Rat trouble

Here is a story about an ethically challenged home seller. This guy offloads a rat-infested house to an unsuspecting buyer. Why tell the buyer that the basement is rented out free of charge to disease-carrying rodents?

"Friday December 1, 2006
The Guardian

When Graham Best and his wife settled in to their smart new house, they thought they had found the perfect home for themselves and their newborn daughter. Then they heard the scratching ...

It was a small house, we'd just done it up, and it was worth almost half a million pounds. The cooker was a seven-ring leviathan, weighing almost a quarter-tonne, and the bathroom looked like something out of the Hip Hotels books. It was smart, it was cool, it was perfect - the ideal spot to bring up our newborn baby and, my wife and I would chuckle smugly, the envy of our friends.

We heard the scratching on the second day after we moved in. It was a horrible noise, 20 seconds of "pfft-pfft-pfft" followed by silence ... and then more of the same. We were at the kitchen table, and we both put down our forks. "Maybe it's next door's cat," said my wife, not believing a word of it. The noise came again, and this time we were able to tune in to where it was coming from - right underneath the dishwasher. We both knew what the sound was, because we had already had a warning. The words of our electrician, uttered over the phone when the house was little more than a shell, came rushing back: "You've got a visitor," he had said, with some drama. "A rat. Sitting there right now, he is. Bold as you like." Rats get everywhere, we'd reasoned, optimistically and, after all, the house was a building site. We had thought no more about it.

Now, as our three-week-old daughter napped in her Moses basket on the floor, we regretted our nonchalance. Weren't rats, like, really dangerous? Suddenly, I remembered every word of a magazine article I had once written - an interview with an expert on the London sewage system - and recounted one especially memorable line to my near-hysterical other half: "Weil's disease is a horrible problem for us," he'd said. "It comes from rat's urine, and it's deadly."

By day four, we would hear them as soon as darkness descended. I became convinced I could smell them too - in one pocket of the kitchen there was a distinct odour. It was sweet and acrid, and uniquely vile.

Disappointment about our sparkling new house grew by the day, especially when the baby developed the sniffles - although the midwife quickly put our minds at rest. We still felt like the world's worst parents, though, and took to barricading her in her bedroom as soon as the light started to fade, and wedging a towel in the gap at the bottom of her door, just in case.

Until now, the only evidence of our uninvited guests was the noises. We remained hopeful that whatever was under the house wasn't actually getting in, content instead to scamper about under the floorboards looking for crumbs or toasting their feet on our hot-water pipes.

But then my wife found some droppings in the nook where we kept the pram. They were way too large for a mouse and looked like coffee beans. Now it was only a matter of time.

We had been there two weeks when we first made visual contact. One rat, and then another. Suddenly, there were three: ugly black beasts, each a good six inches long, scuttling across our kitchen floor. I couldn't think of anything to do but stamp on the floor, which had the instant effect of scattering the buggers, one heading behind the fridge, the other two disappearing under the dishwasher. And so began three long years of hell.

The man from Rentokil came and put down poison, but he couldn't find where they were getting in and didn't seem optimistic about his £300 fee being money well spent. With good reason: not one morsel of his deadly fare was ever snaffled. I bought some enormous rat traps from B&Q, with a truly sickening "snap" to them, and every night gingerly loaded them with peanut butter, which I had heard was better than cheese. Within a week, I had killed seven.

At first, I threw the traps away with the rodents: I would put on some work gloves, screw up my nose and drop both kill and killer into a plastic bag. But at four quid a pop, frugality eventually won the battle over squeamishness, and I found myself recycling the traps. That was probably the worst bit, meekly prising open the gadget's deadly jaws and watching a stinking, blood-spattered rat slip out. Next, I had to wash the trap clean. And then the sink. And then my hands, again, and again, Lady Macbeth-style, feeling nauseous.

Every day at work I would type things like "rat repellent trap killer" into Google. I bought - from America - a plastic bottle of powdered fox urine, apparently de rigueur for scaring the bejesus out of rodents, and a bright yellow electronic "Rat Zapper". The fox wee stank, but my foe wasn't easily fooled. Luckily, the zapper was brilliant. You threw some bait in the end (recommended: dried cat food), turned it on, and next day there was a fried plague-carrier, stiff as a board, at the bottom.

During those first few months, the handful of people we invited round were told to arrive at midday, ostensibly to fit in with the baby's sleep patterns, but actually to make sure that they were gone by the time the dreaded scratching kicked off. We withdrew socially, and became convinced all our friends must be thinking that having a child had sent us mad. We couldn't put off our parents, so we were upfront about our little problem and tried to make light of it. My wife's dad promised to loan us his air rifle, which he had once used to "polish off a 12-inch rat" in his back garden, but we talked him out of it. Even he recoiled, however, when a whiskery beast the size of a brush-head scurried past as we were eating dinner.

After four months, having dispatched at least 25 of the things and seriously contemplated selling up as many times, I took a week off work and spent every second of it pulling out fridges, fingering chimney breasts and unscrewing skirting to see how they were getting in. I never did find out, but I did manage to make the house rat-proof thanks to a job-lot of expanding foam, wooden beading, wire-wool and Polyfilla. From that day on, we never saw another rat, although if we awoke in the small hours we would sometimes hear them, gnawing at the woodwork underneath the ground-floor boards. One died down there earlier this year: you could smell it for almost three months.

"It's this town," the man from Rentokil had said, shrugging. "So many shops and restaurants, so many bins - the rats get under the houses in runs that have been here for decades."
We decided not to include that detail in the particulars when we sold last week. The buyers seemed so nice, too.

My wife and I spent many a fraught evening discussing whether or not we should tell them, but there was never any real danger that we would - who would knowingly buy a house with rats? We did contemplate sending a large cheque after we had gone, along with a letter stating: "Rip up floorboards. Pour in concrete. Relax." But we probably won't be doing that either. After all, as a guy at work pointed out to me, "Nobody told you about the rats when you bought the house, did they?" It's not much of an excuse, but it's something. Luckily, my conscience has assured me that the new buyers are early to bed, sound sleepers, and maybe a little bit hard of hearing, too. Let's just not get started on karma."