Of mice and not men

OF MICE AND NOT MEN
Lisa of Alco-Mouse Cottage
Chapter 1

People laughed when she said she lived in a book, but she really did, she lived in the pages, well actually in pages 72 to 76, she used the intervening pages to add some sound proofing to her life.

She by the way is about 4 our inches long and two inches high and is a mouse called Lisa.

She found the book in about July of 1988; it was lying on some waste ground in a place called Misterton. Lisa had seen the book on her travels up and down the canal and noticed it lying on the ground. It was a big hard backed navy blue book and no one seemed in the slightest bit interested in it but her.

Lisa was a young single mouse, she was not a mouse that found it easy to mix with other mice, in fact the noise of their scratching, mewling and general whispered sounds caused her to have headaches and feel agitated. She had been like this for years. The other mice tried, out of kindness, to jolly her along and try to get her to join in the mice activities. They tried to get her to join the mice racing club, this was a group of young mice that practiced racing in and out of people’s houses giving them fright s as well as out running the cats in the home. Lisa did not like this at all, she wanted to stop and watch the TV in the houses they frequented and was frustrated that this was not something that the other mice thought she could or should do. Another group wanted her to join the office mice, these mice lived in the local offices at the top of the road and they delighted in eating small bits of paper and watching the secretaries get cross when they found them nibbled and try to blame the other workers there. Then there were the all night mice, that liked to party and did not sleep much, they found the good parties where the food flowed and every mouse had as much to eat as they could get in their mouths.

Lisa was a town mouse and the other town mice found her strange as she yearned to be a dormouse, or a field mouse, a mouse who lived in the fields, in the fresh air and did not scurry around the back of skirting boards, looking for gaps in the flooring, seeking scraps of leftover food, hiding in the dark all the time, waiting for the cat to catch her or the humans to put traps down.

Lisa wanted to feel the grass under her paws, to have her whiskers quiver in the wind, to smell the earth when it was wet, to run through the fields and feel the grass over her head and the ground under her feet.

Thus she made a decision, not one her family were impressed when; she decided to move away and to become what she believed she could be. He father, a large auburn mouse was angry and not impressed, he wanted grandmice and was most concerned that she get this “field mouse” idea out of her head, he told her that his whole mouse history was bound up in the house he was in and that she was being difficult and unreasonable.

Her sister, who lived in the skirting boards upstairs, and had two mice to her partner, was shocked and thought she was being silly, after all what was wrong with staying where she was, it was easier and they had their dad to think of as well, he was not getting any younger and who would look after him if Lisa was not there. Their mother had sadly died a few years before, (she by the way was a mouse that had escaped from the house as well). Lisa’s sister thought that Lisa should look after the father as she had nothing else to do, and was being selfish in wanting to get away.

Even as a very young mouse she had been different, when she was given her first piece of paper to chew, a significant day in the lives of mice, she had been more fascinated with what was on it rather than how it tasted, her parents were stunned, she was making a mockery of a significant mouse ritual, she was not chewing and showing joy at the chew, she was challenging and being difficult. Lisa had watched the children of the house and how they looked at pages and did try to eat them, she knew that there was something on the pages that she wanted to understand, so despite all objections she taught herself to read and pages took on a whole new meaning to her.

Words excited her and she consumed (opps! wrong word) them. This is where she found out about the open places, the fields and the skies, this is where she started to find out about stories of hope and change. She came to the place where she knew she liked the stories for children better than the ones for grownups, children believed that animals could talk and think.

Lisa thought about all that her father and sister had said to her, she thought about what she had read, she pondered and cogitated as she practised her yoga, another thing that made her different. She had found out about this from a magazine that her father had dragged in to the skirting boards to tear up for bedding. It was a glossy magazine and he soon got bored and tired with the effort needed to chew up the glossy pages so gave it up as a bad job. Lisa was about to start working on it, when she saw this article by a lady called Katie Appleton, who talked about finding yourself and feeling better if you did yoga. She read on and there was a piece about how to do yoga, Lisa was more than interested, managed to tear the pieces out of the magazine and saved them to read when the others were asleep.

Thus began the journey of her lifetime.

Lisa thought and thought and as she practised her yoga it came to her that she only had this life now and to waste it would be an awful thing to do. She did not know what was out there in the world, she knew she was afraid because the others told her she should be, not because she had any experience of it. With this in mind she developed a plan. She decided that each day, for a week, she would walk in the direction of the open smell she could smell. The smell that was different to the house. She would walk for one hour each day and each day she would take a slightly different path. At the end of the week she would decide which path had felt better and more of an open smell and then she was going to pack her rucksack and head off towards that smell of open spaces.

With this in mind she relaxed into the meditation at the end of the yoga and asked the Big Mouse in the Sky to be with her and give her courage.

The next day she set off, she was scared, of course she was, it would be silly to say otherwise, but she felt that she was doing the right thing, so she persevered. The first day she got as far as the end of the road and the open smell disappeared, her hour was nearly up, so she turned back and went home.

The second day, she turned the other way out of the gate and came to huge road, but the smell was good over the other side, so she sat and watched what was happening on the road, she found the big lorries made a huge frightening noise and rushed past her making her bones quiver, she found little cars came very close the edge of the road and did not slow down, these made her heart beat very fast, there were motor bikes and push bikes and none of them seemed to be going slowly enough for her to scurry across the road, so in despair she turned back and went home, so down hearted. She was never going to cross that road, and the smell of openness was over the other side. She went through the gate to the house and sat in the grass and started crying, there was no way, and she would be stuck behind the skirting boards for the rest of her life.

Suddenly, there was a noise beside her and a blackbird came and perched on the ground next to her. He scrabbled about looking for food, but he was watching her with his beady eye. Taking the bread off the grass, he turned to her and apologising for talking with his mouth full, asked her what was the matter, she did not seem at all happy. Lisa soon found herself telling the blackbird all about her dreams and beliefs of how it was in the open places. He listened intently, head on one side and then he started to sing, louder and louder, Lisa put her paws over her ears, had he gone mad? He stopped and twittered to her, he said how wonderful it was that she believed in the chance of a better place, that he too had had the same sort of experience, that his family had called him a “Whitebird” , for betraying the years and years of Blackbirds expectations, that he he too had followed his heart and was living in a wonderful wood, he had made friends with all sorts of animals, he lived in absolute joy.

The blackbird went on to ask her what her plans were, Lisa told him that she sensed that there were open places on the other side of the big road. The blackbird told her that she was right and, that, if she wanted he would come back tomorrow and take her on his back to show her some of the places that were on the other side of the road. Lisa was so excited; she said yes she would love that. The blackbird bowed to Lisa and said it was a pleasure and that he would be back at 7am the next morning.

Sleeping was not easy for Lisa that night, she tried the relaxation methods she had learnt but she could not settle and at 4am she got up and made herself a nettle tea and watched the sun rising over the town. She felt that this was the last time she was going to be in the town to see this, and reacting to that feeling she packed all her worldly belongings in to a small piece of cloth she had kept and went outside to wait for the Blackbird. Sure enough he arrived at seven o’clock lay on the grass so that Lisa could climb onto his back; and picking her package up in one of his claws told her to hang on tight.

What sights she saw, the tops of trees, buildings all below her, places stretched out further than she could see with her mouse eyes, the blackbird tried to tell her where they were but his words were lost in the wind. She loved it, the smell of the open air, the clean sky, the silence of the air and yet the noise of other birds chirping as they flew near to them. Suddenly, she saw it, the field that she knew in her soul was the place she had seen in her dreams, she tapped the Blackbird on his wing, and he seemed to understand and landed on the edge of the field. Carefully Lisa climbed down from his back, this she told the bird was the place, she did not need to look any further, this was it.

The blackbird told her that she was in Misterton, a village in Nottinghamshire and that over the hedge was a canal, where narrow boats sometimes came up and down, that it was quiet and people walking on the canal were usually people that liked nature. He told her that he lived nearby in one of the woods and that if she liked it here he would help her make a nest for the first few days til she worked out exactly where she wanted her house.

So this is what they did, the bird flew about and bought back all sorts of bits and pieces, as well as some food that he had found in a nearby shop doorway. Lisa was so happy her heart felt like it would burst. She settled down to watch the sun setting over the water and fell asleep to the natural sounds around her.

The next morning the blackbird came to check that she was alright and to give her some tips on where the best food source was and what to watch out for. So began Lisa’s new life.

After a week, she had noticed when she walked up and down the canal side stretching her legs, this book that I first mentioned at the start of this story. She thought initially that someone had dropped it and would be coming back for it. However after two days it was still there. In the evening when her friend the blackbird came to see if there was anything she needed, she told him about the book and how she thought that it would make a good home, if put under some dry shelter. The blackbird agreed to come and see the book with her the next morning and that if it were any good he would get another friend and together they would bring it to a place that Lisa had chosen to have a house in.

In the morning the blackbird, who was called Joe, went with Lisa to look at the book. It was in really good condition, no damp at all, pages intact and the cover in really good condition, the cover had some words embossed on it, but some of them had got rubbed out over time, the words said “Alco...... on one line and “.....mous” on the next. Lisa realised that this must be for her as she recognised the word “mouse”, although whoever wrote the book obviously could not spell.

Joe went and got his friend and together they carried the book to the spot that Lisa had identified. The placed the book under the tree where Lisa had said she wanted it but they put in down on its side, it took up too much space and Lisa asked if they would stand it up with the spine up at the top as this made a natural roof, they helped her open the pages a bit so that the book would not fall over.

Lisa was so excited and thanked her friends, she set about moving the pages to make a room for herself, and settled on the pages 72 to 76, the name of the chapter was “Into Action” and this seemed to Lisa to be so appropriate. She made a bed for herself with some wool that Joe had bought her, she found a cooker from one of the other field mice that no longer used it, and she got pots and pans from the local hedgehog who had some very reasonable deals. When she was finished she stood back and enjoyed her first new home.

The next day she went outside and looked more carefully at the outside of the cover, she scurried over her roof and saw the title of the book laid in gold on the spine of the book, she decided that she would ask Joe if he would help her build a chimney up on the roof and help her put in a little fire, she knew she would have to be careful as insurance is so expensive when one has a fireplace in a book, but she felt sure she would be sensible. She then scuttled down to look at the front cover and saw that where the words had been embossed she could have them painted a different colour to the blue of the book, she also decided to find a builder who could put her in a front door and window as well as look for a carpenter to build her a flower box for the front little bit of earth that she wanted to make into a garden.

And that my friends is what happened, Lisa called her cottage Alco – mouse, from the name of the book in which she lived, most of her friends called it “The Big Book”, an affectionate title for the house of a great and wise mouse, a mouse who had faith, who knew there was more to her life than the skirting boards, a mouse who had courage and was willing to follow her dream.

Her house was beautiful, animals came to see the wondrous house, the colours of her gardens, her flowers, but they did not bother Lisa, they knew she would have her nose in a book, that she would be learning new things, they respected her as an animal that stepped out.

Yes people laughed at her, but no longer in a way that was cruel, she became a shining example to young mice that change was possible, that you do not have to do what the others have always done. That there is an open space for us all, where the air smells clean and the grass is greener.

DQ 20th January 2007