Yet the Robinson Crusoe life felt so congenial at the moment I might never want to leave. The thumping rain made a comforting note against the running of the stream. I killed the first of the summer flies (on the white wall) that was big enough to be the last of the previous summer’s. Everything in order, I thought we’d better bed down, in preparation for what tomorrow might bring. There was no toilet in the place, so I stood on the doorstep with the torch, and pushed Dismal into the murk for the same purpose.
I put down two mattresses, laid out so that should any marauder burst in I would have the loaded air pistol close by, or the threatening luger at the ready. With the drumming of rain and the rush of water from the stream there was little hope of hearing anyone approaching the house, which I considered a black mark to Moggerhanger. Vulnerability made it sensible to be on guard, even if only against the rats, who always came out at night. I told Dismal to settle down, which he did, by taking the place closest to the fire.
I was disturbed at two o’clock by him shaking a rat and throwing it disgustedly across the room. When one ran over my chest a shot from the pistol plugged another hole in the wall. At half past seven, after little sleep, I dressed and cooked breakfast. Rain still drummed down, so it was hard to know what day it was, or the date, and I regretted not having an Old Moore’s Almanack for a clue.
Dismal ate more of everything than I did, indicating there would soon be a need for reforagement. He was well enough to work a treadmill pumping water up from the stream, but I had to make do with him as an interested spectator while I washed the kitchen table, took the flocky mattresses back upstairs, swept the floor, and got sufficient grime off the windows to see outside. Finding a tool box, I mended the door lock, so that only my key could open it. As recompense for all my domestic work the rain stopped, and though the sun came out not much of it penetrated the cottage, the wooded bank across the stream being too steep to let it. When I pulled in a few logs to dry by the fire the place steamed up so much we were driven outside, and I noticed a small khaki coloured van parked at the top of the lane. Through my binoculars I made out a tubby little man walking down the track with a blue plastic bucket which, when he came up to me, I saw was brimming with green crystals. He put it down, and took off his cap: “I should have been here three days ago, but we’ve been so rushed. The little devils really get going in the spring. So many houses are infested.”
I looped a hand around Dismal’s collar, his deep throated bark signalling that he didn’t want anyone coming into the house to eat our food. “Who are you?”
“I’m the rodent eliminator, from the council. Somebody phoned from London a week ago and booked me to come and do Peppercorn Cottage.”
Maybe Kenny Dukes had complained, and Moggerhanger had decided to do something about it, so I didn’t want to put him off. “You’re none too soon. Come inside, and look around.”
“I smell ’em,” he said in the kitchen. “It fair blocks my nose. Wicked pong. Always gets me going.” His piggy little eyes stared at places I’d never thought of looking at. He went upstairs and downstairs, to every cranny and corner, bent double at times to set little heaps of green crystals that I supposed he didn’t want to carry back up the hill. I warned Dismal away in case he thought to give them a lick. Twenty minutes of hard work brought blobs of sweat from the man’s bald head. I asked if he would like a cup of coffee.
“If you’ve got sugar to go with it. The last place I went to didn’t have any, so I had to say no. Too posh, I suppose.”
I came from the stream with a full kettle, and lit the gas. “You’ve done a good job.”
“Have to, don’t I? I hate rats. Anyway, it’s my life’s work.”
I offered a cigarette. He’d earned it. “You wouldn’t have a job if there weren’t any, though, would you?”
“That’s why I hate ’em. I kill all I can, but there’s always more. If I killed every last one I could take early retirement, but the more I kill the more there are. I kill thousands and thousands of the little swine, though some aren’t so little. I once saw one as big as a tomcat, and had to club it to death. It was so fat it couldn’t run. I often wonder if somebody isn’t breeding them and feeding them just to make my life harder. I was told at the office this morning that six more houses had phoned yesterday. It’s a losing battle, but I’ve got to keep on keeping on, haven’t I?”
I stirred six spoons of sugar into his coffee. “But if you left them alone maybe they would die anyway.”
“Then I’d be out of employment, wouldn’t I?”
His entertaining chat could only stop me going mad in such an isolated place, but I wondered whether the green crystals weren’t another form of Dolly Mixtures, and that the rats would breed like multiplication tables on eating them after he had gone. “Are you sure these crystals will kill them?”
He reached for more sugar. “In agony. In three days they’ll all be dead. Mark my words.”
“What am I supposed to do with the corpses?”
He showed his sense of humour. “A lot of people ask that. You could sling them in the dustbin, but if you feel sorry for them you can lay out a cemetery of little white crosses in your garden.” He winked. “Look very fine, it will.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
“You won’t have much time. Once they nibble the crystals they won’t stand a chance. As you see, I’ve put ample portions down.” He gave a wicked laugh. “They’ll die right enough.”
“But what if those who aren’t dying see the corpses of those who have gone before, and put two and two together, and think it might be a good thing not to touch the crystals with the rat equivalent of a barge pole? For example, what if one of those watching with its beady little eyes is a comely lady rat about to give birth to another ten little prettily whiskered baby rats? I do hear that rats are particularly intelligent creatures, as well as prolific in matters of reproduction.”
He sighed. “There you have me. That might be the answer. I wonder myself sometimes. But most do die. They must, mustn’t they? Poison mows the bleeder down a bit, don’t it?”
“I suppose it would be a shame if they weren’t attracted to so many pyramids of delicious looking crystals. But what I’d like to know is, how did you land a job like this? I mean, how does one become a rodent officer? Do you have to sit a City and Guilds exam?” I pushed the pot forward. “Have some more coffee.”
“I bloody nearly had to. It wasn’t easy to qualify, though it’s funny you ask, because you’re the first one as ever did, so I appreciate your curiosity. Yes, I will have another coffee. The thing is I’ve always hated rats, ever since I got bitten in the pram when I was two. My screams were so loud they stopped it moving, so my father had time to kill it with the hard end of a sweeping brush. I suppose if a kid got bitten by a rat these days a social worker would be told to give the little mite some counselling. But not then they didn’t. Them days was different. Life was hard. Not like now, when everybody has it soft. They sent children out to work at fifteen in those days. When I left school I didn’t know what I wanted to be. Like most kids of fifteen I didn’t want to do anything. Schooldays were finished, so I just expected to put my feet up, didn’t I?”
I invited him to sit down. “We all did. We still do.”
“I wanted to go around with my mates, because they didn’t want to work either, not for a few measly quid a week, anyway. I was sitting in front of the telly one evening when the old man came in all sweating from the factory, and things took a nasty turn when I said I didn’t want to go to work. He pulled me to my feet, and punched me right in the face, just like that, a real blinder, no messing. ‘If you haven’t got a job by tomorrow’, he said, ‘you’ll get two of them.’