The Manager, whose name was Mr Stringer, was a bristly man in a black tail-coat. “I cannot permit mice in my hotel, madam,” he said to my grandmother.
“How dare you say that when your rotten hotel is full of rats anyway!” my grandmother cried.
“Rats!” cried Mr Stringer, going mauve in the face. “There are no rats in this hotel!”
“I saw one this very morning,” my grandmother said. “It was running down the corridor into the kitchen!”
“That is not true!” cried Mr Stringer.
“You had better get the rat-catcher in at once,” my grandmother said, “before I report you to the Public Health Authorities. I expect there’s rats scuttling all over the kitchen floor and stealing the food off the shelves and jumping in and out of the soup!”
“Never!” cried Mr Stringer.
“No wonder my breakfast toast was all nibbled round the edges this morning,” my grandmother went on relentlessly. “No wonder it had a nasty ratty taste. If you’re not careful, the Health people will be ordering the entire hotel to be closed before everyone gets typhoid fever.”
“You are not being serious, madam,” Mr Stringer said.
“I was never more serious in my life,” my grandmother said. “Are you or are you not going to allow my grandson to keep his white mice in his room?”
The Manager knew when he was beaten. “May I suggest a compromise, madam?” he said. “I will permit him to keep them in his room as long as they are never allowed out of the cage. How’s that?”
“That will suit us very well,” my grandmother said, and she stood up and marched out of the room with me behind her.
There is no way you can train mice inside a cage. Yet I dared not let them out because the chambermaid was spying on me all the time. She had a, key to my door and she kept bursting in at all hours, trying to catch me with the mice out of the cage. She told me that the first mouse to break the rules would be drowned in a bucket of water by the hall-porter.
I decided to seek a safer place where I could carry on with the training. There must surely be an empty room in this enormous hotel. I put one mouse into each trouser-pocket and wandered downstairs in search of a secret spot.
The ground floor of the hotel was a maze of public rooms, all of them named in gold letters on the doors. I wandered through “The Lounge” and “The Smoking-Room” and “The Card-Room” and “The Reading-Room” and “The Drawing-Room”. None of them was empty. I went down a long wide corridor and at the end of it I came to ‘The Ballroom’. There were double-doors leading into it, and in front of the doors there was a large notice-board on a stand. The notice on the board said,
RSPCC MEETING
STRICTLY PRIVATE
THIS ROOM IS RESERVED
FOR THE
ANNUAL MEETING
OF
THE ROYAL SOCIETY
FOR THE PREVENTION
OF CRUELTY TO CHILDREN
The double-doors into the room were open. I peeped in. It was a colossal room. There were rows and rows of chairs, all facing a platform. The chairs were painted gold and they had little red cushions on the seats. But there was not a soul in sight.
I sidled cautiously into the room. What a lovely secret silent place it was. The meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children must have taken place earlier in the day, and now they had all gone home. Even if they hadn’t, even if they did suddenly come pouring in, they would be wonderful kind people who would look with favour upon a young mouse-trainer going about his business.
At the back of the room there was a large folding screen with Chinese dragons painted on it. I decided, just to be on the safe side, to go behind this screen and do my training there. I wasn’t a bit frightened of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children people, but there was always a chance that Mr Stringer, the Manager, might pop his head round the door. If he did and if he saw the mice, the poor things would be in the hall-porter’s bucket of water before I could shout stop.