A Mouse In The House

"I suppose you mice hold noisy Harvest festivals and Spring celebrations?" said Snake moodily. "And I expect there'd be a lot of singing and dancing and making thorough nuisances of yourselves? I've heard that harvest mice make an incredible fuss about such things."
"Sometimes we can't help it," said Pentecost. "It's the joy of being alive, you see."
Snake pondered gloomily. "And how widespread would this joy be?"

Re-reading this old childhood favourite, The Song Of Pentecost. A group of harvest mice whose rural home has been urbanised and subsumed into the city of Birmingham strike out for the verdant sanctuary of the Lickey Hills to the south, accompanied by a frog who is also a pathological liar, and a snake who wants nothing more than to inflict his own childhood trauma on the rest of the world. Basically, it's The Animals Of Farthing Wood, but ten times darker, a hundred times wittier, and with the very real sense that life is never perfect.