Chapter 3 Summary

In the first chapter of Part 2, the boy recalls the time in 1950 when rats overran the neighborhood where the family lived and they had to be smoked out of their nests. The rat problem occurred because the air-raid shelters behind a row of houses were demolished in the spring of that year and the area left behind became a dumping ground. During the war, the shelters had never been used; the Germans only bombed the docks once, unsuccessfully. Whenever there were false alarms the family sheltered in the house, under the stairs. The boy graphically describes the process of killing the rats, by seeking out their nests using neighborhood dogs, putting burning, paraffin-soaked rags in them so that the rats would escape into the trench and then throwing all the burning torches on them. Lastly, a king rat emerged and was finished off...