The Piccadillymice

The mice's days are long because it's light down there from around five in the morning till gone midnight. Unlike their sleepy, field-based relatives, the Piccadillymice fill their time with frenzied activity, all of it centred on finding food.

Between the arrival and departure of the big noisy worms, the mice scurry about looking for near-empty crisp-packets and toffee-papers which the people on the platform throw at them. The mice think they are being kind but the people on the platform are trying to hit the mice so that they go "squeak". They never do.

Russell is the nimblest Piccadillymouse but he is also the fattest because he gets most of the food. He is quite foolhardy and several times has come close to having his tail sliced off by a noisy worm. Russell once bent his front left paw on a sleeper and it has never been the same again.

Old Grandfather Holborn smokes his pipe under the platform-edge most of the time and the others bring him special pieces of food. Uncle Arnos likes to sit with grandfather and talk, but nobody brings him food because he is still fit enough to get his own. Finsbury and Sudbury are always daring each other to hitch a ride on one of the worms and see what lies down the black tunnel to the west. Lester and Rayner work as a team to hunt peanuts together, skilfully employing cunning tactics of encirclement, entrapment and surprise.

All Piccadillymice are deaf, not just because of the sound which the worms make, but also because of the dreadful screeching and wailing that comes out of the loudspeakers during rush-hours. The mice don't know what these noises mean and neither do the people on the platform.

Piccadillymice are black, too, so that they blend in with colour of the track-bed. An old mouse-legend says that, when a new noisy worm-tunnel is dug, the mice who live in it start off a grey, concretish colour but get darker as the months and years proceed.