‘Why not?’ asked Ted.
‘There isn’t any room.’
‘But there’s lots of room,’ said Ted.
‘No there isn’t,’ said the fattest flea. ‘You’ll have to get off.’
The more Ted protested, the nastier the fleas became. He tried crying but it did no good. They just poked him and tried to make him fall off. In the end he got angry and started calling them all the rude names he’d heard his mother use. They chased him but they were so fat they couldn’t catch him. He ran off down the end of the cat’s tail where they were far too stuck up to go.
After the cat had eaten the mouse it curled up under a bush and went to sleep. The air was warm and filled with the hum of summer flies. A blackbird hopped about on the lawn digging in the grass. Closer and closer it came until it was right behind the cat. As it bent over to pull a fat worm out of the earth, Ted leapt on to its back and two minutes later he was high in the sky, far above the old house and garden.
As he looked down he saw the cat come out from beneath the bush and jump over the fence into next door’s garden. There were two children playing on the striped lawn and the flower beds and bushes were all trimmed and cut tidily. There were gardens like that as far as Ted could see. There were people pushing lawnmowers and hanging out washing or just sitting in the sun. In some gardens dogs lay stretched out and a few sparrows and starlings flitted about, but only the garden he had grown up in was wild and full of wonderful overgrown trees. Everywhere else was clean and tidy like a room inside a house. Only his garden was alive with birds and wild animals.
‘Mister,’ said a tiny red creature tugging at his leg. ‘Please, mister, have you come from heaven?’
‘Yeah, mister, are you an angel?’ said another. The little creatures were bird mites and to them, Ted, who had suddenly appeared from nowhere, was a magical giant.
‘I might be,’ said Ted, looking down and hanging on for dear life as the bird swooped down into the garden again.
‘Cor, can we worship you then, mister?’ said the mites, all clamouring round Ted’s knees.
‘You can give me a present if you like,’ said Ted, who was feeling peckish, which was quite funny considering he was sitting on a bird’s back.
‘We ain’t got nuffink, mister,’ said the mites.
‘What, no food?’ asked Ted.
‘Only blackbird’s blood.’
‘Oh well,’ sighed Ted. After all, he was a flea and although he had told his mother that he was a vegetarian, he knew that fleas live on blood.
The blackbird landed in a tree and as Ted curled up for a quiet afternoon sleep, it began singing at the top of its voice. Ted tried covering his ears with all six legs but it did no good. Another blackbird flew down and the two of them sang even louder. For the first time since he’d left the old rat, Ted wondered if it had been such a good idea.
There must be somewhere I can go, he thought to himself. Somewhere I won’t get jumped on or chased or deafened.
Round the side of the house behind a great tangle of bushes there was a hole in the fence. Sometimes when the dog next door got fed up with her neat and tidy world where everything smelt of washing-up liquid and plastic, she would squeeze through the fence and come into the old garden.
Ted watched as she ambled around the edge of the flower beds sniffing every leaf as if it was a beautiful flower. In the dog’s own garden the grass was so short that the lawn was no more than earth painted green. In Ted’s garden, since the old lady had gone, the grass had grown rich and soft. It reached up to the dog’s knees and she rolled over and over in it as if she were swimming through treacle.
Ted looked down. The dog was right underneath him on her back. Tiny black specks flashed in her brown fur, black flecks that looked like other fleas. Ted crawled to the tip of the blackbird’s tail and jumped.
‘Get out of it,’ growled an angry voice.
‘Yeah,’ said another, ‘or we’ll pull your wings off.’
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said a third.
‘I haven’t got any wings,’ Ted shouted. Something dark leapt out of the dog and landed in front of him. It was an angry flea with a mean look in its eye.
‘It’s all right lads,’ he called. ‘He’s one of us.’
‘We thought you was a mosquito,’ said another flea, coming out of the fur.
‘Yeah, we’ve had a lot of trouble with mosquitos,’ said the first flea. ‘Coming here and trying to eat our dog.’
Ted told the two fleas, Dick and Rick, about the old rat in the drain and how he’d run away to find a better life. He told them about the mouse and the cat fleas and the red mites.
‘They’re rubbish, cat fleas,’ said Dick.
‘Not as rubbish as hedgehog fleas,’ said Rick.
‘Yes they are,’ said Dick.
‘Not.’
‘You want a fight?’
‘Yeah,’ said Rick and the two fleas jumped on each other but before either of them could hit the other, the air was filled with a loud whining noise and a huge cloud of mosquitos came crashing down.
Fleas appeared from all parts of the dog, which was sitting by the house scratching itself. Its fur was full of struggling mosquitos all tangled up and swearing at the tops of their voices. The dog fleas charged into them with their legs flying.
Maybe I should’ve stayed on the blackbird, thought Ted, or even on the old rat.
As the battle went on all around him, he crept off to a quiet corner feeling quite homesick. Was there nowhere he could go to be happy?
The dog gave one great scratch and Ted went sailing through the air. Over and over he tumbled until he vanished into a world of total darkness. As he fell further away from the sunlight, sweet familiar awful smells drifted up towards him. He was back in his drain, and the stagnant water and the rat’s bad breath that had once made him feel so ill now smelt warm and friendly. He looked down and far below the weak light shone on the lid of the rat’s tin. As he raced by he reached out and grabbed its only whisker. He crawled into the rat’s ear and lay there exhausted.
‘You bone idle little scruffbag,’ shouted a voice, knocking him out of bed.
‘Hello, Mum,’ said Ted. ‘I’ve just had an awful dream.’
‘I’ll awful-dream you in a minute, my boy,’ snapped his mother. His ears were aching and his head was ringing but Ted was smiling. He really was home again. And no matter how bad things sometimes seemed, he knew that it was where he wanted to stay forever.
The Rabbits
Right at the bottom of the garden behind the rusty car was where the rabbits lived. Their burrows peered out like black eyes between the twisted roots of trees that grew out of a bank of earth beneath the tall fence. Honeysuckle grew up from the roots, almost covering the fence and reaching its winding arms up into the branches. On the other side of the fence, past a thick forest of nettles and brambles, was a tow path that ran behind all the houses as it followed a canal into the middle of the town.
The almost endless honeycomb of tunnels that the rabbits lived in spread out from the fence like a huge underground city. It reached up the garden right to the brick walls of the cellars below the house. Through tiny cracks in the cement the rabbits could peer into the cellars and see the rats scurrying about through the old boxes and coal. In the other direction the warren went out under the canal, up on to the far bank where there was a field of wasteland covered in broken concrete and rubbish.
In the tunnels lived a rambling wild family of rabbits. They were not the shy secretive animals of children’s stories who only come out at night to nibble the lettuces. These were loud fearless rabbits who jumped on the lettuces and ate the roses, rabbits who shouted and swore and sang rude songs and laughed and spat and threw stones into the pond.
On beautiful summer days when the garden was half asleep in the warm sunshine an
d the birds were singing softly in the wild strawberries and the whole world seemed to be standing still, they would go crashing through the grass, jumping on everyone’s dreams. From their broken-down tunnels they spread noise and chaos to every corner of the garden. They went through the hedge, attacked next door’s cat and bit the heads off the flowers.
‘Go away,’ mumbled the hedgehogs as they dozed under the geraniums.
‘Rock and roll,’ shouted the rabbits and they crashed through the undergrowth, snapping twigs and kicking up the molehills.
‘Go away,’ called Elsie the mole from her tunnel.
‘’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go,’ sang the rabbits as they ran laughing in a line round the lawn.
All afternoon, all evening and most of the night the racket would go on. There were rabbits creating chaos everywhere. When it was dark they tunnelled into other gardens and chewed all the heads off the marigolds and at midnight when the humans had just got into their beds and turned out the lights, they knocked the lids off the dustbins.
Only in the early mornings when the rabbits were sleeping was it peaceful in the garden. The sun came up, a big fuzzy circle in the mist that hung over the canal. Birds woke up, stretched their wings and slipped away through the trees. A hedgehog shuffled across the lawn making dark tracks in the white frost as it hurried back to its bed. From the rabbit warren came a chorus of loud snores punctuated with coughs and sneezes. From each tunnel little clouds of grey steam drifted across the garden carrying the smell of damp fur and mouldy grass.
As morning reached lunchtime sleepy rabbits would begin to emerge yawning into the daylight. They staggered through the bushes snorting and spitting and tripping over the dock leaves. By early afternoon they were banging and crashing away again as loud as the day before. At least once a week one of them fell into the pond and splashed around cursing until it managed to scramble out again.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said an old crow. ‘I don’t know what’s got into them, but it’s got to stop.’ ‘What can we do?’ said Elsie the mole. ‘If you say anything they just ignore you.’
‘They weren’t always like this,’ said Ethel the old chicken. ‘When I was young rabbits were sweet and fluffy. Now they’re like wild animals.’
‘They are wild animals,’ said a rat. ‘We all are.’
‘I’m not,’ said Ethel proudly. ‘I’m domesticated.’
‘Well, we’ve got to do something,’ said the old crow.
The next morning while the rabbits lay asleep in their wildest dreams, the hedgehogs and the crows rolled big stones into the entrances of the burrows. One by one they blocked them up until only the main tunnel was left open.
Then all the animals in the garden sat in a big semi-circle round the warren entrance and watched for the rabbits to come out. They slept late that day but the animals sat patiently waiting. Animals are not like humans, they don’t get bored so quickly. Moles and slugs don’t get bored at all.
At last the rabbits began to stir. From inside the blocked tunnels came the sounds of swearing and a lot of scrabbling commotion. At last some of them found the open entrance and came blundering out.
‘Who’s been blocking up our tunnels?’ they shouted.
‘We have,’ said a huge crow, towering over the sleepy rabbits, the sun flashing on his large bill.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Ernie the rabbit, nervously. ‘Well, you got no right.’
‘Yeah,’ said his mate Dave.
‘We’re fed up with all your noise,’ said the crow.
‘Oh yeah?’ said Ernie.
‘Yes,’ said the crow, leaning right over the rabbit until his bill was touching its fur.
‘Why do you have to rush round making such a racket all the time?’ asked the hedgehogs.
‘Why can’t you let us live in peace?’ said the old chicken.
‘Go and look in the other gardens,’ said a blackbird. ‘There’s nothing there for us. You can see that and you can see that it’s like that for miles and miles. Our garden is a special place, a place where no one comes to kill the weeds or the insects or to cut down the trees. It’s a place where we can live together in peace, yet you insist on spoiling it all. Why can’t you live quietly like the rest of us?’
Arthur, the oldest rabbit, came to the front and said, ‘I’ll tell you why.’
Arthur was the oldest animal in the garden. He was so old that none of the other animals could remember a time when he hadn’t been there.
‘I’ll tell you why we shout and laugh and sing,’ he said, and he told them the terrible story of what had happened.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘Most of you never leave this garden from the day you are born until the day you die. Oh, yes, some of you birds fly up in the sky but from up there everything looks small and safe like a child’s toy. But us rabbits go out into the world and come into contact with man. We have seen the awful things he can do and we have learnt to fear him.’
All the animals felt a sudden cold wind run through their hearts. They had never heard talk like that before. They all stared at the ground so no one else would see the fright in their eyes.
‘Across the canal,’ the old rabbit continued, ‘across the wasteland, over the road hidden behind tall trees, there is an evil place. Two years ago some of us went there and we saw such terrifying things that we knew we could never be sweet and fluffy again.’
The sun was at its highest point in the blue summer sky. A haze of heat shimmered in the air yet all the animals were shivering. None of them knew what the rabbits had seen but they could tell it had been something almost too awful to talk about.
‘Behind the evil place,’ said Arthur, ‘we found a row of dustbins and when, as animals do, we climbed into them to find food, we looked into the face of death. When we pushed off the lids the air was filled with the sweet smell of roses like a summer’s day. But it was the middle of winter and there were no flowers there, just two blind rabbits with their eyes and bodies full of ladies’ perfume. They were still alive so we led them back across the river to the safety of the garden. And that is why we shout and swear and dance and sing, for all the other animals that are still in those awful places.’
The animals stood silent with an aching pain in their hearts. The young ones felt frightened and clung to their parents who were filled with a terrible anger.
‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ said the crow.
‘No, nothing,’ said Arthur.
‘There must be something,’ said a sparrow, but he knew there wasn’t. They all knew there was nothing any animal could do. They knew that every single animal in the world survived only because man let them.
‘That’s why we shout and laugh,’ said Arthur. ‘We could all be dead tomorrow.’
‘Couldn’t you shout and laugh quietly?’ said Ethel. She was an old hen and didn’t really understand. The only human she had ever known had been the old lady who’d lived in the house and she’d always been really kind.
‘We could eat the electric cables,’ said the rats. ‘That’d teach them.’
‘You do that already,’ said the crow. ‘We could build nests and block up their chimneys.’
‘You do that already,’ said the rats.
‘Maybe if we all kept out of their way, they’d leave us alone,’ said the old chicken.
‘If only we could talk to them,’ said a hedgehog.
‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ said Arthur. ‘The only thing that will make men change is other men.’ And he was right. Only the children growing up today can make tomorrow different.
Bob the Slug
Behind the apple trees, past the overgrown pond, was the old vegetable garden. Once the earth had been neat and filled with rows of vegetables and fruit, but now nobody went there any more and the ground belonged to nature again.
&nbs
p; Under an old brown cabbage that no one had wanted, hidden in a twilight world of soft green slime, lived Bob the slug. He was fat and black and sticky and shone like a piece of polished coal.
Every morning Bob and his family slithered out from their damp home and began to eat. They ate every green thing that lay in their path and each day they had to slither a little bit further to find something new.
‘One day,’ said Bob, swallowing a daisy, ‘we’ll have eaten the whole world and there’ll be nothing left to eat.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ said his uncle Quentin.
‘No, this is rubbish,’ said Bob, biting into a mouldy plum.
‘And you are dinner,’ said Barry the hedgehog, eating them both and saving the world.
The Rats
After the old lady moved away, dampness spread through the empty house and the air grew tired waiting for someone to breathe it. The dampness brought cold, so even on a sunny day the house never grew warm. Behind the wallpaper the plaster began to crumble and behind the plaster tiny plants began to grow in the moisture that was creeping up the walls. And in the larder, sweet crumbs of food grew mould and turned to dust.
The house was filled with silence. The rats who lived in the cellars had been used to the sound of human footsteps moving above their heads. They were accustomed to the pitter-patter of the old dog shuffling from room to room. Now it was all quiet. The noises of taps and water running down pipes and drains, the muffled sound of the radio, had all stopped. Now there was absolutely nothing.
At first the rats hadn’t noticed. The noises had been like the sound of cars out in the street that are there all the time so you aren’t aware of them. They all felt uneasy but no one knew why. Then one day a young rat called Derek stopped chewing the electric cable and looked up at the silent ceiling.
‘Listen,’ he said.
‘What?’ said another rat. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
Wild Stories Page 3