Blitzkrieg Revisted by Phillp Donnelly

"You’ve never had it so good" Grandpa Rat said to us, in the pile of rubble that was once Mrs Bleachdale’s house.

We gathered around him, the whole colony, ready as always for one of his bedtime yarns; and behind us, in the distance, the East End shimmered in a rosy incendiary glow; and from the sky, the Rat Gods dropped more exploding poisoned pellets of revenge on our human torturers, splintering their world and turning it into our world.

"You remember what this place used to be like, don’t you? You remember Mrs B., don’t you?"

He paused then for effect, and let the image of the ogre grow in our minds; and our eyes grew large and our whiskers trembled in remembering the giant of a woman, who was two dozen-rats-high and was said to be to grow a tail taller for every rat sent to rat heaven. Once he had raised the ghost in our minds, he went on.

"She was a terror of a woman, Mrs B., and I for one hope she lies howling down below. When it wasn’t traps she was laying, it was poison she was putting down for our young innocents."

He stood on his two back legs, lifted his right front leg and sniffed the air with his pink nose to drive home the point, like some sewer orator; and when all of us were looking at each other and nodding in agreement about how bad things used to be, he continued.

"Time was when only one rat in ten would make it to adulthood in this house, I tell you. One in ten! And they’d be a scrawny, skantering, sniveling kind of animal: all bone and fear, they was. But now … now: well, look at yourselves, now, my fine furry friends. You’ve got meat on your bones and a twinkle in your eye. The future’s as bright as an the search lights that light up the sky at night; the lights that show the Rat Gods flying high above us!"

We all looked up, and there they were, our buzzing vengeful Rat Gods, smoking out the humans, filling the air with strange new smells.

"And look at this fine house of rubble we’ve got for ourselves now, with more hiding places than we know what to do with, and a cracked larder full of food, and all for ourselves. It’s getting a mite smelly now, but that only adds flavour, if you ask me. Good food is like a good rat: the older the better!"

He chuckled at his own witticism, and we pretended to laugh, but in truth, we’d heard this joke a thousand times since Mrs B. died.
Another rat climbed up into the mouthpiece of the gramophone and continued.
 
"And it’s like this all over the city, my comrades tell me, from Lewisham to Neasden. More and more rat communes are taking what’s rightfully theirs, and declaring Rat Rubble Republics. Decadent human civilization is collapsing and history demands that we seize this opportunity to establish the dictatorship of the rodent, in accordance with the laws of dialectic materialism."

Thus spoke Rarathusa, a political rat who often went on forays into the wider world, and was developing quite a following among some of the younger more bookish rodents, but he was, we knew, ill-at-ease in the presence of Grandpa and the senior rats.
There was an awkward silence after he spoke and we could hear the wind whistling through the rubble.

"Tell us about the cat, Grandpa Rat!" one of the young ‘uns demanded, never having seen the fearsome beast herself.

"Ay, well might you shout the word ‘cat’ out loud now, safe in the Ratopia of the blitz world, when men hide in shelters and rats rule the roost. But t’was a time, young ratty, when you only had to say the word ‘cat’ and the mean ole moggy’d appear; teeth sharp as kitchen knives; claws longer than your paws; and yellow eyes bigger than your head. A pox on the mangy rogue, for she slaughtered me own flesh and blood, a dozen times over, and I was never such a happy rat as when I saw her, dead on the dusty floor, skull smashed in twain, fallen masonry all round and a shard of glass straight through her evil feline heart."

"Say what you like about Killer Kat, Grandpa, but she did make fulsome good eating in the end!" Grandma Rat said.

"Ay, she did that, I’ll grant you … even if the screamin’ and hollarin’ and whailin’ of old Mrs B. wasn’t exactly appetizing; lying there, trapped under her precious mahogany table, bleeding from more holes than she had orifices."

"Ay, but she was fairly tasty herself, I thought, considering her advanced years" Grandma Rat said "and she was no spit of a girl either, was she? She kept us going for weeks, the old witch, and sixty kilos ain’t to be sniffed at, even if she did get a bit whiffy near the end."

"Better wiffy food than no food, I tell you. You’ve never had it so good!" Grandpa said.

"But we’ll have it even better, come the Union of the Rat Rubble Republics!" Rarathusa exclaimed.

Grandpa’s nose twitched at that and he looked to the senior rats, scraping the ground three times.

They scurried from their positions in front of him and disappeared into the rubble, but soon reappeared, and I noticed that they now surrounded Rarathusa, but he was so wrapped up in his oratory that he did not take heed of their movements.

"… From each rat according to his abilities; and to each rat according to his needs. Rodent brothers…"

The attack came so quickly that he did not even manage to give the death squeak.

"You’ve never had it so good!" Grandpa Rat said again, but this time with menace.