Sandstone Press

Love songs for mice

Posted by RLD on 3rd April 2010

Asti MacPasti finally packed his little bundle and set out for Sleepy Hollow. Three days later he was met with cuddles from his human and a scolding from Mica who had taken the fireside chair for her own. Sandstone Towers was empty and echoing, but nature abhors a vacuum. When the cat moved out the mice moved in.

The popular mythology of Tom and Jerry and Pixie and Dixie gets it wrong. As a rule the mice are the dim ones, although not so dim as humans who deny their presence until their numbers have increased exponentially. I looked at the shredded toilet rolls in the, now, cat-vacated drying cupboard for a week before I put two and two together.

Mice are fellow travellers, of course, just as much as cats. Looking down at the mess my mind went back to a tenement flat in Ibrox, Glasgow, and me peering from under the table at Dad crouched on his hunkers with sleeves rolled up and a poker in hand. Round the corner was the crack in the skirting board our new tenants used for a door. Ages of living close to people have given mice an ear for music and a strong taste for lyrical ballads. Dad’s tactic, inherited from Old John, his own father, was to croon some Bing Crosby favourite in the rather fine tenor voice that had also been handed down. When a mouse could no longer resist and ventured out for an unhindered listen or, better still, two came out to waltz on the linoleum he would lunge round the corner and strike at them with the poker.

I used a more 21st century method, generously filling a little plastic tray with poisoned granules and leaving it in the drying cupboard. Next day the tray was empty and I could not believe that just one mouse could have eaten all that on its own. Surely I was taking them out in multiples, but – no corpses. Were they dying under the floorboards, and would nature exact an odorous revenge? I filled another two trays and, this time, left the box by the wall with an open, half full sachet leaning against it. Next day the trays were empty, the box had been toppled and the sachet attacked for its contents. It looked like they loved the stuff. Our trip to Orkney and the launch of Liz Ashworth’s book, Orkney Spirit, was imminent so I had no choice but to fill another two trays and depart.

I can’t say I allowed the mice to play on my mind, but I could not help but think of other mouse experiences, especially from the many years I spent in civil engineering. Before the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974 and a few years to kick in) a construction site was a bad place to be in terms of both, and working for the Contractor, rather than the Resident Engineer, was a good idea only in that things couldn’t get worse. The site huts we junior engineers shared with foremen were, frankly, filthy. ‘Midden’ would be no worse than an accurate term, but at least ours was swept out from time to time. The men had no time to clean their hut and with no compulsion a cleaner was considered an unnecessary expense by at least one employer.

‘They get used to it,’ I was told, and so we did along with much else. Mud was ubiquitous in winter, trailed in on muddy wellies, in summer it was dust. Food fell to the floor among old newspapers which were also used as toilet paper in an indescribable wooden cludge. Most of the men preferred to squat in a trench. Mice were happy to join us and I’m sure they felt right at home. Rats only occasionally dropped in, but were a signal that something must be done to even the most desensitised Contracts Manager. Time passed and I moved a few rungs up the ladder, later to the other side of the tracks and the Resident Engineer’s staff, later still to the Highlands where I remain.

Here I tended to move from site to site, and by this time conditions were almost fit for humans to work in. Mice were still occasional visitors, but of the country gentleman type rather than big city hardmen. The Clerk of Works could be relied on to take care of them, a breed of man I only found myself liking and respecting once I had crossed the tracks. Most of them were time-served joiners, the big thinkers and readers on site, always characters. Steel fixers were the money boys incidentally. Bricklayers were usually tragi-comedians and labourers varied between the religious and the criminal. Black Harry McFarlane was my man in the Strath.

A tall, cadaverous individual his soubriquet was applied for his dark sunken eyes rather than his complexion, which was sickly pale, or his hair which was sparse and grey. The overalls he wore were also black. He said they ‘suited him’. Never particularly active on site his reputation did wonders for quality control. He was rumoured to carry a spare set of dentures which Leviticus the Labourer once found him sharpening with a file. So he said, but Leviticus said much where Harry said little.

One day he fashioned a shield from a piece of marine ply, the sort which might be awarded as a bowling club prize, skilfully mitring the corners and bevelling the edges. He finished it with three coats of varnish each sanded down until the final surface was of a perfect smoothness and burnished to a rich mahogany hue. On the rear he fixed an eye to fit over the hook he had drilled into the hut wall. Before he hung it he drove no fewer than fifteen shining, galvanised three inch (old money) nails through from the rear so they stood proud of the perfect surface. I left him dourly admiring his handiwork, not knowing the whole modus operandi.

Harry’s way with mice was to place a selection of small, wide mouthed bottles about the hut with a portion of bacon placed at the bottom of each. The mouse would enter and not be able to turn, even more so after it had eaten the bait, and there it would remain with its tail sticking out of the bottle. The tail was the really clever part. Harry would use it to whip the mouse out and onto my drawing board. While it was still stunned he would nip its head off with a chisel and stick the head on one of the nails as a trophy. Leviticus said Harry would hold the headless body upside down over his mug to squeeze out the blood, later using it to wash down his second breakfast.

This particular site, a sewage treatment plant in its construction phase, was regularly visited by a female representative of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, a darned good looking woman according to Leviticus, known to us only as Ms Kent. As a feminist statement Ms Kent declined to shave her legs, which should date these events to within a few years. She also wore a green beret so that, top and bottom, her appearance defined her political parameters. Leviticus and I once conferred on the subject of hirsute female limbs, wondering if she knew that the colloquial noun ‘hairy’ (which in Glasgow means proto-feminist but with a strong social class implication) was coined for just this reason. The difference, of course, was the difference between a considered, educated statement and ‘being it’.

On a fine summer’s day Ms Kent entered the hut just after Black Harry had made a kill and the head was still twitching and blinking on its nail. There is no telling whether it was this awful sight or Harry’s cruel eyes, or the blood smeared chisel that broke her nerve but, next thing, her skirts were hitched high and she was departing the site as quickly as her hairy legs would carry her.

Lest I should seem misogynist let me tell this other tale. One of our Directors came on a scheduled visit from which I made myself scarce. Round the site he went in his jewel encrusted hard hat and golden wellies until he decided that he needed, in the words of Leviticus, a ‘riddle-me-ree’. In the site hut Black Harry stood with a dripping chisel in one hand and a headless corpse hanging from the other. The shocked Director wheeled around to confront no fewer than fifteen little heads each twitching and blinking and drawing its lips back from its teeth.

Never sure how to react to authority Harry tossed the last mouse’s body into a pile in the corner mentioning, as he did, that he would peel them later to make a doll’s fur coat for his grand-daughter. At this the Director riddle-me-ree’d himself and fainted. Harry, a qualified First Aider who should have known better, went straight to mouth to mouth resuscitation. Tipping back the poor man’s head he cleared his airway with a grubby paw and brought his own head into close proximity. Perhaps Harry was wearing his alternative dentures, but the Director awoke, screamed, and dragged himself backwards on his elbows into the pile of dead mice. This provoked such a state of mental collapse that Leviticus and his brother Deuteronomy had to stretcher him from the site.

These memories were far from my mind when I returned from Orkney, until I opened the drying cupboard door to find the little trays had been emptied of poison and refilled with bedding materials. The floor was strewn with empty beer cans and what looked suspiciously like a dozen or so tiny condoms. The mice had been having a party. I gave up on poison and bought two modern traps that were coloured black and resemble sets of false teeth. My old Clerk of Works would have approved, but there are still no little corpses. Perhaps the old ways really are the best.

The traps are still in place but I have lost patience and type in a crouched position round the corner from the cupboard door. In an all-electric establishment there is no poker but no shortage of old shoes. I hold one now in my free hand and, in a fine tenor voice received by dint of genetic coincidence sing, ‘It’s that ol’ devil moon that you stole from the skies. It’s that ol’ devil moon in your eyes.’ I think I hear them dancing.