Home life
Country life
Alice Thomas Ellis
0 ne of the things I like about the country is that the problems it presents are different. For instance while the drain in London sometimes gets blocked it is never because there is a hedgehog in it. This happened last summer and by the time we located the cause of the trouble the poor creature was coated in detergent foam and half drowned because it hadn't thought of climbing out of the drain, which is not deep, but had sought to preserve itself by
curling up in a ball. I think hedgehogs are possibly dumber even than sheep but they are more likeable. They come at night to steal the cats' meat from the step and when we open the door they scuttle away like little old winos discovered rifling dustbins.
Hearing a clanking one night the third son went bravely out in his underpants, air gun at the ready, and five hedgehogs loped away looking embarrassed, not, I think, at the sight of the son but because they had been apprehended. This son shot a mouse in the house earlier in the year and demanded that we photograph him stand- ing with his foot on it. He shot a beetle too a few nights ago, which I find skilful but rather reprehensible. I said I thought it was extremely mean to shoot beetles and he said indignantly that I hadn't seen the bug. It had come bursting in through the win- dow like a Thing from outer space and he
hadn't got a wink of sleep all night. He said it was huge so we said where was it, and it
had gone. I suppose it might have re- covered and flown away but I suspect that the cats ate it.
The cats do not catch house mice. They catch field mice and bring them, living, into the house. They then ignore them and we have to catch them ourselves. Janet though is quite a good mouser. I act as beater until the rodent is cornered and she seizes it in a dish cloth. One, however, once managed to lie low until we had all gone away and it subsisted, until we returned, on an old forgotten potato, a five years old paschal-egg, the bottoms of the cupboard doors and a plastic bottle of Tipp-Ex.
The fifth son recently rescued a shrew from a cat and it sank its teeth into his finger and hung there. He was enraged at its ingratitude and astounded at its stupid- ity. He had another unpleasant experience owing to the cats' waywardness. One had dropped a mouse into a wellington boot where it had died. He put in his foot, felt
something wriggling and discovered a bun- dle of maggots. You must always turn wellington boots upside down and shake them. One day I inserted a bare foot into one and encountered a colossal cockroach.
On one occasion Puss did kill a mouse in the house. It was a pregnant mouse and she had sort of unzipped it and laid a row of pink embryo mice on the hall floor, which was quite awful, being at once poignant and disgusting. Puss is a fairly bright animal but sometimes her intelligence de- serts her. It did last night. We had gone out to dinner and there was a cloudburst. The third son and his Mary were babysitting the daughter and suddenly noticed water seep- ing under the kitchen door because the drain was blocked with magnolia leaves. They then noticed Puss standing at the door on her hind legs, waist-deep in rain, not having thought to climb the magnolia. Mary had to dry her in a towel. (You can't dry a hedgehog in a towel. You can only give it warm milk and water and hope for the best.) Erring in the opposite direction, my
mother's cat, a remarkably beautiful but perverse beast was staying with us in the country and suddenly disappeared. We could hear her miaowing for two days and the daughter and I nearly went mad look- ing for her. We didn't think to look up until the third day and there she was, about a mile up a pine tree, roosting on a branch like a hen. The builder had to bring a ladder to get her down and he was ex- traordinarily brave because the pine was growing on a sheer and shingly slope.
It is very disconcerting to find animals in unexpected places. Last year we stopped at a garage for some petrol, and there was a tiger sitting in a sort of chicken coop. I think it was an advertising stunt but it made us nervous. Then just a few days ago on the way home we saw an odd-looking animal digging in a field with its tail curved over like a croquet hoop. It was a squirrel.
I said perhaps it had mistaken itself for a mole, the daughter said it was probably trying to remember where it had buried its nuts, and Janet, who really does not in the least resemble the popular or accepted image of your average English nanny, said that that would certainly account for the peculiar angle of its tail.
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