"The only excitement i remember at Giligili was our nightly war on rats. We had two rooms in the large iron roofed house with its earth walls and floor. My sister,her husband and two small children slept in one and the rest of us -three boys- shared the other with bags of rice, garri, beans and other foodstuff. And,of course, the rats. They came and sank their holes where the floor and the walls met. As soon as night fell they emerged to eat the grains while we sat around the open fire in the kitchen. You could never get at them because as soon as you entered the room with a lamp they flew into their two holes. We tried getting them with little iron traps the blacksmiths made,on which you attached a bait- usually a mass piece of dried fish. But after one or two of them got killed the rest learnt to avoid that fishy bait. It was then we decided to go hunting. I,,or one of the others, would tiptoe in the dark and quietly plug the holes with pieces of rag while the rest waited outside with sticks. After a reasonable interval those outside would charge in with a lamp, slam the door and the massacre would begin. It worked very well. As a rule we did not kill the very small ones; we saved them up for the future... Now all that seemed half a century away"