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When I was six, my dad started going out with a woman called Laura.  As soon as he told me about her, I decided that I wasn’t going to like her, but somehow Dad knew I had decided that and told me to give her a chance.

‘I still miss your mum,’ he said, ‘and I still love her very much, just like you do.  But I love Laura as well, and it isn’t her fault your mum died, so you mustn’t take it out on her.  She doesn’t want to be your mother - she only wants to be your friend.  And I think you should let her try.’

It was very difficult for me to accept that another woman was coming into our lives, because after Mum died it had just been me and Dad for three whole years.  I was only little when she died, but I remembered everything.  I especially remembered how much she, Dad and I all loved each other.  When it was just me and Dad, it was almost like it was still me and Dad and Mum.  She still lived in our memories, and in the smells and sounds around our flat.  It would have been better if she was alive, but as she wasn’t, that was the next best thing.  That was why I didn’t want it to be me, Dad and Laura.

But because I loved my dad so much, I agreed to try and get along with Laura.  When she came to our flat to meet me, I said hello nicely and asked her if she wanted to see my pet mice.  Then it all went wrong.

‘That’s an unusual pet for a little girl to have,’ said Laura, in a funny voice.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘Well, wouldn’t you rather have a pet you can play with?  Like a cat or a dog, for example?’

‘But I do play with my mice,’ I said.  ‘They’re brilliant for playing with.  I’ll show you,’ and I took out Mortimer, whom I happened to have in my pocket at the time.

As soon as she saw him, Laura jumped onto one of our armchairs and screamed and screamed and screamed.  Dad made me take Mortimer away and put him back in his cage, which I was going to do anyway, because all that screaming was probably bad for his little ears.  I knew then that I could never like Laura.  She was the silliest woman I had ever met in my life.

---

But things only started to get really bad after Mortimer died, nearly a year later.  He went three weeks after his brother Marmaduke, and it was very sad, but I wasn’t too sad for too long because I knew they were old and it was time for them to die.  It wasn’t like Mum.

Laura was coming to the flat more and more, and she was there when I decided I would like some new pets.  Sometimes I thought I might like some more mice, and sometimes I thought I might like something different like gerbils or rats.  I knew I couldn’t ask Dad when Laura was there, because she would only make a stupid fuss, but she was there for so much of the time that in the end I had to.

‘Why not get a different kind of pet altogether?’ said Laura, before Dad had time to say anything.

‘What about a bird?’ I said.  ‘One that’ll sit still on my shoulder, and doesn’t have to be in its cage all the time, like a cockatoo.’

‘Oh no!’ said Laura.  ‘I mean a nice pet, like a dog or a cat.’

‘I can’t have a dog or a cat here,’ I said.  ‘It wouldn’t be happy without a big back garden.’

‘Ah,’ said Laura, and she looked at my dad with a stupid big smile on her stupid face.  ‘It’s funny you should say that.’

And that was when they told me about the new house.  Dad and Laura were going to get married, and they were going to make me move out of the flat where I’d lived all my life and into a big, cold house with too many rooms.  At first I shut myself up in my bedroom and cried and cried, and whenever Dad tried to talk to me about it I screamed at him that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Then eventually I was so tired, and my voice was so sore, that I had to stop.  When I did, Dad came into my room, sat next to me on the bed and said, ‘Why don’t you want to move?’

‘Because we’ve always lived here,’ I said.  ‘And Mum lived here.  And if we go away then new people will move in, and they won’t remember her, so she won’t be here anymore.’

‘All our memories of her will come with us,’ said Dad.  ‘It’s not the flat she lives in anymore.  She lives inside you and me.’

Even though that made me feel a bit better, I still didn’t want to leave the flat.  But with Laura around, I had no choice.  Dad and I packed up all our things, and put all of our furniture into a big lorry, and we got into Laura’s car and went to the big house.

It was much harder for me to remember Mum when I couldn’t see the stove she used to cook at, or the bath where she used to wash my hair, or the window where we used to stand and count how many cars of different colours went by.  Even the furniture looked different, and most of it was Laura’s anyway.

But at least I was with Dad.  That was the only thing that really mattered.

---

We had been in the house for about three weeks when Laura decided she wanted to spring clean the basement.

‘But it’s winter,’ I said.

‘Don’t be facetious,’ said Dad.

‘Well, she’s quite right,’ said Laura.  ‘But it really does need doing.  It’s filthy down there, and it’s a terrible waste of space.  If I did it up nicely, perhaps we could use it as another room.’

She went down to the basement with a lot of dusters and mops and buckets and things, and I carried on reading my book about crocodiles and alligators.  I had been reading it for some time when Laura suddenly screamed, and came running back up the stairs.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Dad.

Laura had to catch her breath before she could say anything, but even then she didn’t say anything.  She looked at me, and then she took my dad into another room.

After a few minutes Dad came and said to me, ‘Darling, do you remember you told me you wanted a new pet?  What about a cat?’

I knew exactly what was happening, and I said I didn’t want a cat.  Dad went and talked to Laura, and then when he came back he said it was a cat or nothing.

‘All right then,’ I said.  ‘It’s nothing.’

But I knew that it didn’t have to be nothing at all.  There was an animal in the basement, and I knew it would never be my pet, but in some ways that was better.  I couldn’t play with it, but I could still feed it and watch it and maybe even get it to trust me enough to let me get close, and I wouldn’t have to keep it in a cage.  It would be free.

That night I sneaked downstairs to see if I could spot the animal.  I knew it would be dark, and I knew that a mouse or a rat wouldn’t come out if I turned the big light on, so I took a torch with me and left it in the middle of the floor.  It created just enough light for me to see, but not so much that the animal in our basement would mind.  I could see the basement was full of dust and dirt.  Laura had barely even got started on cleaning it.

I knew I might not see the animal that night, and I certainly didn’t expect to see it straightaway, but I did see something.  Laura had put down traps!  When I looked around, I saw three of them.  I picked them all up, put them in the corner and then shone the torch around to see if there were any more.  There weren’t.  I took the torch with me to the corner, and sat with it next to the traps.

Laura had put meat in them, so I thought it was probably a rat she had seen.  Thank goodness it didn’t get to the traps before me!  Rodent traps are horrible things.  The animal thinks it’s getting something tasty to eat, and then the trap springs shut and breaks its spine so that it dies slowly and painfully.

I kept on waiting, knowing that the rat would not approach the traps while I was near them, but it didn’t come out.  When I saw sunlight coming through the little window at the top of the basement, I picked up the three traps and went back to bed.  I put the traps in a drawer, and then took them to school in my coat the next day, so I could put them in one of the playground bins after Dad had gone.  I couldn’t leave them anywhere in our house, or Laura might have found them.

---

I had a childminder to pick me up from school.  She stayed with me until Laura came home at quarter past five.  Then as soon as she had gone, Laura said to me, ‘You are a spiteful, wicked child.’

‘No I’m not,’ I said.  ‘If anyone is wicked here, it’s you.’

I don’t know what might have happened in the end, but then Dad came home and found us arguing.  He asked Laura what was going on, and she told him about the missing traps.

‘Did you move them?’ he asked me.

‘Of course I did,’ I said.  ‘They’re horrible things and I can’t believe you’ve married someone so cruel!’

‘You horrible girl!’ said Laura.  ‘Apologise to me at once!’

‘NO!’ I shouted, and then I ran up to my room and sulked until Dad came up to say it was suppertime.

‘I’m not eating anything she’s made,’ I said.  ‘If I was a rat it would kill me.’

‘Some people are very frightened of mice and rats,’ said Dad.  ‘I know you like them, but not everyone feels the same way.  You must try to understand that.’

‘Anyone who’s scared of animals is silly.’

‘No they’re not.  Laura is terrified whenever she sees a rodent, just like you’re afraid to climb to the top of the biggest slide in the playground, or walk on the cliffs when we go to the beach.  Everyone’s scared of something.’

‘I’m scared of heights because you can fall and hurt yourself, or die,’ I said.  ‘Mice and rats don’t hurt anybody, and she wants to kill them!’

‘Maybe we can get rid of it humanely,’ said Dad.

‘You mean without hurting it?’

‘Yes.  We can get a trap that doesn’t hurt it, but just captures it, and then take it into the wild and let it go.’

I couldn’t argue with that idea, but Laura could.  I heard her through the wall the next day, when I was in the kitchen learning my spellings.

‘What if it comes back?’ she shouted.

‘We’ll take it miles and miles away,’ said Dad.  He wasn’t shouting.

‘I want it dead!’

‘No!  I won’t let you hurt a harmless creature and upset my little girl.’

---

In the end Laura had to agree, and she made Dad go out and buy a humane trap the next morning.  I went down to the basement with him to watch him set it up.

‘It won’t hurt the mouse at all,’ he said.

‘I thought it was a rat,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Dad, ‘it was a mouse Laura saw.  Look.  I’ve put the meat on this little springboard here.  The mouse will have to stand on that, and its weight will trigger a mechanism to shut this door.  It’ll be confused and frightened for a little while, I’m afraid, but that can’t be helped.  We’ll take it to the woods in the morning, and then we can open the trap like this - the mouse won’t get anywhere near our fingers to bite them, see - and the it’ll scamper off and be as happy as Larry.  And now, young lady, it’s time you were in the bath.’

‘Can I stay down here for a bit?’ I said.  ‘I want to see the mouse before it’s trapped.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.  I just want to.  It’s not a school night.’

‘All right,’ said Dad.  ‘But you can’t wait there for it all night.  If it doesn’t appear in half an hour, I’m coming to get you.’

I waited and waited, and just when I was starting to worry that my half-hour was almost up, I saw her.  I knew as soon she squeezed out of the hole that she was female, because she had babies inside her.  I knew exactly what a pregnant mouse looked like.

I decided to give her a name, and I called her Tilda, because she reminded me of one of my first mice.  Her name was Matilda, and she had babies when her sister Marigold turned out to be a boy.  Dad had got them for me a couple of months after Mum died.  I was still very sad, but I was beginning to feel as though I ought to do something, so I asked Dad, ‘What do we do now?’

‘You need a distraction,’ he said.  ‘Something you can focus on when you start to feel a bit too sad.’

‘But I don’t want to forget her,’ I said.

‘You won’t.  But maybe we can get something to stop you feeling sad and help you remember.  I’ll tell you what.  I’ll get you a pet - something that you can look after, and that’ll depend on you for its happiness.  Then you will always remember how much your mother loved you.’

Because of that, Matilda and Marigold were very special, and Matilda was so special that I couldn’t give this mouse the same name.  So I called her Tilda.

I had just finished deciding this when the door at the top of the stairs opened and Dad’s head appeared.  ‘Bath time,’ he said, and scared Tilda back to her hole.

---

I only got to see Tilda for a moment, but I didn’t mind.  I had seen her, and if she got caught in the trap, I would see her again.  I got up very early the next morning - before Dad and Laura were awake - and went down to the basement.  I went over to the trap, but Tilda wasn’t there.  Laura was really silly about it, saying she couldn’t keep sleeping in that house knowing there was a mouse in the basement, but Dad calmed her down and said that we would catch it eventually.

Then, two mornings later, Tilda was in the trap.  She was also very upset about it, chewing on the wire bars so hard that her feet kept lifting off the ground.  Then I saw why.  She wasn’t pregnant anymore.  Her whole body was smaller, but on her belly her teats were still huge and swollen and pink.  Her babies must have been in the hole in the wall, waiting for her to come back.

That was it.  I couldn’t let Dad take her and release her into the wild.  The babies would starve!  I picked up the trap, carried it towards the hole in the wall and opened it the way that Dad had showed me.  Tilda ran like lightning into her hole, and just as she did I heard Dad’s voice behind me: ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’

I jumped out of my skin.  I had never heard him so angry before.  Tears came to my eyes, and I turned round and said, ‘She’s a mother!’

‘What?’ said Dad.

‘When I saw her she was pregnant.  She’s not now.  We can’t take her away from her babies, Dad!  They can’t lose their mum!’

And then suddenly I was sobbing and sobbing, and I couldn’t say another word.  I knew Dad wasn’t angry anymore, because he put his arms around me and held me to his chest and put his mouth on the top of my head, murmuring comforting things on my hair.

‘Dad,’ I said.  ‘There are other mice in there now.  If we get rid of one of them, it won’t make any difference.’

‘You’re right,’ said Dad.  ‘And if this one’s had babies, there must be a male around somewhere, and those young ones will be breeding before we know it.  There are probably dozens of them under here.  Laura will go mad.’

‘Oh Dad, don’t let her kill them!’

‘We can’t have mice living under the house.’

‘Why can’t we?  They don’t do any harm, Dad, you can’t kill them - you couldn’t possibly kill them all, anyway!’

‘We’d have to get an exterminator in.’

‘You mean someone to choke them all!  Dad, no - no!’

I was nearly crying again, but before I could really get started Dad squeezed my shoulders and said, ‘All right, all right.  But what am I going to tell Laura?’

‘Tell her we caught the mouse and released it into the wild,’ I said.  ‘We can just take the trap for a drive in the car - she won’t even look at it.’

‘That’s very deceitful,’ said Dad.  ‘And you know how scared she is of mice.’

‘Oh but Dad, she’ll never know.  Please, Dad, don’t kill them.’

He sighed, and said, ‘I don’t know what to do about this.’

I wished that Tilda had got into the trap while she was still pregnant, and then we could have just released her with the babies still inside her, but I knew wishing didn’t do any good.  Wishing for something to happen was okay, but wishing for something not to have happened when it already had was just silly.  I often wished that Mum hadn’t died, but it didn’t change anything, and sometimes it only made me feel sadder.  So I stopped wishing and tried to think what to do.  In the end, I could think of only one solution.

‘Couldn’t we stop Laura being afraid of them?’ I said.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Dad.

‘I do.  You know James at school?  He’s got an aunt who used to be afraid of cats, but she went to a special kind of doctor and now she’s not scared of them at all.  And you can do it with spiders too - I saw a telly programme about it once - so you must be able to do it with mice.’

‘Darling, I think it’s a lot to ask of Laura.’

‘But we haven’t asked her!’

So we went up to the kitchen and asked her.  She didn’t like the idea at first, and said there was no way she was going to do it.  But then Dad made both her and me sit down at the table, and he sat between us, and he took one each of our hands and said, ‘I love you both so much, and I so wish you could get along, and it seems to me that the only thing really getting in the way of that is your phobia, Laura.’

‘I don’t think it is,’ said Laura.  ‘She’s beastly to me sometimes.’

‘Only about the phobia,’ said Dad.

‘That’s right,’ I said.  ‘If you see a mouse or a rat you want to kill it, and I just can’t bear it.’

‘Can’t you understand that they terrify me?’ said Laura.

‘Not really,’ I said.  ‘But if you went to a doctor and got cured, I could try to understand, and I could help you.’

‘Laura,’ said Dad.  ‘You must understand how she hates any living thing to die needlessly.  After she lost her mother, she knows how precious life is.’

‘Well,’ said Laura, looking a little bit cross and a little bit sorry for me.  ‘When you put it like that, how can I refuse?’

‘Thank you,’ said Dad.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘But that mouse I saw in the basement,’ said Laura.  ‘That’s trapped and ready to be taken away, isn’t it?  Because I haven’t seen any doctor yet, so for the time being I still can’t stand sharing a house with one.’

Dad and I looked at each other, and there was panic on his face.  Then he coughed, tugged at his collar and said, ‘Yes, we’re just off to release that one after breakfast.  Aren’t we, love?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

After that, I knew I had to be careful not to let Laura catch me going down to the basement, but I still had to see Tilda.  I even took food down for her and the babies, because I didn’t know where she usually got it from, and if it was too far away then it wasn’t safe for her to leave her babies to get there.  Anything could have happened to her.

Laura never saw me going down there, and she never saw another mouse in the basement either.  But I don’t think it was a waste of time and money for her to go the phobia doctor.  If we’d gone on as we were, Dad would have felt bad about secretly knowing there were mice in the basement, and both Laura and I would have thought the other one was horrible when actually, she was really nice.  And once I knew that I found that I liked it being Laura, Dad, me and our memories of Mum.