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Taking a family holiday with an unexpected guest

Apr 12, 2017

Family holidays have always been fantastic, but for Winsome, this holiday was special for an unusual reason… she learnt she actually cared for a pest…

The holiday cabin was what you would call cosy, but it was in no way flash. We set down our luggage and looked around. There were only two rooms and a verandah. The one large bedroom contained three single beds and a cupboard. The room we had entered was a combined kitchen and living room, containing a kitchen bench, stove and small fridge. At one end of this commodious room there was a double bed and under the window in the middle of the room there stood an old battered sofa.

Having grown up in small towns, I was anxious for my three suburban children to have some country experience. Accordingly, I had booked a week’s holiday for the family at a so-called country “resort” near a large town. Country it was, resort it was not.

My husband had reluctantly agreed to the plan. His idea of a family holiday was nothing less than Surfers Paradise but our finances restricted our choice of holiday accommodation.

The place did have some advantages. There was plenty of room for children to run around. The yard contained sulkies, drays and unused farm machinery. There were hens in an enclosed area, and the world’s friendliest cattle dog dozed most of the time on the verandah.

On our first morning, the little girls sat on the old sofa to have breakfast. They bounced about on its springy base and almost sank into its cushions. It was covered in green velvet and was comfortable lumpy. It was my husband who made a discovery. “There’s a mouse in that sofa,” he announced.

He was right. The mouse, now hiding somewhere in the sofa’s interior, had wandered around in the night leaving its visiting cards on the bench and around the sofa.

For two more nights, the mouse explored the kitchen, leaving the evidence. My husband, always enterprising and seeing himself as the family’s protector, saw the resort manager and borrowed a mouse trap. The obliging manager gave him pumpkin seeds to use as bait.

Before going to bed, my husband set the trap and placed it near the most raged part of the back of the sofa. Before long everyone was asleep, except me.

I had never slept in the same room as a mouse trap before. Traps were always set in the kitchen at the far end of the house; in the morning someone else always disposed of the tiny corpses. I have never been afraid of mice, rats or spiders… I just don’t want them occupying the same dwelling place as me!

There was no sleeping for me that night. I lay awake waiting for that sudden snap. The rest of the family slept soundly, no doubt exhausted after a long active day and not even thinking of the execution which was about to take place.

I remembered a visit to Sydney’s Paddy’s Market. This was the old market of the nineteen fifties. Second-hand stalls sold books, jewellery, dress materials, bundles of ribbons and discontinued lines of kitchenware. At the far end of the building was the animal man. He sold white mice, kittens, puppies and snakes. I noticed a large snake curled up in a glass aquarium, and to my dismay, there were two mice playing in the same tank.

I was dismayed because the mice were so cheerfully and innocently enjoying themselves almost in the jaws of death. They had been placed in the tank as food for the snake and were not aware that at any time they would be eaten.

That night in the cabin I lay awake imagining the resident mouse playing around under the sofa not knowing about the trap. I was just dropping off to sleep when I heard that deadly snap. That was not all… The snap was followed by several bangs. The mouse had not been killed outright but had desperately tried to escape the trap.

I vowed never ever to set a mouse trap again. If I had to deal with mice in the house, I would always use poison. I would rather a mouse have 30 minutes of belly ache than suffer the agony and horror of a broken body.

The experience taught me that a tattered and torn old sofa in a kitchen makes an ideal home for a mouse until humans interfere.