‘That was at Canvey Island,’ my dad tells me. ‘In the 40s. I was born in ‘49; by then my parents had got the house in Leigh-on-Sea.’ The latter house was the one I’d grown up visiting: semi-detached, homely, elephant ornaments and taught leather sofas, a dying willow tree at the bottom of the garden.
Dad recounts the story his parents had passed to him. My grandmother, his mum, had cooked a roast chicken. A typical affair, only this particular day took a turn. After retrieving the bird from the oven, she went to the kitchen to lay the table. Both of my grandparents went back into the kitchen and the chicken had gone.
‘They were hunting,’ tells my dad. ‘Where’s it gone? Something must have come in. Then they heard something under the sink.’ They opened the cupboard door. In plain sight, a rat. In its mouth, the leg of a roast chicken, the rest of the bird still attached and dragging hot grease.
‘Somehow or other it managed to get it under the kitchen sink. There was a hole there at the back of the cupboard, and it was trying to drag the chicken out through the hole.’
I expect such stories would be typical in 1940s UK. In these more sanitised times, a rat in the kitchen gets you a Manchester Evening News article, as ‘Kim’ and Tia Henderson found.
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