Something in the attic

The other morning, I heard something moving around up in the attic. It was unnerving at first as I just heard the scuttling of clawed feet and I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. I searched the area directly around me, scrutinized the walls, then finally looked up at the ceiling, cocking my head as if that would help me see and hear better. Yup, there it was again.

Yikes! I felt quite panicky for a moment. But the sensible side of me knew it couldn’t be anything more sinister than some kind of little animal that had got in from the garden. But I was alarmed nonetheless.

I called Rentokil and they said it might be a squirrel or rat or mouse. They would send a man round to take a look.

Well, that’s a relief. Only a squirrel, rat or mouse.

I don’t know what I was expecting them to say. This is England after all. I guess the scuttling sounded so loud that my imagination went a bit wild. And I expect that the strange animals that sometimes got into the house when I was a child in Malaysia also conditioned me to be more fearful than you might expect to be in a tame London suburb.

When I was a child, my parents house in Kuala Lumpur was surrounded by a few empty lots that were thick with undergrowth and trees. In the garden and in neighbours gardens, there were many fruit trees - rambutan, banana, avocado as well as coconut trees, jacarandas and a flame tree. The air was always loud with birdsong, cicadas, frogs and insects.

Whenever anything got into the roof, it was most likely a civet cat - loud, noisy and stinking of its distintive feral odour. For us kids, it was scary for its wild crashing around. We also sometimes had bats flitting through the air vents, spooking us with their dark shadowy wings.

Once, my mother put some of the house plant pots out into the garden to water them and give them some direct sunlight for the afteroon, before bringing them back in again. That evening, as we sat down to dinner, we noticed the tall, bamboo like fern moving in the corner. Perhaps it was just the breeze from the fan, we thought. Until it moved again and we looked over more carefully. And scattered to the far end of the room in screaming tumult. It was a snake, entwined in the tall spine of the fern.

So, a squirrel, rat or mouse - that’s not so scary! A nice cup of tea will do to calm me down and remind me that I’m not in the wild tropics anymore…

Photo: thanks to tantrum_dan from flickr.com (CCL)