Had you been an out-of-season fly on the wall on Thursday last you might have observed me sitting at the kitchen table crumbling bread. It had all begun with a foray into the cellar to unearth the winter curtains, a foray that ended with me staggering up the steps not only with Mathilde’s quilted draft excluders but also Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife.

Its leather binding is faded and brittle; the spine, what’s left of it, is torn. I remember where it sat on Great Uncle Mole’s dresser between the cracked teapot containing the housekeeping kitty and volumes V to XI of The Practical Engineer’s Handbook. It was in no better condition then, but I suppose it had already graced one kitchen or another for over two hundred years.

In spite of the broken spine the binding is tight. The pages are thick and the type so firmly impressed you could read it with the pads of your paws. It is filled with advice on how to make liquid laudanum or concoctions to aid breeding or Battalia Pie (whose ingredients would do the beard of Edward Lear’s old man proud). But what I remember it being consulted for each summer was Gooseberry Cream, and Uncle Ratty laying the carving knife across its pages to keep them open.

A torn piece of flocked wallpaper still marks the page with the Gooseberry Fool recipe, but what seduced me was Bread and Butter Pudding. And so last Thursday or thereabouts, I was sitting in my kitchen at a table that was once my Mama’s with a loaf in front of me, just I once sat with my late Mama, crumbling bread to make bread sauce. We didn’t sit at the table I now have in my kitchen. It is a kitchen table, but the kitchen in the parental burrow was so cramped, and the table so piled up with stuff, that we had to spread an oilcloth out on the walnut table in the dining room alcove to do our crumbling.

Somehow the crumbling and the wallpaper and thoughts of my late Mama began to sadden me. I was transported to a grim month I’d been farmed out to a mole so old she must have been an aunt of Great Uncle Mole’s rather than one of his many sisters. Her burrow was decrepit and ivy grew through cracks in gothic splendour. This ancient mole did not favour nippers. Mealtimes were silent and by way of avoiding contact she decreed two hour naps after lunch. The damp, mouldy mustiness made me so wheezy I couldn’t lie down. There was nothing to read, or play with, and so during those long hours I would entertain myself by tearing off samples of the layers and layers of wallpaper that had begun to peel away from the walls. Every afternoon I’d take these samples and lay them out in sequence as if I were dealing from a pack of cards. I imagined the life of each mole entrapped in this room, counting back generations as I moved from pattern to pattern.

There is something meditative about crumbling bread between you paws. The tactility and gentle motion slows time and allows the mind to wander. I had crumbed the whole loaf before I realised what I had done.

I was not supposed to crumble. I was supposed to take a pat of butter and spread it on a two penny loaf sliced very thin. I was supposed to layer those slices with scattered raisins and currants between, pour over it three pints of cream thickened with the yolks of ten eggs, scatter grated nutmeg and mix in half a pound of sugar.

Those poor eighteenth century arteries.

Perhaps it is as well that I crumbled. I can still make a pottage of sorts but can call it something else, hold back a little on the butter and cream and eggs, and bring myself into the here and now.

It rained yesterday, rained and rained. It thundered, too, and blustered; it broke out into brilliant sunshine, scudded clouds across the sky. Black clouds chased white and from time to time dazzling with patches of rainbow. I braved Knocklofty with a large umbrella. The creek, though not exactly gushing, was at least flowing. Dry, cracked dips were now puddles and even the frog-ponds were beginning to refill. The path, a treacherous, gravel-slippery beast during the long, dry summer, was now so sodden that the sound of my tread appeared to be travelling along little arteries just beneath the surface. It moved at a marginally slower pace than my paw-fall, so that one step was indistinguishable from the next.

A scarlet robin, returned for the winter, almost brushed my snout it swooped so close, first in front, then behind, then in front again. He was a bit of a blur because I was wearing my reading glasses, but the flash of colour gave him away. He was black, red-breasted, with white underparts.

The rain had fallen as snow on the mountain. I felt alive, woken up from my summer lethargy, replenished.

But the chill that was so invigorating on Knocklofty was less welcoming in my burrow. Although I covered my paws with thick woolly socks and clasped a hot-water bottle to my bosom, I couldn’t quite get the snugness of Great Uncle Mole’s place. Mind you, that may have just been the contrast after heroic walks in blizzard conditions.

And then I remembered the waistcoat. Or at least the memory surfaced; it must have dusted itself off on Knocklofty when I was being swooped by the robin.

It was red – Great Uncle Mole’s winter waistcoat, – and he was inordinately proud of it. His pride and the waistcoat’s rather bulky padded lining puffed him up, and it was hardly surprising that Uncle Ratty ribbed him.

‘I am NOT a robin!’, Great Uncle Mole would thunder, puffing himself up still further. But it was not the bird itself he objected to, it was the associated colour.

Now, he would have had no objection to being likened to the Tasmanian robin I saw yesterday. It is not called scarlet for nothing, although its female counterpart is brown with an orange breast, more like the English ones Great Uncle Mole was being likened to.

For Great Uncle Mole to have the colour of his waistcoat alluded to, however vaguely, as orange was an outrage.

Orange was a very inferior sort of colour.

Great Uncle Mole’s waistcoat was an heirloom. I imagined umpteen generations of grizzled old moles holding forth by the fireside, puffing out their scarlet chests just as Great Uncle Mole had done. I later learned that the waistcoat was a reincarnation of a coat, a uniform to be more precise, that had once belonged to a General. But the General was not some illustrious moleancestor. He had, in fact, been mouldering in his grave for a good many years before any molekin of Great Uncle Mole’s had happened upon the coat. A great, great, great someone of his (and I suppose a great, great, great, great, great someone of mine) was a seamstress at the late General’s ancestral pile. The attic was off limits, but being an inquisitive sort of a mole, she spent her evenings fossicking about in it. And it has to be said that from time to time she helped herself to the odd treasure. The red coat was one. She was quite brazen; boldly paused on the stairwell where the General’s portrait hung – he on horseback, in the coat and brandishing a sword. She looked him straight in the eye before slinking back down to her quarters below stairs and gloating over her find. The coat was no use to the General any more, and it was really very fine woollen cloth, – and the red! She’d never seen anything like it; just the stuff to make a waistcoat for her first-born (who cut rather a dashing figure for a mole, and had just reached his majority).

It wasn’t she but the dashing first-born who found out about the red. His paternity was a bit of a mystery and he did like to dream. He’d inherited the fossicking trait from his mama but his leaning was towards paper, most particularly towards the literary endeavours of notable figures, – personal diaries, to put it bluntly, the more personal the better. And so it was that an auction he stumbled across an archive of diaries the General had kept as a young blade.

What the dashing first-born uncovered helped him not one iota with the question of his paternity, but was nonetheless gripping to that red-waistcoated young mole – with the added frisson of being in code. When the General was his age (not a General then, of course), he was sent on a secret mission to Mexico.The voyage was perilous to say the least, not because of the weather conditions but because he had insinuated himself as a naturalist onto a French ship at a time when the French were siding with the revolutionary Americans and he, the General-to-be, was English – Suffolk-born to be exact. His task was to penetrate the Spanish plantations and steal prickly pear plants infested with with cochineal beetles, sequester them somehow and smuggle them back to England. There was a scheme afoot to build acres of hot-houses where the prickly pears could be propagated and the beetles bred. It was ambitious, indeed, this plan. The aim was to supply the officers of the British army with the reddest coats in all the world, and to distinguish them for once and for all from their faded, orangey madder-dyed subordinates.

The young General-to-be succeeded in his mission but alas the grand idea of hot-houses had failed for lack of funds. It takes a sacrifice of 50 000 beetles to make just one pound of red cochineal dye.

There was a single small harvest from the General-to-be’s venture, just enough to dye one bolt of finest wool.

Still chilled, I headed for the cellar, ploughed through a chest containing odd assortments of curtains and eiderdowns and parachutes until I found the box. It was there, intact, apart from one or two moth-holes: one red waistcoat.

And yes, here I am, tapping away at my typewriter, puffed up and snug as a robin.

*With a nod to Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville
Mole is going on Sabbatical. The next Murmurs will appear on Friday, 3rd June.