A Mouse In The House

The onset of the coldest winter weather had brought a number of small guests in, but the regular setting of a disproportionately large number of mousetraps had seen an end to the problem. But, whilst staying with a friend this week, I woke in the night to hear familiar scuttering, scurrying and muted squeaking in the dark and speculated that my friends had a little visitor or two in their attic.

Next morning at breakfast my friends asked if I had slept well. Any disturbances? I mentioned the early morning rave up in the roof and asked if they had a mouse problem. "Problem? We've got a plague," my friend said. "Every night we catch a couple of mice in the roof. We can't work out how they are getting in." Graham then went up into the attic and produced two wooden humane mousetraps complete with guests. Unfortunately he then put the traps on the floor by the back door - "I'll take them down the garden later" - and left the traps to the kindly, and inquisitive attention of their two border terriers. A couple of minutes later the inevitable happened. The terriers tipped up the traps and the mice shot into the sitting room. Chaos. Panic. Recriminations.

We went out to our business with the traps left set in the sitting room. That evening, the traps were empty and there was no sign of the mice. Next morning the same two mice I swear were caught in the traps in the loft space. "Mark them before you release them," I suggested. Graham did, with Tippex. Next day he had two Tippexed mice in the traps. These were obviously homing mice, well accustomed to legging it back down the garden, getting into the house, possibly by an airbrick behind their woodstove in the sitting room, and then climbing up through the central cavity wall space and into the loft.

"Why don't you take them farther away?" my friend suggested to her husband.

He took them to the end of their road. I had visions of two little mice with red spotted hankies on the end of sticks thumbing a lift home. In the night more scurrying. In the morning two familiar mice. I suggested my friends check the deeds of their house to establish true ownership and perhaps ditch their principles and buy a set of Little Nipper mousetraps. Fiendishly difficult to set, but definitely guarantee the none return, unless in spiritual form, of mice.

No. My friends, dear as they are, have funny ideas. They are vegetarian you see. Mind you, vegetarians who like the softest leather shoes, coats, wallets, car seats etc. "I'll just have to take them farther away," Graham said. So he did. Drove them to a river bank, stopped by the side of the road, let them out of their traps and watched one of them run across the road and get flattened by a passing car. I am not joking. He was devastated. Railed at the driver although how he could have seen a mouse on the road is beyond me. All that energy and time invested in a humane trap and then the mouse was killed. "Well at least you know it won't come back," I said, feeling very subdued after all the grief I had given them about their humane principles and considering whether I should visit a medium to apologise to the mouse in its next life.

"No," said Graham, "and neither will any more mice in future. I've just found out that those darned mice have made a nest in a collection of my old classic car magazines. It's Little Nippers from now on."

Updated: 13:43 Thursday, February 07, 2002