Henry Wilks was regarded by his neighbours as a trifle odd; a belief shared by his wife, Louella. Simply put, the problem boiled down to differing philosophies.
Henry prescribed to a belief that every living creature had a right to live its life regardless of its impact on humanity. Fleas didn’t ask to be born fleas so they should have the right to live out their lives peacefully. He applied the same philosophy to others that shared the family house, such as flies and cockroaches. Louella hated them all. Henry knew she killed them. He found a used flea bomb in the house one day and accused his wife of mass murder.
Henry was only too well aware that his wife’s tolerance of his oddities did not extend to the well-being of household pests. If he happened to be out of sight and she saw a fly on the kitchen wall or window and a fly swat was handy. Henry had nicknamed the kitchen wall ‘the wall of death’ and the window ‘the window to eternity’.
Louella regarded Henry’s ‘catch and release’ policy for flies to be so far from normal as to be abnormal.
Henry’s conviction extended to accosting pest exterminators when he saw their vehicles outside his neighbours’ houses, then haranguing them about the rights of those they regarded as pests. He staredsorrowfully at the neighbours if he saw them buying insect sprays.
During a mouse plague one year Louella, who was terrified of mice began setting traps, but by the second week the traps had found not a single victim – traps sprung, cheese gone.
One day she found a tiny piece of paper on a sprung trap on which a little note had been written: Ha ha! Missed! At once she knew the culprit and sought an explanation from her husband. He denied having anything to do with it, claiming it was obviously the work of a tiny paw. At the end of the plague the total score for Louella’s traps was zero.
Shortly after, Henry wrote a paper titled The Rights of Mice & Lice, Rats & Gnats and did a letterbox drop. It achieved nothing, apart from further alienating his neighbours.
Most were careful not to be in their gardens when Henry walked by, and equally careful to avert their gaze when walking by Henry’s. The general consensus was that Henry’s mental state drifted somewhere on the far side of eccentricity and lingered on the shore of insanity.
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