Thwak! Bash! Splat! Die, you dirty, blood-sucking monster. Did you enjoy your last dinner, which was me? Like all big things killing much smaller things, I have overdone it, flattening the little creature with my bedside book, Will Self’s The Book of Dave. My brown blood obscures the word “dazzling” on the back cover. I am screaming at a dead insect and I have officially lost the plot.

It is 5am and I am at war with Cimex lectularius, bedbugs to you, a source of complete misery and obsession to me for the last few months, when they have been creeping into the marital bed at dawn and sticking me with anaesthetic with one little piercing tube then sucking up my blood with another. Hours later I come up in a hideous “dermatological reaction” of huge, itchy, painful welts, each boil-like swelling made up of three little marks: breakfast, lunch and dinner. They are on my face, neck and trunk. I spend the rest of the day scratching myself in an antihistamine-induced fog, my fingernails coated with the pink, anti-itch cream that doesn’t actually work. My husband, an Irishman, remains untouched, because as my pest control technician, my new best friend, jokes later, “They don’t like Micks.”

Well, that’s a lie. Bedbugs like anybody who is warm, blood-filled and emits carbon dioxide. You don’t have to be dirty and Dickensian to be afflicted with what I have come to learn is the new great leveller: pestilence. Many of us are living in a verminous state. A recent survey by Rentokil found that 61 per cent of all households in the UK have had some sort of pest problem, which makes me think that 39 per cent of households are lying or just oblivious to the ants, mice, wasps, flies, moths, rats, cockroaches and bedbugs that are plaguing the rest of us. We spend more than £100 million a year to “combat” pests, a euphemism that speaks volumes for the fact that we must be making a hash of it and not actually killing the blighters in sufficient numbers. Oliver Madge, chief executive officer of the British Pest Control Association, says: “There is a general rise in population levels across the board, with all pests. If you look at rodents, the milder winters mean that a natural percentage of the population isn’t killed off, but not only are they not dying, they are also reproducing because there is more opportunity.”

According to the 2006 National Rodent Survey Report published by the National Pest Technicians Association (NPTA), there has been a 12.5 per cent increase in mice infestations, 13 per cent increase in brown rat infestations, and a 22 per cent rise in “summer rats”. The summer rat is not actually a species, but the NPTA has had to invent the phrase to describe the surge in requests for pest control technicians to deal with rats in the summer months, until recently a quiet time for rat treatment. The NPTA says there are six factors contributing to the increase in rats, and none of them is global warming. Firstly, many local authorities are charging for pest control, which means more people are turning to cheap and often ineffective DIY remedies. Secondly, there is a lack of joined-up thinking/action between the water companies and the councils to tackle sewer rats. Thirdly, we are over-feeding wild birds, not with those cute little peanut feeders, but with bread that is thrown on the ground and becomes food for rats. Fourthly, we are not Keeping Britain Tidy, chucking fast-food litter, complete with uneaten fast food, all over the place. Fifthly, recycling, particularly compost bins and the mess left by fortnightly refuse collections, is really good news for the rats. Finally, councils are not reclaiming enough derelict properties, a safe haven for rats.

My brush with disaster

Traps, poison and pest control couldn’t do it. So how did our correspondent get rid of his dirty rat?

While there is no Ministry for the Counting of Rats, the survey says there have been 1.69 million infestations. And who knows how many rats there are per infestation? Lots. For most people, one is enough to start getting 1984-type nightmares, or at least, to discover you are phobic of something you never knew you had a phobia of, as happened to 33-year-old Lucy Winfield, who lives in a detached cottage in Berkshire.

“I have a phobia of snakes, but rats, well, I never thought I would come across one so I didn’t worry, but when you see one scamper in front of you, they are so quick and scraggy and disgusting,” she says, with a shudder. “I thought the town ones would be more scraggy and horrible than the country ones, but the ones I saw were not very healthy-looking. Having said that, they had just been poisoned.”

Lucy and her husband Jerry thought something was amiss when they saw gnawed blankets (not on the bed, but in storage) and then spotted a rat outside the kitchen. They found a rat’s nest behind the fridge, and soon after Jerry found a live one in the rafters. “He had a screwdriver and hammer in his hand and he started to try to whack it between the rafters. He was like a man possessed. I was screaming my head off. I had a new baby and I thought if Jerry tries to attack it, it will try to attack him, leaping from the rafters like in a horror movie. But that didn’t happen. We called in Rentokil and they put poison in the holes, and they started dying.”

Rats rarely bite, says Savvas Othon, technical director of Rentokil, but they do carry diseases such as salmonella, TB and Weil’s disease, which is carried in their urine. As they mark their territory through purposeful incontinence, it is conceivable that one could wee on your bath sponge, and then the urine could get into a cut, and you would get ill. “Reported cases are rare,” assures Othon.

Indeed, it is impossible to nail down a figure for how many people get ill from their domestic pests – who is to say that your stomach upset was caused by a dodgy curry or by a fly vomiting on to your toast or a cockroach traipsing across your butter knife? Most of us only take notice if pests wreck our stuff (moths), march upon us in great volumes (ants), scamper across our line of vision (mice), sting us (have you seen one of those just-flew-in-from-Europe violet carpenter bees?) or bite, and the bite itches or hurts.

Most people find out they have bedbugs from the bites, although some don’t react at all and go on happily sharing their beds until someone sleeps over and comes up in the tell-tale three-pronged welts. But where are they all coming from? Since the mid-Nineties reported infestations have doubled annually, and in parts of London bedbug infestations have risen tenfold since 1996. Othon and others in the pest control industry say bedbugs are on the increase from cheap travel and backpackers who stay in infested rooms, throw their clothes on the floor, pack them up and bring the bedbugs home. But I don’t backpack. Why me? Othon says, “I don’t want to be a scaremonger but you can pick them up on buses, in airport lounges, from other people’s dry-cleaning.” Other sources are used books and used furniture (guilty).

I ring David Piper, of First Choice Comprehensive Pest Control, and I (vegetarian, lover of all living creatures, ecologically aware, semi-organic kind of gal) shriek, “Come and kill these things with the heavy artillery, DDT, organophosphates, whatever you’ve got. Come in a marked van, I don’t care if it says, ‘We kill your bedbugs even if you are the type of person who only remembers to change the sheets when someone throws up on them!’ on the side.”

Piper arrives, spouting facts about the life cycle of bedbugs (they can go for up to a year without eating), telling me there is an epidemic of them in my part of London and that he doesn’t have a great chance of getting rid of them first visit, a better chance by the second visit, and we’ll talk about third visits if it comes to that. He looks at my bedroom and its gappy floorboards, hoards of used books and general work-from-home detritus, and declares: “Worst-case scenario”. They love to live under gappy floorboards, they love horrible, fabric-covered divan beds like mine, they love books, picture frames, the insides of alarm clocks. They love me.

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