Flowers For Algie
When I was a kid, I kept mice. Mouse, to be accurate, a little white mouse with pink eyes that I called Hercules. I used to keep him in a little wire cage and feed him hamster food, bird seed and then one day I discovered he like buttercups , dandelions , rose and other flower petals. My younger brother was so taken by Hercules that he saved up and bought a cage and a little mouse that he called Algie, based upon the mouse in the book ‘Flowers for Algernon’ that he was reading in school.
We used to let the two of them run around and wrestle with each other, till one day we discovered that Algie was not a boy after all, and she soon got fat around the middle then gave birth to six little baldy, pink sausages.
My dad was not a hard man, he was not violent , like some of the other dads in the street, he never used the belt or the buckle, but he had been through the war and had seen some terrible things. So he had no problem in making sure that when we got up for school the next day, there was one little pink baldy sausage, instead of six.
I would have been about eleven years old, too young to have any muscle, but old enough to be useful, so I used to help him with his projects. He taught me how to build a garden fence, how to place the posts, how to creosote it, and all the things to watch out for. I helped him build our garage , the greenhouse on the allotment and then one day he made an announcement.
He said that as I was getting older, he was going to expand from one allotment to two. We would give one plot over to potatoes, the other to seasonal veg, fruit canes, a pear tree and some flowers. ‘The big thing is’, he said, ‘is that we need a shed. A big shed’
So he bought a prefabricated shed. It was delivered on a horse and cart and I could see it was massive.
We started putting bricks down as the foundations. When we had a few courses down and they were all levelled off, we went hunting for glass. There is always lots of discarded glass on the allotments and we brought back a wheelbarrow load. We planted shards of glass, with 10% sticking out of the ground, and we put poison all over the place. ‘If rats start to nest under your shed, you are finished ‘ my dad said, ‘and this will keep them away. A plague of rats can clear you out in a day.’
We finished the shed, moved our gear in and started to prepare for Spring time and the planting season.
Meanwhile, my mum asked me to move the mice into the garage, the weather was getting warmer and she didn’t like them around the house, so I agreed to do it after scouts that Thursday night. I forgot of course, but moved Algie and sausage in before school the next day.
At lunch time I ran to the plot, gave the tomatoes half a gallon each, ran back to school, then back to the plot to meet up with dad to get some spuds planted. It was a lot of hard work.
Next morning we headed for the plot again, and dad came out of the shed with a face like thunder. ‘Look at this …’
It was a half eaten seed potato. ‘Rats’ he said.
He gave me a ten bob note and sent me off to the shops, half a mile away. ‘Go to the chemist, and get some flowers’
Now it wasn’t often that I knew more about something than my dad, but I knew one thing, mice (and therefore rats) just loved flowers.
‘No, not flowers flowers. Flowers of sulpher’
So I ran off and bought this bag full of yellow powder. Flowers of sulpher ? I was intrigued. Dad got a piece of wriggly tin, poured half of the sulpher onto it and placed it in the middle of the shed. ‘In the bible, they call this stuff brimstone. You know when your ma strikes a match, and you get that sharp smell ? well that’s sulpher dioxide. It dissolves in the fluid in your nose and makes concentrated suplphuric acid, then it is diluted and goes away. If there is enough of it, it will take a lot lot longer to go away, and if you are little, with little lungs, like a rat, it will kill you.
He put a match to the yellow powder and it caught alight. It started smoking and I got the whiff of a thousand matches all being struck under my nose at the same time. I had runny snot and I felt it catch at the back of my throat. It wasn’t unpleasant at all, I had the feeling I was getting a blooming good clear-out. Dad was laughing , till he realised he was snotting everywhere as well. We closed the door and waited. And waited.
We were expecting to see rats leaping out of the shed, waving the white flag in abject surrender at our human ingenuity. Nothing. Just a runny nose ‘er..why not go and water those tomatoes again son’.
‘Ok dad’.
That afternoon, I met up with the gang. There were about twelve of us. It would be fair to describe us as feral, scruffy, dirty, snot-runnelled, scouse tearaways.
When I told them about the sulphuric acid, there was no hesitation, we just had to give this a go. No one had the one and three for the sulpher, so we had a ‘tarpaulin muster’ to get the money and off we went. (A tarpaulin muster is a seafareing term, when a sum of money is to be voluntarily collected. A sheet of tarp is stretched out and everyone throws in what they can afford. No one knows who threw what, so there is no shame in being poor, no kudos for being wealthy, and no peer pressure if you don’t agree with the cause)
We all ran down the shops, got the sulpher then ran back to my dads garage. It was the only place we knew where we might get away with it, without adult interference.
We lit the powder and it was just the same as earlier. Thick clouds of white smoke, that bit the back of the throat and cleared the sinuses in the most effective way.
All the gang were running around whooping, then someone panicked and we all ran out laughing and screeching, laying on the grass and larking about.
I went back into the garage to make sure everything was ok, then I saw the cage in the corner. Where I had put it the day before. An icy hand gripped me and I felt waves of terror, I couldn’t bear to look. I went out and locked the garage, and all of the gang dispersed. That evening, I slipped back into the garage , got the cage and put it back in the house under the stairs. The mouse and her little baldy baby were still.
The next morning , it was Sunday school. My brother came in from the back room whinging his little eyes out. Algie was dead, blood all around her mouth and the baby too
Ma looked puzzled, she glanced at me. She thought the cages had been put into the garage. She was about to say something, got distracted.
I felt like a murderer and a baby killer, maybe as it's sunday I should confess ?
I kept my gob shut, and beat a hasty.
When I was a kid, I kept mice. Mouse, to be accurate, a little white mouse with pink eyes that I called Hercules. I used to keep him in a little wire cage and feed him hamster food, bird seed and then one day I discovered he like buttercups , dandelions , rose and other flower petals. My younger brother was so taken by Hercules that he saved up and bought a cage and a little mouse that he called Algie, based upon the mouse in the book ‘Flowers for Algernon’ that he was reading in school.
We used to let the two of them run around and wrestle with each other, till one day we discovered that Algie was not a boy after all, and she soon got fat around the middle then gave birth to six little baldy, pink sausages.
My dad was not a hard man, he was not violent , like some of the other dads in the street, he never used the belt or the buckle, but he had been through the war and had seen some terrible things. So he had no problem in making sure that when we got up for school the next day, there was one little pink baldy sausage, instead of six.
I would have been about eleven years old, too young to have any muscle, but old enough to be useful, so I used to help him with his projects. He taught me how to build a garden fence, how to place the posts, how to creosote it, and all the things to watch out for. I helped him build our garage , the greenhouse on the allotment and then one day he made an announcement.
He said that as I was getting older, he was going to expand from one allotment to two. We would give one plot over to potatoes, the other to seasonal veg, fruit canes, a pear tree and some flowers. ‘The big thing is’, he said, ‘is that we need a shed. A big shed’
So he bought a prefabricated shed. It was delivered on a horse and cart and I could see it was massive.
We started putting bricks down as the foundations. When we had a few courses down and they were all levelled off, we went hunting for glass. There is always lots of discarded glass on the allotments and we brought back a wheelbarrow load. We planted shards of glass, with 10% sticking out of the ground, and we put poison all over the place. ‘If rats start to nest under your shed, you are finished ‘ my dad said, ‘and this will keep them away. A plague of rats can clear you out in a day.’
We finished the shed, moved our gear in and started to prepare for Spring time and the planting season.
Meanwhile, my mum asked me to move the mice into the garage, the weather was getting warmer and she didn’t like them around the house, so I agreed to do it after scouts that Thursday night. I forgot of course, but moved Algie and sausage in before school the next day.
At lunch time I ran to the plot, gave the tomatoes half a gallon each, ran back to school, then back to the plot to meet up with dad to get some spuds planted. It was a lot of hard work.
Next morning we headed for the plot again, and dad came out of the shed with a face like thunder. ‘Look at this …’
It was a half eaten seed potato. ‘Rats’ he said.
He gave me a ten bob note and sent me off to the shops, half a mile away. ‘Go to the chemist, and get some flowers’
Now it wasn’t often that I knew more about something than my dad, but I knew one thing, mice (and therefore rats) just loved flowers.
‘No, not flowers flowers. Flowers of sulpher’
So I ran off and bought this bag full of yellow powder. Flowers of sulpher ? I was intrigued. Dad got a piece of wriggly tin, poured half of the sulpher onto it and placed it in the middle of the shed. ‘In the bible, they call this stuff brimstone. You know when your ma strikes a match, and you get that sharp smell ? well that’s sulpher dioxide. It dissolves in the fluid in your nose and makes concentrated suplphuric acid, then it is diluted and goes away. If there is enough of it, it will take a lot lot longer to go away, and if you are little, with little lungs, like a rat, it will kill you.
He put a match to the yellow powder and it caught alight. It started smoking and I got the whiff of a thousand matches all being struck under my nose at the same time. I had runny snot and I felt it catch at the back of my throat. It wasn’t unpleasant at all, I had the feeling I was getting a blooming good clear-out. Dad was laughing , till he realised he was snotting everywhere as well. We closed the door and waited. And waited.
We were expecting to see rats leaping out of the shed, waving the white flag in abject surrender at our human ingenuity. Nothing. Just a runny nose ‘er..why not go and water those tomatoes again son’.
‘Ok dad’.
That afternoon, I met up with the gang. There were about twelve of us. It would be fair to describe us as feral, scruffy, dirty, snot-runnelled, scouse tearaways.
When I told them about the sulphuric acid, there was no hesitation, we just had to give this a go. No one had the one and three for the sulpher, so we had a ‘tarpaulin muster’ to get the money and off we went. (A tarpaulin muster is a seafareing term, when a sum of money is to be voluntarily collected. A sheet of tarp is stretched out and everyone throws in what they can afford. No one knows who threw what, so there is no shame in being poor, no kudos for being wealthy, and no peer pressure if you don’t agree with the cause)
We all ran down the shops, got the sulpher then ran back to my dads garage. It was the only place we knew where we might get away with it, without adult interference.
We lit the powder and it was just the same as earlier. Thick clouds of white smoke, that bit the back of the throat and cleared the sinuses in the most effective way.
All the gang were running around whooping, then someone panicked and we all ran out laughing and screeching, laying on the grass and larking about.
I went back into the garage to make sure everything was ok, then I saw the cage in the corner. Where I had put it the day before. An icy hand gripped me and I felt waves of terror, I couldn’t bear to look. I went out and locked the garage, and all of the gang dispersed. That evening, I slipped back into the garage , got the cage and put it back in the house under the stairs. The mouse and her little baldy baby were still.
The next morning , it was Sunday school. My brother came in from the back room whinging his little eyes out. Algie was dead, blood all around her mouth and the baby too
Ma looked puzzled, she glanced at me. She thought the cages had been put into the garage. She was about to say something, got distracted.
I felt like a murderer and a baby killer, maybe as it's sunday I should confess ?
I kept my gob shut, and beat a hasty.
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