MOUSE & SAM
The back garden was a menagerie. A pair of pigs grazed on the perfectly kempt lawn and a donkey sheltered by the well. Butterflies the size of dinner plates clung to the red brick house. Living alongside these reconstituted concrete and resin animals was a real cat. Jimmy was the latest in a long series of strays that Ernie and Maud had adopted, every one named Jimmy whatever its sex. And there were more strays, birds with broken wings or fledglings concussed after flying into freshly Windolened glass. Ernie built an aviary for them. He’d also built his and Maud’s home. He was both a deeply practical and a playful man. Since leaving his job as a joiner for British Gypsum he’d run his own business out of the garage. He built bird houses, garden sheds and fences and for the villagers of East Leake. For each piece he’d make a mouse, with a nose lathed into the perfect point, two curled leather ears, a tail and a pair of beady eyes. The mice were on everything he made, secreted away in the eaves of bird houses and under the seats of benches he constructed. It was only after Ernie’s death last year that his grandson Sam rediscovered the wooden mice – in the drawers of his grandparent’s kitchen, perched on water pipes and window sills. Maud was happy to have one less animal to dust and the mouse now lives in London, on Sam’s bookshelf.
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