Town Mouse

My country-dwelling cousin, the harvest mouse, doesn’t like humans.

According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Mus minutus ‘lives entirely away from houses, commonly taking up its abode in wheat or hay fields’. He’s very different from the house mouse Mus musculus, who, according to the same source, ‘with man’s involuntary aid, has succeeded in establishing itself throughout the civilised world’. In the city, mice and men live with each other, though not, generally, in harmony.

The other day, a specimen of Mus musculus appeared in our London kitchen and scampered down some infinitely tiny hole. This is no surprise: the precise mouse population of London isn’t known, but some half a million are supposed to dwell in the tunnels of the London Underground, subsisting on discarded Mcdonald’s and enjoying the warmth. The house-mouse population of Britain is estimated to be 5.4 million.

When our cat Milly was alive, we didn’t have to worry about mice. We never saw a hint of rodent invasion, because to the mouse, the cat is a cruel, sadistic monster of terrifying proportions. Now that Milly is dead and winter is here, Mus musculus has become bolder.

We also found evidence of mice in the form of droppings round the bin under the sink. They’d been having a great time feeding on spilt food by night, retreating to their mysterious nests by day.

Loath though I was to murder my own kind, I trudged down to the hardware shop and surveyed the various rodenticide devices and systems. There were the conventional traps my parents used to put around the house. I remember retrieving many a squashed mouse from them, though the traps never really got rid of them entirely – hardly surprising when you consider that a female mouse can give birth to 64 babies in a year.

With a heart full of foreboding, I bought one of those plastic bait boxes and a box containing four sachets of poison. ‘NEW IMPROVED FORMULATION – KILLS IN ONE FEED,’ boasted the packaging. ‘Contains brodifacoum.’ This new version of warfarin leads to internal bleeding, shock, loss of consciousness and eventually death. A horrible way to go.

Back home, I put a plastic bag filled with murderous blue granules into the bait box. I placed it by the bin under the sink. I was a calculating murderer – a callous mouse-killer. I had turned on my own kind. Wasn’t a trap a more human and pleasingly traditional method of dispatching the rodents?

A few days later, I opened up the box and was hugely relieved to discover the bag of bait remained undisturbed. The mice had clearly decided to leave it alone. I moved the box to another location – at the top of the cellar stairs – where it remains.

We haven’t seen a mouse since I put down the bait box.

Since the poison hasn’t been taken, the lack of mice must be down to the other, less vicious, strategies we employed. First, we blocked their entrance holes. House mice live outside quite happily when it’s warm but, in winter, they start to enter buildings in search of food and warmth.

Mice can squeeze through the tiniest aperture – a quarter of an inch – but what they really hate is wire wool. Wire wool pricks their noses and has a deterrent effect similar to that of barbed wire on humans. I found two tiny holes and stuffed as much wire wool down them as I could fit, using a bradawl to dig it deep into the passageways.

Our second measure was to remove the tim’rous beasties’ food source. We cleaned up a bit under the sink and had a rethink about our domestic wasteprocessing system.

We bought a caddy – a little green dustbin with a lid designed for food. Unless mice can live on the tiny drops of beer and wine that may collect in the recycling, then we are all right.

Yes, I feel sorry for my brethren. Our friends the voles have a different and vastly more humane approach to rodent control: they’ve learned to live with the mice. They don’t mind them.

That’s well and good for the voles. But, for us, I am sorry: the house mouse will find no welcome in this house. He will find no bits of discarded grain if he does manage to squeeze in. Still, at least no mouse has ingested the fearsome, cruel rodenticide bait. I have consigned that fearsome substance to the dustbin for ever.

‘I was a calculating murderer – a mousekiller. I had turned on my own kind’