Thirty-nine Steps

It was on our first walk in Bath, around 17.00 hours it must have been, the three of us, discovering the city on foot. Andreas always carries his little mouse with him, and sometimes he also throws it away as far as he can. Normally this is not a problem, we pick it up and put it in a safe place. But in Bath, most of the houses have a basement floor, open at the street side, often with a small staircase down. But this particular house had no staircase and there was no way of getting down. I rang the bell, no answer, it was a school and we were there during school holidays. The MacGyver in me started to think, where can I get a ladder, or a rope, or a long hook? I rang the bell next door. A very kind lady said that there was nowhere there at the moment and that we better slip a note into the letterbox. And so we did, asking if they would be so kind as to send the mouse to Belgium, or if before the 2nd of August deliver it at the Royal Bath. Sophie and I were very depressed, we thought that we would never see the mouse again, Andreas was not aware of what had happened. The next morning we passed by the house again, and both our mouths fell open when we saw that the mouse had disappeared. Immediately I rang the bell. The lady concierge must have thought we were crazy when we nearly burst into tears at the sight of the mouse. We couldn’t thank her enough. The next day we bumped into the lady next door and she asked if we had found it. She too must have been heartbroken to see a little toy mouse starve to death on a lonely basement floor…