Roux the cat stared at the rat, decided it was a bad do and retreated. The rat was screaming so loudly the cat slunk away, while trying to style it out. A podgy black and white, Roux strolled casually with his head in the air as though saying: ‘I was just passing. Rat? No, I never saw a rat. If I had, I would have done something, obviously.’
The rat was backed into the corner next to a sideboard against the hallway wall. ‘You deserve a second chance,’ I told it, and got a long dustpan and brush. ‘Come on, come out.’ The rat squeaked desperately as if telling me I had to be kidding. Had I seen the size of that cat? ‘Don’t worry about Billy Bunter. He’s useless. Get in the dustpan.’ The rat climbed in, and I carried him to the front door and emptied him into a flower bed.
I found the first dead rat by the bottom of the stairs, when I trod on it with my bare foot and screamed
The builder boyfriend had been gone two days to do a job in England and the rats were running across the Aga in gangs, giving me the middle finger. And I was talking to them. Meanwhile, the boiler, being commanded by me to do things like heating, was making a noise like it was going to blow up.
‘Make sure there’s one bar pressure,’ text-ed the BB. ‘Oh sure. I’ll just do that,’ I text-ed, then climbed onto a stool and started fiddling with levers like Willy Wonka. This boiler, a great gurgling monstrosity with twisting pipes that looks as if it could eat naughty children and spit them out as bubblegum, made some rumblings and I decided to swizzle one more knob and if that didn’t do it I would call our estranged plumber and start begging… but thankfully it did. I achieved one bar and texted the BB that I had cracked it.
As for the rats, I had no hope that Roux Sauce would tackle any of them. As I pondered this, the pony wandered past the front door, for I had turned the mares out on the driveway to munch the verges, and started eating a rose bush. ‘Why?’ I asked her, as she ignored the grass and stuffed thorny stems into her mouth.
All the animals I’ve ever owned have been contrary. Cydney the little black spaniel, was a devil, bound to run me from one end of a field to the other. Tara Lee, the Irish mare, was deranged. She laid waste to everyone who got on her back apart from me and that was only because she was so devious she worked out I paid the bills, so she had to keep me alive. Grace, the skewbald pony, was wonderful but strangely accident-prone.
I have a feeling the cartoon picture at the top of this column – created more than 20 years ago now – was based on an article I wrote about riding Grace while on the phone arguing with a Tory spin doctor, whereupon, as I stopped steering, poor Grace, who I hadn’t realised was walking along half asleep, lost her footing and incurred a million-to-one injury by treading on a piece of rabbit bone that entered the frog of her foot and kept travelling upwards until it nearly severed her flexor tendon. The vet at Liphook equine hospital said he’d never seen anything like it before and never would again. It was impossible, and yet she’d managed it.
As for Darcy the thoroughbred, I haven’t had a night’s sleep since I’ve owned her. She couldn’t fight her way out of a paper bag, although she could turn herself inside out and break all her legs if she had to go by a paper bag in the road.
Our latest addition, Dave the dog, is so daft we can’t teach him anything. The only thing he likes doing is sitting in the hay barn under an old sideboard waiting for a passer-by he can savage, ideally a B&B customer. I know I won’t ever have the heart to let him go. They all land on their paws and their hooves when they find us. I’m proud to say I’ve never re-homed an animal, even though they’ve all given me a terrible time.
Even our dear old spaniel Poppa can be tricky. She has an autistic streak so if she overhears a row she disappears for hours to hide under a hedge. I have to shoo her out of the room before I rip a strip off the BB for going through another bottle of Fairy Liquid.
But having said all that, I do have Bruce the cat, or Bruce Lee, as we call him. He was re-homed to me because his previous owner was left-wing and didn’t like how he chased other cats.
Bruce is a Kung Fu fighter, and more than a little bit frightening. His face markings are in the shape of a black-and-white Batman mask. I think he may be a superhero.
I went and found him in the farmyard and plonked him down by the hole in the skirting next to the Aga, which is the portal to rat world. After a few hours, I found the first dead one by the bottom of the stairs, when I trod on it with my bare foot and screamed. Bruce was already sitting by the fountain chewing up another carcass.
He later came through the catflap with a wound on his head. Either one of the rats had fought back or he’d been having a go at the Polish cats again. Fine, I don’t know if they’re Polish. The neighbours are Polish and they have cats. What passports they hold I have no idea. They’re probably Irish citizens and fight like the Irish. In any case, I had to take Bruce to the vet for antibiotics.
Dear me, I love rural Ireland but also I often think it’s absolutely awful and I’d like to go back to Surrey, to be clean and ratless and call out a plumber.
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