Freeze moths out of your life
They got her clothes, her carpets and her curtains. But then RAFFAELLA BARKER got even
No cloth, no cashmere, no carpet is safe from the stealth missile that is the pale-backed clothes moth.
this I found out a few weeks ago, when, humming a little, I went to unwrap my summer wardrobe from its winter home.
opening the door to our spare bedroom, not much stirred at first. But as I stepped past the bed, a flutter of wings spiralled up from the floor — a single harbinger of the doom that I was still oblivious to.
Pulling out a pale grey cardigan I felt I was in a zombie movie — the front crumpled and dissolved before my eyes. Moths! With a shriek, I shut the door to protect the rest of the house from assault and stared about me.
Flinging back the rug, I noticed a ragged line of holes running like honeycomb across the carpet. We had a moth invasion, and it was mighty bad.
Monopis crocicapitella, the pale-backed clothes moth, is a new species recently identified by English heritage. this newcomer, combined with the common clothes moth (Tineola bisselliella) — numbers of which have doubled in the past five years — has prompted the charity to go on the offensive.
As house after house, from henry VIII’s former hunting lodge to Brodsworth hall in Yorkshire, falls prey, the charity is asking visitors to join them in operation clothes Moth, trapping the pests at home, recording their findings and sending them to the charity so something can be done. Quite what, remains unclear.
English heritage’s moth trap (available free from its historic places) is simple yet ingenious. Made of cardboard and glue, it’s impregnated with the female sex pheromone of the clothes moth. this will lure the male moth in — and, bingo, they get caught and can be counted.
the counting is the first stage on the road to finding a solution, English heritage hopes. Its ‘hope’ springs from desperation, since their moth-beating cleaning bill tops £1 million a year.
UntIl it happens to you, moth infestation is just an abstract concept, eliciting reminiscences about the smell of oldfashioned naphthalene mothballs and a vague idea that a hungry moth is probably obsolete now. Well, unfortunately not. Moths are a permanent part of our history, first recorded causing damage in Roman times.
they were rife in the Elizabethan era, with records showing that in 1590 Elizabeth I — who was fastidious about keeping her clothes clean — employed eight men for a day to beat the furs at Windsor castle in the hope of eradicating moths.
clearly uncowed by this, they are still going strong around Britain. they love our delicious pure wool carpets, respond well to the nurturing environment of a centrally-heated house, and happily lay their eggs in quiet cupboards full of out-of-season clothes. left alone they wreak havoc. how can they be stopped?
the situation in my spare room was becoming ugly. the flittering from the wardrobe when I opened it was worthy of a hitchcock movie. My clothes were clean when I put them away. I’d even added the odd cedar ball — but the moths didn’t care. A silk dress looked as if acid had been spilled down it.
Evolution means domestic moths are stronger than ever, and don’t really respond to Doom or any other insect repellent sprays.
luckily, at the dentist’s I’d been reading a housewifely pamphlet I’d found about spring cleaning. Grabbing armfuls of my clothes, I rushed outside to the dark shed where our chest freezer lives.
hurling the clothes in on top of a couple of long-forgotten pizzas, I slammed the lid shut. twenty-four hours immersion in sub-zero temperatures should save my summer outfits. But what about the carpet? the curtains? help! the whole house could pixellate and vanish in a nanosecond.
I called tim Adams, a specialist moth man. ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can,’ he promised, ‘but turn off the heating and keep the room sealed.’ Spine chilling.
tim, a carpet cleaner by trade, was prompted to train in moth eradication by the number of infestations he was called to. he says central heating means moths are now a year-round threat. My dresses — and curtains — emerged from the deep freeze like stiff cardboard cut-outs, but a day on the washing line softened the fabric again, and not a moth stirred from a single pleat or buttonhole.
Just to make doubly sure, I shoved all the bedding in next. there’s something strangely criminal about forcing four pillows and a duvet into a deep freeze.
‘Moths like warmth,’ tim told me as he surveyed my spare bedroom. ‘they like natural fibres where they can find the protein keratin, and they like undisturbed places.’
It’s the tiny, maggot-like larvae (caterpillars) that hatch from the moths’ eggs and do the damage, as they eat their way through your carpets — so you need to get deep into the carpet, sometimes underneath it, to get rid of those.
tim, wearing two plastic shower caps over his shoes, armed himself with his spray gun and shut himself in the spare room. Some odd noises ensued. My guess was those moth larvae don’t stand a chance.
Eventually he emerged, peeled off the shower cap shoes and pronounced: ‘they have gone.’
that said, if any have slipped under a floorboard and found a new food source, they could be back. But next time I’ll be ready for them. or, rather, tim will . . .