S ome of the happiest years of my 20s were spent in a house-share in east London. Four of us were crammed into a three-bedroom terrace where the dining room had been turned into a bedroom. My housemates were my closest friends. We were young women with the kind of intense-bordering-on-codependent dynamic that becomes unsustainable later in life, when you have long-term partners, pets and children. We lived together, we went out together, in the summer we took our Argos tent to festivals together. We stayed up late discussing love-life and work dilemmas, often crowding round a phone to draft text messages.
We were also not particularly clean, which meant our cluttered, chaotic house was the ideal home for mice. At first we told ourselves it was just one mouse we saw running along next to the skirting board or darting behind a sofa. But a quick scan of the internet confirmed our fears that it’s never just one – mice are social creatures, and they were likely in a nest-share similar to our house-share. A female mouse gives birth to a litter of five to eight mice and can be pregnant up to 10 times a year. We read forum posts that claimed mice were doubly incontinent (something I’ve since learned is fake news), and our horror began to grow.
As the sightings increased and droppings appeared on the kitchen worktop, we agreed something had to be done. Two of my housemates were vegetarian, so we laid humane traps, with a plan to set the creatures free in the garden or a park. The humane traps did not work. The mice continued to thrive and multiply.
Weeks passed and a siege mentality set in. We tentatively agreed it was time to try inhumane traps filled with peanut butter, which mice quite enjoy. We kept the counter tops clean, we checked they weren’t raiding our cupboards. We bought wire wool to plug holes in the skirting board, with mixed results. We were waging war and determined to win.
On a rare night alone in the house, I decided to treat myself to some jam on toast. Blaring Beyoncé from my phone, I turned the toaster upside down to empty out the old crumbs. Out dropped a tiny brown mouse. It landed, very startled and very much alive, on the kitchen worktop.
I screamed as if I was in a slasher movie, but there was no one to hear me. Meanwhile, the mouse stayed stock-still, staring back at me in terror – or maybe anger. It dawned on me that perhaps it saw me as the intruder, noisy and blundering, disrupting its cosy, carb-filled home. I banged the worktop and it ran away. The evening was ruined. I didn’t approach the toaster for weeks.
I do not miss living with mice. Nor do I miss my laissez-faire landlord, who fixed the hole in our roof with tarpaulin and left me and my friends to deal with the infestation alone. But I do miss the chaotic adventures I had living with other women who were too skint and too silly to be proper grownups.
I don’t know what happened to the little brown mouse in the toaster. Did she get pushed out of the area by gentrification? Or is she munching on sourdough crumbs left by the house’s new occupants? I wish my old housemate and her many, many descendants well.
