The Fitzgibbons finished their planting, and for a week or two all was quiet. But it would not stay that way. The crops would appear, the asparagus was ready to sprout, and for the rest of the spring and summer the garden would be too busy a place for mice to live in comfortably.
So on a day in May as warm as summer, early in the morning, Mrs Frisby and her children laid a patchwork of sticks, grass and leaves over the top of the entrance to their cement block house, and then carefully scraped earth over it so that it would not show. With luck, they would not have to dig a new one in the autumn.
They walked to their summer house, taking half a day to do it, strolling slowly and enjoying the fine weather, stopping on the way to eat some new spring leaves of field cress, some young greens and a crisp, spicy mushroom that had sprouted by the edge of the woods. For their main course, a little farther on, there was a whole field of winter wheat, its kernels newly ripe and soft.
As they approached the brook, towards the big tree in the hollow of whose roots they would make their summer home, the children ran ahead, shouting and laughing. Timothy ran with them, and Mrs Frisby was glad to see that he showed no trace of his sickness. It was an exciting time for them. In the garden they were always alone with themselves, but along the bank of the brook in summer lived five other mice families, all with children. Within a few minutes of arrival, her four had gone with a group of the others down to the water to see the tadpoles swim.
Mrs Frisby set about the job of tidying up the house, which had acquired a carpet of dead leaves during the winter, and then bringing in a pile of soft green moss to serve as bedding for them all. The house was a roomy chamber with a pleasant, earthy smell. Its floor was hard-packed earth, and its wooden roof was an arched intertwining of roots, above which rose the tree itself, an oak.
On her way to get the moss she saw one of her neighbours, a lady named Janice who, like herself, had four children. Janice ran over to talk to her.
‘You’re so late getting here,’ she said. ‘We all thought something must have happened to you.’
‘No,’ said Mrs Frisby, ‘we’re all fine.’
‘But don’t you live in the garden?’ Janice persisted. ‘I should have thought you’d be afraid of the ploughing.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Mrs Frisby explained, ‘they didn’t plough the particular spot in the garden where we live. It’s behind a boulder.’
‘You were lucky.’
‘That’s true.’ More than that Mrs Frisby did not tell; she had agreed to keep a secret, and she would do as she had said.
Still, she thought after quite a long deliberation, it was probably all right to tell her children, first making them promise to keep it secret. They were, after all, the children of Jonathan Frisby. For all she knew, and for all Nicodemus knew, they were likely to turn out to be quite different from other mice, and they had a right to know the reason.
The following evening, therefore, when they had finished an early supper, she gathered them around her.
‘Children, I have a story to tell you. A long one.’
‘Oh, good!’ cried Cynthia. ‘What kind of a story?’
‘A true one. About your father, and about the rats.’
‘How can it be about Father and the rats?’ Teresa asked.
‘Because he was a friend of theirs.’
‘He was?’ said Martin incredulously. ‘I never knew that.’
‘It was mostly before you were born.’
To everyone’s surprise, Timothy said, ‘I thought he might be. I think Mr Ages was, too.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I didn’t know it. I just thought it. A couple of times I saw Mr Ages leaving their rosebush. And I knew that Father used to visit him a lot. But I never saw him near the rosebush.’
Probably, Mrs Frisby thought, because he would have been careful always to leave through the blackberry bramble, just so we would not see him.
They sat down outside the entrance to the house, and beginning at the beginning, with her first visit to the rats, she told them all that she had seen and done, and all that Nicodemus had told her. It took a long time to tell it, and as she talked the sun sank low, turning the sky red and lighting the tops of the mountains, beyond which, somewhere, the rats of Nimh were living.
The children’s eyes grew round when she told them about the escape from Nimh, and even rounder when she described her own capture and escape from the birdcage. But in the end the eyes of Teresa and Cynthia were filled with tears, and Martin and Timothy looked sad.
Teresa said: ‘But Mother, that’s terrible. It must have been Justin. He saved Brutus and then went back. And he was so nice.’
Mrs Frisby said: ‘It may have been Justin. We can’t be sure. It could have been one of the others.’
Martin said: ‘I’m going to find out. I’m going to go to the Thorn Valley, somehow, someday.’
‘But it’s too far. And you don’t know where it is.’
‘No. But I’ll bet Jeremy knows. Remember, he told you the rats had a clearing back in the hills. That must be in Thorn Valley.’ He thought about this for a minute. Then he added: ‘He might even fly me there on his back, the way he did you.’
‘But we don’t know where Jeremy is, either. We don’t see the crows down here,’ Mrs Frisby reminded him.
‘No, but in the autumn, when we go back to the garden — I could find him then. If I got something shiny and put it out in the sun, he’d come to get it.’ Martin was growing excited at his idea. ‘Oh, Mother, may I?’
‘I don’t know. I doubt that the rats will want visitors from the outside.’
‘They wouldn’t mind. After all, you helped them, and so did Father. And I wouldn’t do any harm.’
‘It’s not something we have to decide tonight,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘I’ll think about it. And now it’s late. It’s time for bed.’
The sun had set. They went into the house and lay down on the soft moss Mrs Frisby had placed on the floor of their room under the roots. Outside, the brook swam quietly through the woods, and up above them the warm wind blew through the newly opened leaves of the big oak tree. They went to sleep.
Afterword
Poor Rats! They must be the least popular of all animals, both in real life and as characters in fiction. So how the American author Robert O’Brien came to adopt them as the heroes of his book is best explained in his own words:
‘It happened that a friend of mine was seriously ill and was sent to the NIH (National Institute of Health) for treatment. He was required to take a daily walk, so when I visited him a few times we walked together around the NIH grounds — numerous buildings set in a park.
‘One large, low building was unlike the rest, and when we asked, we were told that it was the animal production laboratory, where rats, mice, rabbits and guinea pigs are raised for use in scientific tests. The attendant we talked to said that though they had no trouble with the other animals, the rats somehow managed to get out of their cages at times. He added that when energy and intelligence were required in a test, the scientist much preferred ‘wild rats’ over the docile laboratory-bred variety. I am quite sure it was this conversation that put The Rats of NIMH into the back of my head — where they stayed for several years before emerging as a story.’
But however energetic and intelligent, there is still a problem in making rats the heroes of any story. Twitching noses, yellow teeth and rapid darting movements can be very alarming at first glance, although tame white rats have often been much loved pets. Wild rats also carry diseases, and have been blamed for spreading the Plague that once wiped out so many families in Europe. Although — as Nicodemus points out — rats ‘never spread as many diseases as people do themselves’, they are still feared as well as hated for their habit of stealing food.
In Robert O’Brien’s story, rats have a much better image. Instead of behaving like rodents, they speak English, get married, have human names, and sit down on benches in order to
read books. When young Isabella comes into a room, she is carrying a pencil and ‘Looking at some papers as she walked’. This is no hurrying, scurrying rat: the picture is closer to an attractive, educated young woman. Just as Anna Sewell’s noble horse character Black Beauty talks like a sensitive young Victorian, Robert O’Brien’s rats come over as decent, family-loving humans in rat disguise. It is easy for us to side with them in their tussle against their worst oppressors: human beings in their own skins.
Readers often enjoy books that show the human race in an unflattering light. We always learn something from such fiction, ending up with a better view of our own faults as seen from the point of view of smaller beings. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH also teaches us to be more tolerant of other forms of life on this small planet: a lesson even more relevant now than it was in 1971, when the book first came out. All creatures play a part in our environment: scavengers such as vultures and jackals who, like rats, are also often given bad parts in stories, in fact have an important job to do clearing up after other animals.
We also know how clever and ruthless humans are when pursuing their own ends. Any animal that still manages to give us a good fight cannot help winning our respect, So the rats’ escape from the laboratory and Mrs Frisby’s last-minute rescue from her cage are both nail-bitingly tense, given the odds against them. No one grudges the rats their happy ending, finally escaping from an experimenter who simply wants to use them for cold-blooded scientific research. It may still be difficult for most of us to change our minds permanently about rats after finishing this story. But no reader will ever feel the same about field-mice again, having come across such a great-hearted little creature as Mrs Frisby herself.
It is always sad when a good story ends, especially when there are still some details that remain unclear. Which rats did not finally make it and how successful was the new civilization at Thorn Valley? Fortunately, two sequels are available, answering these and other questions and written by the author’s daughter Jane Conly, so readers can discover more about Justin, Brutus, Timothy Frisby and Jeremy the crow. This means there are still plenty of exciting adventures to come, again often to do with the continual struggle between animals and humans for the world’s remaining resources, so vital for all forms of life.
Nicholas Tucker
Some other Puffin Modern Classics
THE BORROWERS
Mary Norton
CARRIE’S WAR
Nina Bawden
CHARLOTTE’S WEB
E. B. White
THE CHILDREN OF GREEN KNOWE
Lucy Boston
THE DARK IS RISING
Susan Cooper
THE FRIENDS
Rosa Guy
THE MOUSE AND HIS CHILD
Russell Hoban
THE SILVER SWORD
Ian Serraillier
SMITH
Leon Garfield
STIG OF THE DUMP
Clive King
THE TURBULENT TERM OF TYKE TILER
Gene Kemp
TOM’S MIDNIGHT GARDEN
Philippa Pearce
WATERSHIP DOWN
Richard Adams
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH Page 17
