “That gave me a fright,” he announced. “But I’m not scared,” he continued as he hugged me round my hips and pressed his head into my body.
I passed him to Mum, who looked a bit bewildered, and started to make my way towards the Hall from where I would be able to go upstairs from whence the noise had emanated.
As I reached the foot of the stairs, Dad swooped down them shotgun in hand. He gave me a triumphant look. “There,” he said grinning, “That’s what you get from sniper training!”
And with that cryptic remark he stalked off outside to retrieve his prize from the flowerbed and lay it at his mistress’ feet. Needless to say she was not amused. And from the foot of the stairs, listening to Mum scolding my father to take that revolting thing away and out of her sight, I realised that he had done a most romantic thing.
His Lady had fled in terror from a monster and he without wasting a moment and with no thought of his own comfort had slain it.