Flies- I Hate Them!

I mean – why flies? Why are they necessary? Are they, indeed, necessary? And, whatever their purpose, can they really carry it out to fulfilment by massing and buzzing at the very top of the high triangular window in my new kitchen extension?

Every fine day, there they are. Where are they on dull, wet days? Why can’t they be satisfied to be there when I have the doors and windows open? Why? Why?

Maybe I seem a little hysterical on this subject, but so would you be if you had had the experience I had, years ago, when I had just moved into a small cottage in Worcestershire, under the shadow of the Malvern Hills.  I’d been in it a week, just got the furniture arranged and the books unpacked, and was carrying out the building society’s demand for woodworm treatment by employing two gentlemen who were possibly more at home on horseback, wearing Stetsons and shouting ‘Whip crackaway!’ to do the necessary work.   I’d left for work that morning, having let them in, and returned in the evening confident that all would be well.

Actually, I’d already returned at lunchtime to find that all was not well. While spraying noxious substances in the loft, one of them had fallen through the ceiling over the landing (well, it’s easily done when you’re more accustomed to the wide open spaces of Arizona) leaving a large, unsightly gap in the newly-painted plasterboard. But they’d apologised profusely and promised to return to make it good, so there wasn’t much I could do about it. I didn’t, however,  expect to find what I found when I came home that evening.

Every fly that ever there was had taken refuge in my loft. (I should, perhaps, explain that it was October and they were hibernating, thus answering that other age-old question about where flies go in wintertime. Check your own loft sometime, if you dare.) They were large and fat, replete with whatever flies eat to keep them going through the long cold months until they come out to torment us again. And the woodworm spray was as fatal to them as it was to woodworm.

They were dying. All over the house. With that huge gap in the landing ceiling, there was nothing to stop them. They came down, staggering slightly, in search of fresh air, but it was too late and they lay, spinning on their backs and making that high-pitched buzzing noise flies make as they die – and I can tell you, when three or four thousand do this together, the noise is horrendous. It sounds more like a chainsaw being operated just beside your ear.  And they were doing this everywhere. On the floor. On the furniture. On the windowsills. Down the back of the sofa. In the beds – yes, in the beds. And they were doing it to the pervading and noisome smell of woodworm treatment. Nowadays, Health and Safety would probably say you couldn’t live in a house that was being treated like this. But this was before that august body burst upon us and I and my 10-year-old daughter had nowhere else to go. And my dear little cottage had been spoiled for me. I was in tears.

There was worse to come. My car, a battered little Mini, needed distilled water for its battery (I told you it was a long time ago) and I had to walk to the nearest garage to get some. That was over a mile away, along dark country lanes and of course it was raining. Lashing with it.

Carrying an empty cider bottle, I set out, leaving my daughter at home, and trudged sobbing through the dark, wet night. About 40 minutes later, wet, bedraggled, tear-stained and clutching my cider-bottle, I opened the front door and came in, to find a strange man sitting on a kitchen chair, having brushed it clear of dying flies (however fast we swept them up, more came lurching drunkenly down from the loft) and, presumably  for want of anything better to do, showing my daughter a selection of carpet samples.

I had completely forgotten he was coming. I never found out quite what he made of the wild-eyed apparition who came bursting in out of the night, nor of the apparent squalor in which we lived. But I dragged myself together, explained rather unconvincingly that the bottle contained distilled water, chose a carpet more or less at random, and once again set about vacuuming up flies’ bodies. We went to bed in the only sheets I could find that hadn’t been died upon, and next morning cleared up the harvest of the night.

Eventually they were all gone and – eventually – the cowboys did return and replaster the ceiling, although they never came to repaint it. But that’s why, when flies arrive on hot days and buzz around the rooms or mass on that high window, I get a little tetchy. And I can’t go to bed knowing that they’ll be there in the morning. Last thing at night, I get the vacuum cleaner, climb on to the kitchen table and suck them all into its bag. I hate to think what it’s like in there but I am never going to look, so I’m never going to know.

If ever you want to see murder in a woman’s eyes (probably you don’t) just look into mine when I am setting about the flies that dare to enter my house in summer. I tell you, I absolutely loathe them.