The North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse

Day 11

General Status Update

Hair: no change and, because I’m afraid to brush it, looking pretty ratty.

Nausea Demon: Increasingly cross. Claims the powerful and disabling cocktail of anti-nausea drugs he is now being administered every day is breaching his Inhuman Rights. Threatening to take me to an employment tribunal.

Heightened sense of smell: should you come within 10 yards of me on the street eating KFC or a kebab, I WILL KILL YOU.

Anxiety level (1-10): but enough about me – how anxious are YOU now feeling, after reading all this? I bet you’re checking yourself for strange lumps on a much more regular basis now, aren’t you?

State of mind: best observed through a glass, darkly.

 

The first I knew of the North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse was a few weeks ago, on one of the coldest, darkest and stormiest nights of the year, the night 2 months’ worth of rain fell on the north of England during the space of a few hours.

 The phone rang, and on the other end was Big Sis Fo, babbling:

‘They’re outside, they’re outside’ she cried ‘they’re BANGING ON THE WALLS, and they’re TRYING TO GET INSIDE THE HOUSE!’

 After pausing for an instant to draw breath, she continued:

 ‘And the internet has gone off and it’s been raining non-stop for 24 hours and the beck is going to overflow any minute and then we’ll be flooded and then we’ll never be able to sell this house again NEVER NEVER NEVER, and we will have to live here FOREVER!’ 

‘But I thought you loved the house so much that you never want to move again, and intend to be carried out of there in a box, feet first?’

‘That, Caroline’ replied my sister, a touch tersely, ‘is BESIDE THE FUCKING POINT’.

 I made soothing noises, and suggested that she pour herself a Weapons Grade gin and tonic, for medicinal purposes, and tell me exactly what was going on.

At this point I should give you a little background info on Big Sis Fo, the oldest of the Fo Sisters - there are five of us in all, including my two lovely step-sisters (who are not genetically Fos and therefore much saner, generally nicer and incomparably better-mannered than the rest of us). We are like the Bennet sisters, only middle-aged and with iPhones. And without the lovely frocks. I like to think of myself as Elizabeth (delusional, much?) and my younger sister, aka L’il Sis Fo, to whom you have yet to be introduced, is Lydia. Very Definitely Lydia.

 

Big Sis Fo is thus, obviously, Jane.

Like Jane Bennet, Big Sis Fo found a Happy Ending with her true love (only in her case, second time round), and they live together, with a truly demented Hungarian Visla called Hank (think Scooby Doo on crystal meth), in an exquisitely restored 18^th century farmhouse (pure property porn, it’s even been featured in one of THOSE magazines), with a stream (in local parlance ‘beck’) running through the grounds, in a small hamlet on the north Yorkshire plain, on the edge of the Howardian Hills (the geological significance of this location will become apparent later). 

 

 

By the way, as always with stories of Fo family members, please be assured that I am not making anything up (a friend suggested me to me recently that the Fo family motto should be ‘Ultra parodiam’ i.e. ‘Beyond parody’, and I think he may well be right).

So, Big Sis Fo lives a truly enviable life in her rural idyll with a man who

a) is utterly devoted to her,

b) is 13 years younger than her,

c) earns a quite ridiculous amount of money as a partner in one of the big management consulting firms (so let’s call him the MC from now, for ease of reference),

d) not only insists on doing all the cooking, but does so to pretty much restaurant quality standards (his pink grapefruit granita is to die for),

e) has converted the stables into a wine cellar to house his ever-growing collection of rare and precious vintages, including a world class selection of vintage champagne, and finally – 

and this is the one which is going to make women everywhere want to HUNT DOWN AND KILL my sister 

f) insists on doing absolutely everything related to Christmas.

 

I will repeat that, the MC does Christmas. Every single bit of it.

 

Christmas is his hobby, for goodness sake; he takes two weeks leave every year in December to devote himself to the whole enterprise, from presents to decorations (I’ll leave you to imagine the Christmas tree) to the seven course Christmas lunch extravaganza, accompanied by the kinds of wines that the likes of you or me are highly unlikely to get to drink in this lifetime (unless we happen to be related to him, that is, which happily I am).

You’re beginning to hate Big Sis Fo now, aren’t you? I don’t blame you – it’s almost impossible not to. The rest of it you could just about take, but the Christmas thing is the absolute killer. I keep thinking she must have done something amazingly wonderful, in karmic terms, in a previous life, to deserve the one she has now. Maybe she was Mahatma Gandhi, or Mother Teresa. She’s very fond of curry, come to think of it – but no matter, you’re going to start feeling a whole lot more sympathetic towards her when we get to the full horror of the Rat Apocalypse, which will be very, very soon.

Rats apart, the only other less than optimal feature of my sister’s fabulous existence is that the MC, who likes to go shooting and salmon-fishing when off-duty, has landed her with the daily care and maintenance of his dog Hank, a Hungarian hunting dog with major behavioural problems, despite having being sent away for training at the gun dog equivalent of Eton. Although, to be fair, his education was cut short, rather abruptly, after he urinated all over the dog trainer’s feet, in an attempt to assert his dominance, something which no other trainee gun dog had ever had the balls to do. Hank’s balls, by the way, are enormous, and the fact that they are still attached to him is a continuing bone of contention between Big Sis Fo and her partner… but I digress. We will return to Hank and his humongous balls another day.

 

 

Where was I? The night of the storm, and my sister on the phone, swigging back almost neat Bombay Sapphire on ice to calm herself as she began to tell me how she and the MC had, a few days previously, become aware that they might have a problem with vermin.

 When you live in a big house, especially a very old and very cold one in the bracing climate of north Yorkshire, you inevitably end up spending most of your time in one or two favourite rooms; such is the case with Big Sis Fo and the MC who, of an evening, are usually to be found in a tiny little room off the kitchen known, inevitably, as ‘The Snug’; this little den has barely enough room to hold a small sofa, an armchair and the 42” plasma TV the MC had installed above the fireplace, the better to watch the Cooking Channel non-stop from a horizontal position when he is not out at work, or otherwise engaged.

One evening a few weeks ago Big Sis Fo, the MC and Hank were all sitting in front of the fire, watching Yotam Ottolenghi disassemble a large squid, when they became aware of noises coming from – underneath them. Hank immediately began to run round in circles, quite difficult for a dog his size in a room that small, barking his head off. The MC muted Yotam for a moment, and they all continued to listen. Yes, something – or rather a number of somethings – was moving around under the floorboards. Stomping in fact. Quite loudly. It was evident that there was a party going on down below to which the official occupants of the house had definitely not been invited.

‘OMG’ said my sister ‘we’ve got mice. I’d better get some traps’

‘I dunno,’ said the MC ‘it sounds a bit loud for mice. Maybe it’s badgers.’

‘I don’t think they sell badger traps,’ replied Big Sis Fo ‘and aren’t they protected? If it’s badgers, they won’t let us touch them. It’s like bats. Hell’s teeth, we may end up being forced to run a badger sanctuary.’

The next day my sister put down mouse traps. The noises from below continued, however, and grew louder, as the new occupants started asking their friends to drop by; by the end of the week they decided that there nothing else for it but to call in the council Pest Control man.

When the Pest Control man walked into the snug, he just sniffed the air and said ‘’Ey up*, love, you’ve got rats. I can smell ’em’. Big Sis Fo was mortified to hear that her house stank of rats, but the Pest Control man hastened to assure her that in his line of work he had developed a heightened sensitivity to the very faintest traces of rat odour, quite undetectable by the average person.

After examining the exterior of the house, the Pest Control man found the hole where the rats had tunnelled through the base of the wall under the bay window in the snug. He laid poisoned bait in various places around the exterior of the house, assuring Big Sis Fo that, once poisoned, the rats would head out from under the house to seek water, as poison makes them very thirsty. As my sister stood at the open door waving him off, she heard a noise and looked down. A large black rat was sitting just in front of the doorstep, looking up at her, as if waiting for admittance.

 

 

(picture posed by model - that is not the actual rat). .

The wall through which the rats had tunnelled inside was repointed; within a few days they had eaten their way through the new mortar, and were back inside, continuing to party. The new breed of Giant Mutant Ninja Rats - and these ones are particularly hard, coming from Yorkshire - just love mortar with a side of rat poison. And the reason they were continuing to invade the house, as on the night of the storm, when my sister could hear them scrabbling around just outside, banging on the wall, trying to get in, was - the weather.

The massive rainfall experienced this year has meant that the Yorkshire plain is SODDEN; black rats have a particular aversion to getting their feet wet, so have been coming out of the fields and hedges looking for warm, dry places of refuge. North Yorkshire and, for all I know, the rest of the country, is genuinely facing a plague of black rats, a lot of whom found their way chez Big Sis Fo.

In the end, the ONE THING that prevented any more rats getting in was, strangely, Brillo Pads. Rats will eat anything, up to and including actual walls, but they won’t eat Brillo Pads. The texture and taste of wire wool covered in caustic detergent doesn’t agree with them, apparently. Please note this useful tip for future reference in case the Rat Apocalypse moves into your neighbourhood next.

So, things were looking up: the rats had either been poisoned, or couldn’t get inside any more, and gradually the noises underfoot stopped. Problem solved.

A few days later, the smell started.

My sister, when asked to describe what the corpse of a dead rat decomposing under your floorboards smells like, was both clear and concise:

‘It smells like liquid death – SWEET liquid death. It is unspeakably vile and even just thinking about it makes me want to vomit.’

So the carpenter came, to take up the floorboards in the snug, now rendered uninhabitable by the awful, terrible-beyond-imagining smell that was wafting up from below; the Brillo pads, of course, had not only prevented more rats from getting in - they also stopped the poisoned rats from getting out. Underneath the floorboards they found the decomposing corpse of one recently deceased rat, and one mummified rat; problem solved.

But a few days later the smell reappeared, first in the dining room and then, bafflingly, in the snug. And so it went on. By the end of last week all the floorboards in the entire ground floor of the house had been taken up, and a total of 4 fresh rat corpses, and 3 mummified ones, removed. The carpenter insists that there are no longer any decomposing corpses in situ, but my sister swears he is wrong – she thinks there is at least one left, somewhere inside the old, thick stone walls, which cannot be got at. 

‘I know the smell of dead rat by now’ she said, darkly ‘I’ve lived with it long enough, and there’s still at least one there. I KNOW THERE IS.’ 

Christmas is coming, the highlight of the MC’s year, and there will be a number of guests around the dining room table for his command performance. All Big Sis Fo can do is hope that the smell will finally have dissipated by next week – but she isn’t holding her breath. Although she will be on Christmas Day, quite possibly.

She’s asked me to give her a flame thrower for Christmas.

So that, my friends, is the true story of the North Yorkshire Rat Apocalypse.

On the whole, I’d prefer to have the chemo.

 

*People do actually still use this expression in Yorkshire dialect, it is not a comic myth - it comes from Old Norse. I have heard it myself.