A Disneyland for rats

All I wanted was a roof over my head.

What I got was the kind of little cottage in which almost every room has windows on three sides.Which makes the roof a complicated arrangement of triangular shapes. From the top it looks a bit like a cluster of hills, with peaks and valleys. Inside, the ceiling is a maze of wooden beams and gables.

It's the kind of roof that roof rats dream of living in.

I moved in unsuspectingly, little realising what terrors lay in store for me.

The rats were there from the beginning, running around merrily, playing hide and seek and snakes and ladders, and every now and then peering down at me with bright little eyes. At night I'd hear leaves being dragged and I knew they were nesting in the walls. Entire families of rats, it seemed, were squatting in my roof. Once I saw a little one just sitting quietly, scratching itself and yawning. Another time I was in the garden when I saw it on the TV cable wire that runs from the roof into the trees of the compound behind. As if the cable were a tightrope, and it was performing for my benefit, it tottered along the length of wire at great speed and disappeared into the trees. In spite of my utter terror, I couldn't help giggling: the little rats were so like the mouse in Tom and Jerry cartoons.

But something dire had to be done.

Poison, I was told. But I didn't want dead rats raining down on me while I slept. I tried rat traps, but the rats never seemed to come down from the roof. I imagined them living there for ever, rat cities springing up over my head.

In desperation I called the rat catcher (actually a half-drunk roof carpenter who was willing to help). Just take them out somehow, I told him.

He climbed onto the roof with a long bamboo stick and began to remove the tiles where I thought the rats were most likely to be found. He removed a nest with little white baby rats and threw them out. And then, while I watched from inside, he poked the stick down the many long tunnel-like stretches that join sections of the roof. There they are, I shouted. Three little rats were scuttling down the beam in fright, one behind the other. And in spite of my terror, I found myself singing in mind: Three blind mice, see how they run! They ran with the rat catcher chasing them up and down the roof. At the end of half an hour, I had to believe they were gone.

But they returned, loath to give up the Disneyland that offered them such amusement.

In the end I had to put bits of rat chocolate at strategic points along the roof. It worked. Slowly they disappeared. I found dead rats in the garden. But they were dead. Peace at last.