Annabel liked oats so much that if we showed her an empty saucepan she would stick her head in it like a fencing mask and, while we held it in place over her nose, march hilariously round the field by way of demonstration. Annabel liked oats so much that when we decided we were still giving her too many and replaced her morning quota with bread she burrowed through it like a terrier, snorted with disgust when she found there were no oats underneath, and upset the bowl with her hoof. Annabel liked oats so much that when, a few weeks after Henry's departure, she suddenly went off them and took of all things to carrots, our eyebrows went up in alarm.
Full of Vitamins, she announced, chewing steadfastly away at the roots she'd previously hated. Made her feel Sick, she said, turning her head away when we offered her oats in our hands. Made her feel even Sicker, she insisted when we made her a hot bran mash, offered it to her knowing horses usually went mad about it, and after one wan sniff she turned languidly aside.
She could, she added as an afterthought – turning immediately back again to sniff the bag I had under my arm in case the mash was the wrong consistency – manage a little dry bran. So she took to bran and hot water consumed from separate bowls – as she often drank water through whatever she was eating the result was presumably mash anyway but Annabel preferred it like that – ate peppermints as avidly as ever, went capriciously off oven-dried bread for a week or two in favour of the same bread Soft with Honey On, and encouraged – as the next thing to worry us – rats.
We already, as we knew, had one rat. He lived in the cottage roof, disturbed us by coming in in the early hours and gnawing on the beam over our bedroom ceiling, and could be seen from time to time – which was the reason he'd taken up residence with us – slipping round the corner to eat the bread we put out for the birds in the yard. He was quite an establishment around the place and even Solomon and Sheba – he was, after all, a pretty big rat – didn't bother with him overmuch. Sometimes he had a session on the beam during the day whereupon the cats, snoozing comfortably on our bed, raised their heads, stared reproachfully at the ceiling, and went back to sleep. Sometimes Solomon did a routine look up a drainpipe like 'What The Butler Saw' and stuck his paw up it. Sometimes, if she had nothing else to do, Sheba sat in the guttering over the kitchen door. Overflowing it like a small blue broody hen, informing callers when they least expected it that she was Waiting up Here for the Rat – and he wished, said the postman, dropping our letters nervelessly into the mud one morning when she spoke to him in the very act of his handing them over, that we'd train our animals to be normal.
Once, after a particularly sleepless night ourselves, we caught the rat in a cage trap, carried it a mile into the hills with the coal tongs, set it free with a warning about disturbing people and started up another mystery. At five o'clock next morning somebody galloped belatedly across our bedroom ceiling, started gnawing post-haste at the beam, stopped when I hammered beneath it, and – after a minute or so's complete silence during which I got back into bed – dropped a stone like a bomb on the plaster-board. Whether our neighbour in the roof had found his way back and was mad with us, or whether it was a newly-imported girl-friend of his we'd captured and after a fruitless search for her he was mad at us about that we never knew. Only that it seemed to be the same rat we saw eating the bread in the yard next morning. Definitely that whoever it was was chewing away on the selfsame beam. And that we were practically walking somnambulists through lack of sleep and expecting the roof to cave in at any moment when suddenly, blessedly, he vanished.
He didn't vanish far. The next place we saw him – unmistakable from his size and light brown colouring –was up in Annabel's house, scuttling across the floor with a piece of bread in his mouth and making for a hole in the wall to which presumably he'd moved on the grounds that Annabel had a bigger stock of bread than the birds and nobody thumped on the ceiling at him in the night. And the next thing we knew he'd got friends up there.
Bread was disappearing from Annabel's bowl at breakfast time practically on a conveyor belt system. Annabel, a little belatedly, for it was her finickiness in leaving bread around that had started this business in the first place, was standing, while she ate, at Invasion Stations – behind her bowl and suspiciously facing the door, which was quite the wrong way round because the rats nipped out from behind her. Half the cats in the neighbourhood started sitting on the wall watching for the rats. Solomon kept going up and fighting the cats. Father Adams, listening to the howls that came constantly from behind Annabel's house where, from the sound of it, murder was being committed, said we couldn't even have rats could us, peaceably like other people.
We certainly couldn't. The howling was Solomon, with the other cats cornered in crevices or up trees, telling them what he'd do to them. Bite their ears off! he roared, undulating like an air-raid warning and probably deafening them for days. Pull their tails out! Punch their noses if they touched a twig on Siamese property! Which was all very well, but Solomon didn't catch the rats himself. All he did was come in with his eyes watering and frighten us into thinking he'd picked up a germ, until we realised it happened every time and the explanation was that the passion with which he'd been howling had made his eyes run. One day he also came in reeking of ammonia where a besieged adversary had sprayed at him in self-defence and we had, while he howled some more, to Dettol him. We were jolly glad when Annabel got keen on her food again, the rats and cats apparently disappeared, and life returned to normal.
As normal as it ever is, that is. We – it was now three weeks to Christmas – were having our sitting-room fireplace altered. The modern one, which had been the bugbear of our lives for years, taken out; an oak beam set in the wall as it must have been originally; and a simple, wide brick fireplace with an air-control principle behind it set back into the alcove.
Sidney, when we first asked him about doing the job, asked incredulously what did we want to move the old one out for. Nice shiny tiles, boiler and all behind, what did we want better than that? Sidney, reconciled eventually to our having a brick one, wilted again when we suggested setting it back in the alcove. Whip the first 'un out, he said persuasively; bung the brick 'un flat in its place – did we realise what it would mean in altering pipes alone if we went back into that wall? Sidney, bringing along his mate Norm to confirm the position when we still insisted on excavating the alcove, had a moment or two of intense hilarity when Norm said 'twould mean altering all the plumbing. I said we could do without hot water for a day or two. Norm and Sidney fell helpless on one another's shoulders at my innocence and said 'twould be more like a week but go ahead and order the thing if we wanted to. We did. The parts, ordered in September, arrived three months later. Sidney, when we told him, said Lumme he thought we'd forgotten that lot, he was in the middle of decorating his bathroom. Pressed for co-operation on account of the nearness of Christmas he said Norm and his other mate Ern might possibly help him. And so the job was done.