The pest I’ll never forget: the rat who jumped off the wardrobe and flew at my face

There was a rat army in my flatshare, gnawing through pipes, carpets and even a bedroom door. That’s not to mention the mice ...

We should have known we were in trouble when we saw that the garden of our new place backed on to a Chinese restaurant in Hackney, London, with terrible reviews. Before long, the rats started coming in through the pipes. It was ratmageddon, and every day it got more harrowing. They trooped over our kitchen, like the world’s worst sequel to Ratatouille. They calmly walked into rooms while we were watching telly. They gnawed through all the carpets to try to get into our bedrooms.

There was no stopping them. After sniffing out the remnants of an old snack in my housemate Simon’s bin, a pack of rats got to work one night gnawing through the wood at the bottom of his bedroom door. Like a rodent military exercise, they spent eight hours whittling a hole large enough to get through. I lay next door, 100% freaked out, panicking they’d try to get into my room next. I didn’t sleep a wink. Fairly soon after this, one of the rats died under the floorboards so we got a bottle-fly infestation to boot. Naturally, our landlord did nothing about any of this.

We tried not to kill them – in fact, Simon the pacifist locked a bunch in the saucepan cupboard using a wooden spoon. One day, he and I trapped one in his bedroom with us. It tried to get away from us by climbing to the top of the wardrobe. Suddenly, it jumped, body splayed, and flew at my face, ran down the entire length of my body and scuttled over my feet. Jonathan, our other housemate, walloped my toes with the metal pole, mistaking me for the rat.

On another occasion, I came home and heard such loud crashing in the bathroom at the back of the house that I thought it must be a burglar. I should have turned and run or called the police, but no, I foolishly strode over to investigate. When I opened the bathroom door, a mega rat – the most humongous I have ever seen – ran over my feet (again!) and dashed across the kitchen and down a hole before I could have at it.

There were mice, too. I always thought rats and mice could never cohabit – until a mouse crawled across my friend Chris’s bed in the middle of the night and tried to nestle in next to his neck. But the most brazen mouse I ever saw? The one that tried to make its getaway by riding across our full washing up bowl on a scourer, like its very own raft. Pixar could never.

I don’t want to jinx it, or make anyone cast aspersions on my general cleanliness, but my house now is in fact the only place I have lived since 2006 which doesn’t have rats, mice, or both. After we left Hackney (AKA refused to pay rent and got the hell out of there), we moved to Brixton in south London and rats soon had the run of that place, too. We had a real streak of bad luck for a while – but thankfully I think I’ve finally left ratmageddon behind me.