“It’s time to go,” my grandmother said. “Our work is done.” She got down off her chair and picked up her handbag and slung it over her arm.
She had me in her right hand and Bruno in her left.
“Bruno,” she said, “the time has come to restore you to the famous bosom of your family.”
“My mum’s not very crazy about mice,” Bruno said.
“So I noticed,” my grandmother said. “She’ll just have to get used to you, won’t she?”
It was not difficult to find Mr and Mrs Jenkins. You could hear Mrs Jenkins’s shrill voice all over the room. “Herbert!” it was screaming. “Herbert, get me out of here! There’s mice everywhere! They’ll go up my skirts!” She had her arms high up around her husband and from where I was she seemed to be swinging from his neck.
My grandmother advanced upon them and thrust Bruno into Mr Jenkins’s hand. “Here’s your little boy,” she said. “He needs to go on a diet.”
“Hi, Dad!” Bruno said. “Hi, Mum!”
Mrs Jenkins screamed even louder. My grandmother, with me in her hand, turned and marched out of the room. She went straight across the hotel lobby and out through the front entrance into the open air.
Outside it was a lovely warm evening and I could hear the waves breaking on the beach just across the road from the hotel.
“Is there a taxi here?” my grandmother said to the tall doorman in his green uniform.
“Certainly, madam,” he said, and he put two fingers into his mouth and blew a long shrill whistle. I watched him with envy. For weeks I had been trying to whistle like that but I hadn’t succeeded once. Now I never would.
The taxi came. The driver was an oldish man with a thick black drooping moustache. The moustache hung over his mouth like the roots of some plant. “Where to, madam?” he asked. Suddenly, he caught sight of me, a little mouse, nestling in my grandmother’s hand. “Blimey!” he said. “What’s that?”
“It’s my grandson,” my grandmother said. “Drive us to the station, please.”
“I always liked mice,” the old taxi-driver said. “I used to keep ‘undreds of ’em when I was a boy. Mice is the fastest breeders in the world, did you know that, ma’am? So if ‘ee’s your grandson, then I reckon you’ll be having a few great grandsons to go with ‘im in a couple of weeks’ time!”
“Drive us to the station, please,” my grandmother said, looking prim.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Right away.”
My grandmother got into the back of the taxi, and sat down and put me on her lap.
“Are we going home?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered. “Back to Norway.”
“Hooray!” I cried. “Oh, hooray, hooray, hooray!”
“I thought you’d like that,” she said.
“But what about our luggage?”
“Who cares about luggage?” she said.
The taxi was driving through the streets of Bournemouth and this was the time of day when the pavements were crowded with holiday-makers all wandering about aimlessly with nothing to do.
“How are you feeling, my darling?” my grandmother said.
“Fine,” I said. “Quite marvellous.”
She began stroking the fur on the back of my neck with one finger. “We have accomplished great feats today,” she said.
“It’s been terrific,” I said. “Absolutely terrific.”
The Heart of a Mouse
It was lovely to be back m Norway once again in my grandmother’s fine old house. But now that I was so small, everything looked different and it took me quite a while to find my way around. Mine was a world of carpets and table-legs and chair-legs and the little crannies behind large pieces of furniture. A closed door could not be opened and nothing could be reached that was on a table.
But after a few days, my grandmother began to invent gadgets for me in order to make life a bit easier. She got a carpenter to put together a number of slim tall stepladders and she placed one of these against each table in the house so that I could climb up whenever I wanted to. She herself invented a wonderful door-opening device made out of wires and springs and pulleys, with heavy weights dangling on cords, and soon every door in the house had a door-opener on it. All I had to do was to press my front paws on to a tiny wooden platform and hey presto, a spring would stretch and a weight would drop and the door would swing open.