I think we have seen the last of the rats.   I have been putting B. & C
up in the loft on a daily basis for a week and miraculously all
scuffling and gnawing sounds have ceased (touch wood).  Ted even came
around to check the roof to see if there was any chance of anything
getting in from outside but could find no openings.  

All this reminds me of a tumbledown house and a rat story from my past.  

When I was about 12 my parents sold our farm and bought a bigger one
which unfortunately had one drawback - an old house.  I can still see my
mother weeping at the kitchen table and wailing that she wanted to go
back to the lovely modern home she had had.  

The kitchen was a disaster.   The ceiling and skirting boards had been
painted black and the fly-speckled walls were once a bright orange.
There was no electric stove, only an old coal range.   I think the black
paint in the kitchen was meant to disguise the fly spots.   There was
high grass growing around the house and as soon as anything was cooking
flies came inside in their thousands.

The main bedroom had been wall-papered several times over scrim.  A
thick coat of duck-egg blue paint had been added to the last coat of
wall-paper with the result that it had become heavy and had ripped a lot
of the scrim off the walls.   When the wind whistled through the walls
of the weather-board house the blue wall-paper undulated like waves on
the sea.   Just watching it gave you a strange sea-sick feeling.

The bathroom had a funny old bath that had been painted with silver
paint.   Bits of paint flaked off every time you had a bath and stuck
glue-like to bathers giving them a  speckled look.   The bath also
narrowed at the bottom which meant that people with a big rear-end got
stuck.  The house was full of the sound of my father cursing and
shrieking for someone to prise him out of the bath!  There was no
drainage and the water simply ran under the house and sat there.

We shared the outside chemical toilet with several flea-bitten dogs and
a family of possums.

But the rats were the worst feature of the house.   Generations of them
had bred in the high ceiling and at night you could hear them galloping
around like horses on a race course.  Most of the rooms had rounded rat
tunnels through the walls.

We had brought Terrible Tiger Tom with us from our other farm.
He was a moth-eaten, ear-tattered killer.  We inserted him struggling
and kicking into the loft and left him to it.  You should have heard the
noise - there was enough squealing and snarling and crashing to wake the
dead.   TTT was in the loft a week and cleaned out every rat.  He ate
most of them and my father cleaned up the spare corpses.

It was time to bring down TTT and therein lay the catch.   TTT was
absolutely terrified of heights and handing him to someone balanced high
on a ladder soon proved an impossibility.   All participants in his
rescue were scratched and bitten.  Try putting a fighting cat through a
small man-hole!   My father nearly broke his neck when the ladder
over-balanced.
"That cat can stay up there until he gets hungry" shouted my father, who
had a short fuse.   He stamped off, thereby washing his hands of the
whole affair.

Mum couldn't bear the thought of her darling TTT being hungry.
She finally found a sack and launched herself off the ladder up into the
ceiling.   Mum used a piece of meat as bait to catch TTT and flung the
sack over his head.   TTT fought like a fury and Mum put her foot
through the plaster ceiling but she won in the end.  

Mum passed the pulsating sack to my brother who was perched on top of
the ladder.   "Don't drop him," shouted Mum, "it's a long way down."

Mum was whistling in the wind.   My brother could no more manage that
thrashing sack than fly.   The sack crashed to the floor with a
sickening thud.  "OMG," screamed Mum, "you've killed TTT"!

The cat shot out of the sack and out the back door and we didn't see him
for a week.  To Mum it was all the final straw. She was devastated.
"Tom's gone off and died from his injuries," she wailed, "oh, how I hate
this place."

There was a happy ending.   TTT finally appeared on the doorstep with a
dead rabbit in his mouth.   He seemed none the worse for wear.

--
Bev
The email of the species is more deadly than the mail.