One fort in the Grave, with KEITH FORT

HOW horrible for customers of a Rawtenstall bank, innocently drawing money from an automated teller machine, to get, along with their cash, gruesome pieces of mouse.

Most of all I feel sorry for the mouse (although I shouldn't). There he was, thinking he'd found a nice safe haven, snuggling down among the tens and twenties, when suddenly he found he's ended up in the shredder.

They just don't learn, do they, these mice? They don't learn that they and humans (well, most humans, anyway) don't mix. And they don't learn about ending up in the wrong place. Namely, my house.

My first furry friend moved in just after I did. With the building being new and in the country the mouse was probably there before the house was. However, it left me tell-tale messages around the kitchen and it just had to go, especially when I found it was sharing my cornflakes.

I didn't possess a trap so I waited and swooped, batting it a couple of times but it still escaped beneath the units. Next I tracked down it's point of invasion -- an enlarged hole for the sink waste pipe -- and blocked it without realising the distress this was to lead to.

A couple of weeks later my nose sniffed out the worst. I had to pull half the kitchen to pieces to trace its stinking putrefied body trapped beneath a unit. My next encounter was in those same kitchen cupboards but after they had been relegated to the garage as storage for my tools. Going for a saw one day, I found a furry visitor had taken up residence there and was making a dreadful mess.

As the garage was inside the house this lodger had to go. I bated a trap with cheese and waited....and waited....and waited. It became obvious that Mickey had blown this particular gaff so I moved the trap to a hole in the wall leading under the house floors designed to accommodate my heating pipes.

Boy! Was I in for a shock. First night -- bingo! Second night -- bingo! Third night -- bingo! And I was getting worried. Half a pound of strong Cheddar later and the toll had risen to eight before the trap remained intact and untouched. I really blocked up that hole. It all took me back to my childhood when someone bought me two white mice, which I hated, and eventually they died on me, probably through neglect. It gave me a phobia for life. Were the mice trying to exact some kind of revenge?

By now I had become a domestic great white hunter, sensitive to scratchings in the loft that seemed all wrong for my pair of starlings which have been nesting up there for the past 30 years.

So up the trap went, not very successfully at first because, as I was to discover, these Upstairs mice had a more sophisticated taste than the poorer Downstairs variety. I realised this when one of those helpful TV Tips from the Pros programmes advised baiting with chocolate, not cheese.

The nightmare started all over again. I never imagined I could have so many lodgers.

I began to visualise millions of marching mice all the way back to China and all headed for my house. And still felt more fortunate than one of my neighbours who found squirrels up there (try getting rid of those) and another who stumbled across an entire bat colony (it's illegal to get rid of those). My tally soon rose to eight with the trap sometimes going off in the middle of the night, shocking me awake.

I found they preferred my favourite, chocolate marzipan, to solid Cadbury's (Mice of real taste, I told you). But then came a disturbing incident. It started when, checking my trap, I found bits of fur but no body. I put it down to a near miss.

I baited the trap again and went away for a few days. About a week after that I remembered the trap. This time, there was a body all right. But it looked a bit weird. Worse still, it had no head. Then, a few inches away, I found it. A white skull, picked absolutely clean, inside and out, with two long incisors, like a miniature dinosaur skull.

The only scary thing I've surprised was a fast moving spider large enough to impersonate a mouse -- the biggest I've ever seen in this country.

But what can have done that? What can be up there? The trap is still there. The chocolate is untouched. Whatever it is, it might have frightened the mice even more than me.