The Amazing Adventures of Freddie Whitemouse (9 page)

Freddie tried to think, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Then he said, ‘Well, when I was a tiger I was always hungry and there was nobody to talk to: not at all like when I was
Charley.’

‘But when you were a dog, you had no choice about what happened to you. Your friend Alphonse – a most intelligent dog – pointed that out to you several times.’

‘I know. He was a poodle in a thousand. Ten thousand. I shall always miss him. And Poppy. I loved them both, you see.’ And his eyes, already sore with crying, filled again with
scalding tears.

‘There, you see? You didn’t know anything about love until you became Charley. Stop crying, Freddie, or you won’t listen to me properly.’

Freddie took a deep breath and managed to stop, but this gave him hiccoughs.

The toad waited a bit for them to stop, but they didn’t.

‘If you don’t stop that silly noise, Freddie, I shall give you an eNORmouse fright.’

Freddie, who was frightened at the thought of an eNORmouse fright, stopped at once.

‘I want you to consider the advantages of being a mouse.’

There was a pause while Freddie battled with not hiccoughing.

‘You said that as a tiger you were lonely. A mouse need never be lonely. As a dog you had no choice about what happened to you. As a mouse you have any amount of choice. Naturally, if you
don’t recognise these advantages you are going to feel discontented and sorry for yourself. You have proved that you are quite brave – even enterprising – think of your escape
from Hoot – but the moment you get home, you mooch around complaining about everything. True?’

Freddie nodded miserably.
Brave
. . .
enterprising
– he clung on to those more cheering remarks about his character.

‘I suppose I must just make the best of it,’ he said, wondering how on earth he could do that.

‘I’m coming to that. That house you live in—’

‘It’s not a house, it’s a very small flat. It’s No. 16, Skirting Board West at No. 3, The Grove.’

‘And No. 3, The Grove is a very large house. But you’ve never explored it, have you? You’ve never been further than the ground floor.’

‘No, I haven’t. My mother always said it was far too dangerous.’

‘That is a mere mother’s remark. All very well for an ordinary mouse. But you are no longer ordinary, Freddie; you have had adventures. You won’t find another mouse within
miles who has been a tiger and a dog. So now you must do the next thing.’

‘The next thing?’ It made him tremble to think of what that might be.

‘Explore the house: every floor of it. See what you can find. It’s time you had a home of your own.’

There was a silence while a sleepy fly got too near and the toad’s tongue shot out and devoured it.

‘I have often wondered why the general intelligence of flies doesn’t improve, since my kind take such a heavy toll of the fools.’ He sighed – a rather squelching sound
– and Freddie took a step backwards. ‘However, it is fortunate for me that they continue to abound. Now – back to you. What about this new adventure? I know you think you are
brave, so how about proving it? I’ve taken a great deal of trouble over you, and I certainly don’t want all my sorcery wasted. To put it quite simply, are you a tiger or a dog or a
MOUSE?’

And Freddie, without hesitation, said, ‘I’m a MOUSE.’ And to his amazement he felt quite proud to say it.

‘Splendid. Off you go. You can report back to me if you like. Retirement has its disadvantages – I shall be rather short of news. Not bad news, mind – the other
kind.’

‘Thank you very much for all your help.’

‘Ah! Gratitude. Another thing you have learned. Your character is much improved. Now go off and learn to be enterprising.’

O
n his way home, Freddie decided that he’d better do something enterprising before facing his mother. Being enterprising meant being
brave, and he decided that it would be easier to be brave if he wasn’t quite so hungry. The rubbish bins would probably be the easiest place for that.

It was early evening, and the door separating the back garden from the front, where the bins were, was ajar. The bins had been recently emptied, but as usual they had been overflowing, and he
quickly found the remains of a chicken carcass and dragged it under the bushes. It was a good thing he did: people kept coming through the gate from the street to go up the front steps of No. 3.
They were coming back from what they did all day, and would now be cooking, so the kitchen was out of bounds to mice until much later. But he was no longer mice; he was a MOUSE. He looked up at the
enormous house; his heart was pounding. Lights had come on on all the floors except the very top one, that had only one window under a small pointed roof. It was now or never.

He got onto the ground floor – the one with the kitchen well known to him. He got to that quite easily because the back door had a gap under it. There were people crashing about in the
kitchen, but the flight of stairs up to the next floor was empty. He stopped on the landing of the next floor because the blast of noise almost knocked him out. Someone shouted angrily from below
and then doors were slammed, and the music – for that was what his mother had said it was called – got quieter. He waited a bit: the next flight of stairs confronted him.
I’ll
explore the rooms in the daytime when the people are all out
. The thought that they might not all be out occurred to him, but he decided that it was not a brave thought so he stopped thinking
it.

The second flight was steeper than the first, and he arrived on the second landing breathless. The people on this floor had their sitting-room door open: they were sitting on chairs watching a
box that had a man talking. They all had their backs to him, so he slipped quickly past the doorway to the next flight of stairs. These were really steep and narrow and had some slippery stuff on
them instead of carpet. Except for a rather dim light on the landing, it was dark and completely quiet. For some reason this frightened him, and he felt that whatever was up there would not be like
the other floors. It was a real test of courage and enterprise. He waited until he had got his breath back and then went for it. His feet made a clicking noise on the slippery stuff, and each step
was higher than any he had climbed so far, and he got slower and slower as his heart thumped more and more loudly.

At length he could see a narrow door with a pointed top and a row of round holes near the bottom. He chose one and jumped through.

The room he found himself in was very large and there was very little light.

The windows – there was a second at the back – were indeed small and the glass encrusted with spiders’ webs. It was also extremely full of furniture, or at least very large
objects that seemed in the main to be broken: a table with one leg missing, various wrecked chairs, a huge cracked mirror, several heavy leather suitcases – mostly open and bulging with
clothes and papers. Rolls of wallpaper, piles of cracked and broken plates, pot and pans dented or with holes in them, a sewing machine and an old gramophone with an enormous horn, funny sticks
with a fat end that had once been filled in by a mesh but now had a large hole in the middle – he did not know what many of the objects were for – and everything was covered with dust.
He scurried about looking at things, and after a bit he discovered that perhaps he was looking for something. Almost the moment he realised this, he found it.

Sitting on the floor beneath one of the dirty windows was an amazing house. It was red brick with a slate roof and a scarlet front door with windows each side of it. It had two floors, and the
ones above had curtains. The red front door had a knocker on it – a lion’s head with the ring knocker in his mouth. He thought he would see if he could look inside through one of the
windows. By standing on his hind legs and putting his front paws on the windowsill, he could. In spite of the dusky light he could see a beautiful room with walls papered in green and white
stripes, and tiny little pictures of people in gold frames stuck on them. And the furniture! There was a sofa, and two gilded chairs, several small tables – one with a bowl of flowers on it,
one with a tea tray. Over the fireplace was a mirror divided into three parts, its frame gold with fruit and flowers carved at the top. There was a carpet embroidered with roses, and hanging from
the centre of the ceiling a marvellous thing with tiny candles. Then he noticed in one corner of the room someone was lying on their back with their arms spread out. Were they asleep? He watched to
see if they would wake up and see him, but they did not move.
Brave
. . .
enterprising
. . . echoed in his head. He went back to the front door and pushed it. It gave way, and he
was in. He was in the hallway; there was a doorway on the left to a room that was clearly where the inhabitants ate their meals; a long table with chairs on each side. The table had plates of
delicious-looking food on it; jelly, fruit and a very large dish that contained a whole, long pink fish. He sprang onto the table, his mouth watering, but the food was not food at all – it
was pretending to be food. He jumped off the table to see if there were any real crumbs on the carpet, but there was nothing – not a single crumb.

Back in the hall there was a staircase, but it was so small that he could easily run up it. Here were several rooms with beds in them, and in one he found another small person. She had long
golden hair spread over the pillow and her eyes were open. He got onto her bed and sniffed her carefully. She did not move. She was a pretending person – like the food.

Sitting on her bed, the thought came to him that this was a mouse-sized house; he could live in it; become a serious mouseholder, raise a family in it. There were two drawbacks. The first was
that he had nobody to raise a family with, and the second that going up and down all those endless frightening stairs without anyone seeing him was going to be very difficult.

He left the little house and went to one of the windows and looked out. Even when he scrabbled some of the cobwebs off one of the small panes of glass, it was too dark now to see anything
clearly. He decided to go home.

Going down the flights of stairs was not quite so frightening as coming up them had been. The people at the bottom of the first were still listening to the box where there seemed to be some sort
of fight going on: loud bangs and people screaming, but they were so occupied by it that it was easy to slip past them.

The next flight down was also easy. The music was now very quiet and there was a strong smell of cooking. He resisted a lonely chip that was sitting on the landing carpet and started on the last
flight. Here he was stopped in his tracks by a truly terrifying sight.

The enormous old cat was crouched upon the bottom stair. She had her back to him, but her copious fur overflowed on each side until it nearly filled the stair. Even if she was asleep, she would
smell him if he tried to pass her. Terrible tales his mother had told him about how cats tortured their victims – pretending to let them escape and then pouncing on them again and again
– flooded his mind and for minutes he was unable to move, was frozen by fear.
Brave
. . .
enterprising
– that was what the toad had said to him, and so far he had been
those things. He couldn’t stop now.

So very quietly, carefully, he crept down the stairs; the cat remained motionless. Then, when he was only three steps behind the monster, he took a deep breath and murmuring ‘Freddie
forever!’ he sprang onto the cat’s back – almost on its head and off again – for a lightning dash to the gap under the front door, down the front steps and into the front
garden. His heart was beating like a bird in a cage trying to get out. Then he realised that any minute someone might open the front door and the cat would be out and after him. So he hurried back
to No. l6, Skirting Board West.

The home had been much enlarged during his absence, although it did not at first seem so as troops of mice were returning from the evening’s hunt for food, and his mother was telling them
where to put everything. It took him a few minutes to get accustomed to the dusky gloom (the roof was dimly lit by a generous gap between floorboards above and every evening Mrs Whitemouse made the
older mice stuff it with shreds of coconut matting before everyone settled down for the night). She didn’t notice Freddie at first until he touched noses with her.

‘What a surprise! And where have you been, if it’s not too much to ask?’

‘Finding things out,’ he replied. He suddenly realised how extremely tired he was, and how much he had been banking on an affectionate welcome. For a moment he was wracked with
longing for Alphonse and Poppy and for him being Charley. But then he remembered that they were all happy together and that he was determined to be a successful mouse. ‘I’m very glad to
be home,’ he offered, ‘and I shan’t be going away any more.’

The younger mice now realised that their hero had returned and clustered around him. ‘Tell us a story, Freddie – please tell us an eNORmouse story!’