Things that go bump in the night

It’s close to April Fools’ Day so forgive a light-hearted story in these troubled times. It involves things that go bump in the night. It begins with a tale from my youth, when I was stationed with the RAF in the Middle East. At sundown, when beer flowed to keep pace with salt tablets the medics gave us, there might come a sudden hush in the proceedings if someone had a yarn to unwind that would help spin the dark desert nights away. One that I remember best of all was recounted by a Welsh lad with a singing voice like that of Dylan Thomas.

The story lasted over an hour and was about a camel that could count out loud in English. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,’ and onwards to twenty it said as it plodded through the night. It held travellers in thrall as they marched across the starlit desert. Some said this animal had been used on desert patrols since the time of Lawrence of Arabia. Others that it was his actual personal mount.

Certainly it had been part of the UK’S contingent during WW1 during the Ottoman/german campaign. That was why it counted in English. Taffy spun this nonsense till bed-time. Lads, just out from the UK, who had yet to get their knees brown, listened open-mouthed.

To cut a long story short, all was eventually revealed by the story-teller. Certain that no camel, however well-bred, could count in English, an intrepid soldier one night ripped open the carrier bags laden across the camel’s back, and pulling out the contents, found a packet of Player’s cigarettes hidden there. Flipping back the lid, he revealed the answer to the mystery.

Printed on the flap were the words; ‘It’s the tobacco that counts!’ At this point Taffy Thomas dived for cover as beer bottle caps were hurled at his head.

This bed-time story I once told my own children in this house in the woods. The camel yarn was appropriate because once or twice they had been frightened by

footsteps overhead in the bedrooms. That was what they sounded like as yellow-necked mice, a larger version of the wood mouse, jumped over the rafters onto the plaster board as they scurried about in the loft. It sounded just like the heavy tread of an ogre as seen in the Rupert Bear books. However, story-telling soon reduced these nuisances to their proper size.

Fifty years later, these rare mice still infest the house although nowadays with insulation laid aloft we hardly ever hear the dreaded tread. My photo shows a specimen helping itself to bread on the bird table. Of course I am obliged to trap them because electricity cables are what they like to sharpen their teeth on. Also they like nothing better than the leather seats of my ancient Alvis car in which to make nests for their new broods every two months. Tawny owls pounce on them as often as they can, but still the mice keep coming.

I even introduced a new colony of the pests to Norfolk by accident, when they hitched a ride in the car and jumped out at my mother’s house where they became of great interest to naturalists in the county who declared them to be a sign of global warning, having moved north so quickly. They are troublesome, but at least they don’t count out loud to themselves in the darkness.