These last few days I have spent what might amount to hours squatting under the oak tree, occasionally weeding my new vegetable patch with my good paw, but often just listening to the rustling leaves and pondering. It might be hours, but time has been irrelevant. My familiar, Boo, when not hunting skinks, has been nestled in a pile of lawn clippings beside me.

A dozen or so years ago, when I had just embarked on a big work, and I was moseying my way down to the university, I decided to take a short cut through a piece of wasteland. The grass was so long it tickled my snout but what drew me in was the sight of blackberries so luscious, that they dragged down the branches that held them. My eyes were entirely tethered to the prize and I narrowly missed stepping on a fledgling oak. I knew that any day soon not only would the blackberry bushes be slashed but the grass scythed, too, and that this little oak would be decapitated. We moles are good little diggers and I had it up in no time. I rummaged in my rucksack for my notebook, ripped out a page, origame-ed a cup to hold my new protégé, and headed off for the university. The blackberries were all but forgotten.

I planted the tiny oak thinking of Great Uncle Mole who had not long since died, and remembering the big oak near his burrow that shaded us from both sun and rain when we had our picnic treats. Pies and hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and relishes and shrimps (outside food was always so different from – and so much better than, – indoor food); we would eat ourselves into a stupor. And at the bottom of the hamper, for after the very last crumb of fruit-cake, there would be a book wrapped in a linen drying-up cloth. We would settle our backs against the trunk of the great oak so that Great Uncle Mole could read out loud while Uncle Ratty slept off his stout. My absolute favourite was Argonautica and the story of Jason and his ship, the Argo, that had the gift of prophecy because it contained timber from the sacred oak of the oracle at Dodona. ‘This tree’, Uncle Ratty would say, one eye opening from his snooze, and his paw knocking at the bark behind him. ‘This oak was grown from an acorn from that very tree.’ And then, as night follows day, Great Uncle Mole would tell him not to tell such porkies.

Finding the oaklet felt like an auspicious start to to the big work I had ahead, if I could keep it alive, that is.

I hadn’t really thought of the practicalities. My burrow isn’t on the kind of grand estate that can easily accommodate an oak or three. Perhaps I didn’t have much confidence in its survival. My record for keeping plants alive has not been good, but this oak is a pretty sturdy tree now, perhaps some twelve feet high. It will no doubt become sturdier, spread its branches further, cast shadows over neighbours’ gardens.

And there are now eleven baby oak trees rising in the vegetable patch under its boughs.

I look at their brave, spindly little stems and imagine 17th century ship-builders eying them up for their curvature. It took about 700 oaks for the Dutch East India Company to build its ship Batavia. By the end of that century of trade and exploration, Europe’s forests were mere shadows of their former selves. They reckon on an oak needing to be at least a hundred years old before its timber can be considered, but I am not thinking of harvesting. I can’t even bring myself to weed them out now.

And there is another life in the balance just now, one that takes a great deal more pondering as I hunker under the oak tree. The purring familiar nestled on the grass clippings is wasting away. I have to decide whether to intervene or let be. At Dodona, the priestesses listened for the oracle’s pronouncements in the rustling leaves of the oak tree, and I know it is in the timelessness of this little spot in my garden that my decision is being made.

What is it that is so beguiling about silence? Retreating for nine days has only made me value it more. It wasn’t really silent. My listening was, if anything, more acute than usual. Feeble though they are, my little mole-ears became fine-tuned to the sound of birds cooing, cawing crowing, chortling; wallaby tails thumping; gravel under paws; ticking; traffic hums, roars and screeches; corduroy rubbing against pelt; bubbling, lid-clattering boiling water; dogs barking; toast-crunching; my neighbour filling a watering can, and wind straining the hinges of the window. The kind of silence the retreat provided was a wordlessness. I neither spoke nor got spoken to, I listened to no wireless programmes. I admit that once or twice I lifted my pen, allowing a word or two to escape into my journal. On the other hand, I eschewed all reading – all except one book, that is. I allowed myself to leaf through and absorb Warnscale,* one landmark at a time. It is a book that uses words in a painterly way, sparingly interwoven with drawings and maps, peepholes and photographic vignettes – each word inviting layers of thought rather than pace of progress. When my retreat came to an end and with it the book, I felt bereft on both counts. But a retreat cannot exist without its counterpart, a re-engagement with life, and that was also what the book was working towards.

When I emerged I felt no inclination to read, could not imagine what might be as nourishing. But then I felt a weight as I swung open the back door. My neighbour had hung a bag on the handle. In it was a book she had borrowed from the library: Shaun Tan’s Sketches from a Nameless Land.* Perfect.

The Nameless Land is a country Tan evolved for his book The Arrival* about a decade ago. The two words in the title are the only ones used. And it is crucial to the impact of the story that this should be so. The story is very simple. A refugee lands in a strange place and has to makes sense of it. In a series of exquisite drawings, some grounded in familiar photographs of forced migration, some fantastical – with strange codes, animals, foods, and transport systems of the new world. The wordlessness and strangeness forces a reader into the same bewilderment as the refugee.

It is a bewilderment that clutches at me somewhere between my chest and my throat, and hurls me back to a time when I was plucked from a life in which I was quite an articulate wee mole, and deposited into one that was completely incomprehensible. At the school in this new place I understood none of the rules, had no idea about codes of conduct. I knew none of my fellow pupils nor their language or the language in which were being taught. A blank sheet placed in front of me remained blank. I did not understand the instructions, nor had I the means to express any thoughts. The playground customs were baffling, the games a mystery. The only thing clear to me was my position at the bottom of the pecking order. It was terrifying. Too terrifying to even to pique my curiosity in the way the refugee in The Arrival takes in his new world.

But The Arrival calms me, too. Deeply calms me. I feel understood by it. Because it has no words there is an egalitarianism about the experience. Its depth was enhanced even further a few years ago. Lying on a beanbag in a wharf shed – the kind that refugees and emigrants are corralled into like cattle, – I watched images of the drawings projected onto screen while Ben Walsh & the Orkestra of the Underground played an especially composed accompaniment.*

Why is it that I spend my life at a desk wrestling with words when it is images and music and movement through the landscape that move me?

Is this what is so alluring about the silence – that it quietens my word-heavy world and allows my other senses to surface?

*Louise Ann Wilson. See my post Paw Prints, 2 October 2015
*Shaun Tan, The Arrival (2006), Sketches from a Nameless Land (2010)
*The Arrival – Shaun Tan, Ben Walsh & the Orkestra of the Underground http://youtu.be/ZSV3T3X_IHY

I was lounging in a cane chair and nursing a glass of stout in my paws when the subject of railway tunnels came up. It was Monday night and we bellringers were gathered at our usual watering place, a kind of faux Raffles opposite the Cathedral. On the gramophone Vera Lynn was promising that we would meet again but I knew I wouldn’t be there the following week. I was heading off for a ten-day retreat.

One of our number had been traveling English waterways and was showing us photographs. Dead straight canals in the Fen country might have been lifted straight from Dorothy Sayer’s Nine Tailors, and the morning-mistiness of a lush river in Bedfordshire would have made Uncle Ratty weep, and me too, on his behalf. I don’t know whether it was the stout, or Vera Lynn, but when the very last photograph came to the fore and showed not a boat or a canal but the entrance to a disused railway tunnel, I was suddenly transported back to my youth and an outing with Great Uncle Mole.

I had rather been hoping to accompany Uncle Ratty who was sailing off somewhere with a chum to salvage bells and lamps (and treasure, I thought) from a village that had long been lost to the sea. Walking along a disused railway line with Great Uncle Mole seemed a very thin second prize, and I have to admit I was more than a little disgruntled.

We had been strolling for a couple of hours. It was hot and I was eying the old gas mask case he was carrying. It contained lemonade and madeira cake. I knew because I had seen Uncle Ratty pack it along with his own. Because I had already asked Great Uncle Mole once whether we mightn’t stop for elevenses, even though it was now well past noon I didn’t dare ask again. He droned on and on about the merits, or otherwise, of different gauges and the stability, or otherwise, of rolling stock. ‘One track mind’, I muttered. At that time puns seemed to me the finest form of wit.

Suddenly he stopped dead and poked about in the long grass with his walking stick. …’Aha’, he shouted with the enthusiasm of Archimedes. ‘Look, Moley, Look!’ What I could see was a rusty pipe like thing.

It was a switch, he said.

Oh, I thought.

But then as he told me what it was for and showed me how to throw the lever, I was no longer looking at bits of metal and difficult sums. I was on a train, travelling through the countryside. How would it be, I wondered, to be sitting with your bucket and spade and all geared up for a holiday in West Wittering and, unbeknownst to you, some trickster threw the points and had you hurtling towards Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum? Or, for that matter, how would it be if you were handcuffed between two guards and suddenly found yourself building sandcastles or collecting shells?

Oh to be that trickster.

How old was I then? Fourteen or fifteen perhaps. In those days the gleeful impulse to throw the switch would have far outweighed any thought of the consequences. Now that I am edging perilously close to Great Uncle Mole in years, I would have said my default position was avoiding decisions and sticking to the route I was already on; that I would not dream of throwing the switch on my track or anyone else’s. And were someone else to throw a switch on my track, I might have imagined myself clasping the plush seat with both paws, eyes fixed on the wrong landscape hurtling past the window, and worrying myself into ghee about all the implications, real or imagined, that this turn of events might have in store for me.

So I might have thought, but I find that I have greater equanimity than I expected. I had long been preparing myself for my retreat. I was anticipating with every hair on my pelt its silence, its attic room with a window overlooking the gardens, its beach, its all-meals-provided. I had well nigh packed, created a roster for watering, emptied the fridge, and organised a lift.

It was cancelled.

I didn’t collapse into a little mole-heap.

Instead, new vistas appeared before my eyes. My burrow transformed itself into a retreat. Coloured pens slipped out of their cases and wrote lists of small pleasures. The hands of clocks removed themselves so as not to be held to account. Cancelled appointments were firmly turned away from re-entering themselves into the diary. Knocklofty awaits longer walks at stranger times. At midnight tonight my contraptions will switch themselves off for the duration. Not even a murmur will be transmitted next week.

The switch was painless.

Yesterday lowered. Grey cloud suffocated the landscape and held moisture like barely suppressed anger. It was one of those days that feels mis-struck and I was in a grump. I couldn’t decide what project to work on, whether any was worthwhile. I vacillated, berated myself for vacillating and vacillated more.

In the end I decided that as I was in a grump anyway I may as well do something I really didn’t want to do. The task I alighted on was one I had been putting off. It required a great deal of paperwork. And because I had at one point decided that the papers I now needed were history and had nigh consigned them to a bonfire, my approach to filing them had been so anarchic, even Kropotkin would have been impressed.

I set my snout into an attitude of pained martyrdom and set off for the cellar.

There is in my cellar a bewildering array of trunks and suitcases, Gladstone bags, orange boxes, crates and tea-chests. They would have to be clambered over and hunted under, and peered into. All of them – at least nearly all of them.

But not the box that I discovered behind Great Uncle Mole’s old skis. It wasn’t large, but what it lacked in size it made up for in ornamentation. In rather crude disregard for its fine detail, Uncle Ratty had stencilled M O L E X. I know it was Uncle Ratty because this was his nickname for Great Aunt Mole. Not my great aunt, but Great Uncle Mole’s. Great, Great, Great Aunt Mole to me – but well, that was too much of a mouthful even for Uncle Ratty. He called her Great Aunt Molex because she had been excommunicated by some of the more stodgy members of our family. The story handed down by the more liberal of my mole kin – who, it has to be admitted, were at times rather more inclined towards effect than gospel truth – went something like this:

One night during a storm of Biblical proportions, when Great Aunt Molex was quite a wee thing, there was a great thumping at the door of the parental burrow. When, after some to-ing and fro-ing about no mole in its right mind being out in such weather and the racket surely being thunder and wind, her papa grumbled out of his chair and went to investigate. He found a bedraggled shape in a sodden cape with what looked to be an enormous hump on his back. The creature was beckoned inside, his cape removed, a large box with brass fittings revealed. He was thrust into the chair just vacated and invited to warm his paws on the fire. Soup was produced. Molex’s mama went off to make up a bed. They all had a brandy, even Molex though hers was watered down. Now warmed and oiled, their visitor told them he was a traveling missionary raising funds for the China mission. And as he was clearly not going to reach the metropolis that night why didn’t he by way of thanks for their most generous hospitality, show them his lantern slides.

It was long after a wee mole’s bedtime, but Molex sat on a pouffe in the dark transfixed by the missionary’s sonorous voice and the lurid and graphic scenes of heathens unfolding before her. She was seized with such a passion that her future was sealed that fateful night. The years passed agonisingly slowly for Molex until, at barely eighteen, she ran away from home and boarded a ship for Macau.

Needless to say the box marked MOLEX was a good deal more compelling than the search for my papers and I carried it upstairs to my study. The lid was tightly fitted and it took some manoeuvring with the paperknife. As I prised it open the wood squeaked with such pain that some creature might have been trapped inside, but what escaped was a strange smell somewhere between musk and ginger. The few belongings that had been sent back were wrapped in emerald green silk and tied with a tassle. On top lay a black-rimmed card announcing her death in Canton. Beneath was a collection of coins, minutes of the 1876 and 1878 meetings of the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Prevention of the Opium Trade, some cuttings from The Friend of China, a dictionary, several notebooks and carefully wrapped in more silk, bound concertinaed bamboo slips. Between each fold was a sheet of paper filled with Great Aunt Molex’s sloping handwriting.

The Chinese characters on the slips were a mystery to me but I soon detected from Great Aunt Molex’s words that what I had before me was a version of the I Ching, and I remembered that it was not her disappearance to China that had caused Molex to be excommunicated, but her various acts of sabotage against British government officials sanctioning opium imports, and her abandonment of Christianity for Chinese philosophy.

The more I read, the more I became convinced that somewhere within this vast work of translation lay a message from the impassioned Great Great Great Aunt to her lily-livered descendent. I gathered the coins together, rattled them about in my paws, and placed them on around compass points: K’UN, then K’AN – combining to the hexagram SHIH, the army. Five yin lines and one yang: ‘Everything is correct. Nothing will go wrong if the leader is wise and experienced’. If. My line of change told me the army had incompetent leaders. Either the commander had lost authority, or the army has too many leaders, and chaos would ensue.*

I sat among the open trunks, the suitcases and tea-chests and their scattered contents, and pondered the effects of too many projects, over-reaching ambition, lack of direction. A small piece of paper, an offcut, fluttered from the folds of the bamboo slipped as I packed it back into its silk wrapping: ‘Do not rely on the confusing advice of many’.

Time to grasp this life by the mettle. Like Great Aunt Molex.

*Martin Palmer, Kwok Man Ho, Joanne O’Brien, I Ching (1986).

It must have been a year ago – almost to the day. Some chums and I were traveling through the countryside. The sun was shining, the fields were green and the hills a bluish purple in the distance. Our trip had been planned some months before; our destination was about an hour away in orchard country. An old apple pickers’ hut had been converted into a workshop and there were going to spend the day cutting away at lino and printing our images. There was a sort of end of term feeling in the car as we tootled along. We were chatting away when one of our little band said: ‘And look, all the Roadies are out’.

For a moment I thought that she meant the toads of this world, the gleeful speedsters and terrors of the road, although it has to be said that the other drivers seemed as sedate as we were. I waited for more context and soon gleaned from the opprobrium in her voice and the pleasure her comment was giving the others it soon became apparent, that the Roadies she was referring to were in fact rhodies, the rhododendrons that bloomed splendidly in the gardens we were passing. Forty years on this island and I still haven’t picked up the lingo.

I know it must have been a year ago because today on my stroll I saw a rhododendron in full bloom.

It took me right back to the first time I heard word ‘rhododendron’ – so grown-up and mysterious. It was taught to me by my dear Papa. We drew out its four syllables, as if it were a chant like the sinister ‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…’, which was the kind of shanty Papa seemed to think was just the thing for small ears. We must have been staying at his parents burrow, I think, where the garden was filled with rhododendron bushes of every conceivable colour.

Although it was Papa who showed me how to enjoy the shape of the word, it is but a shadow of the memory I have of Grandma Mole when I see a rhododendron. Her name was Rhoda and her moleself and the flower are stored side by side in my mind. So they should be. Grandma Mole relished rhododendron colours: bright reds, oranges, pinks, purples. The primmer members of my family thought these colours clashed, but to Grandma Mole whose senses had been enlarged and saturated in Rajasthan and Kashmir, they became the expression of her liberated and generous heart. She wore big splashes of crimson and fuchsia and tangerine; adorned her walls, her curtains, her chairs and sofa with scarlet, magenta and lilac; poured Assam tea from a rose and carmine and gold teapot into matching cups. The magnificent rhododendrons in the garden brought Srinagar to their little Surrey burrow.

What these rhododendron bushes brought to me as a small mole was a place to go that was all my own, a sanctuary. All I had to do was part the dark the leaves with my paws, crawl inside and I was hidden from the world. When I was a little older and had discovered torches, I would head for a rhododendron bush with a book. It was dark and woody and often damp. It was heaven.

I awoke this morning to blackbirds chirping in the pre-dawn, a cool breeze gently disturbing the air in my bedchamber and stroking the pale pink flesh of my snout. It was an inviting day, a perfect going for an early stroll on Knocklofty kind of a day, the kind of day that would usually have had me out bed in a jiff. Before you could say Bob’s your uncle, I would be moseying up the hill to watch the dawning light pick out the grey trunks of the eucalypts. I would soak up the sense of calm and well-being that comes with fresh air and exertion, and knowing that a walk not only limbers up my hind legs but ignites my little grey cells. Not today, though. Today I just wanted to lie still and breathe. And I did.

These are the last days that I have the motor lent to me by a friend. It has given me the freedom to set out on my teepee adventure and it has spurred me on into making appointments across town, venturing out to locations off the bus route or after dark, and fetching and carrying plants, stationery, oats and what you will. It has meant being able to nip to places without a second thought.

Had I ever thought of getting a scooter, some chums asked a couple of days ago and the toad within remembered the exhilaration of riding Ratty’s Velosolex through France all those years ago. The Universe had other ideas. The very next morning, I was driving down my favourite avenue. Huge plane trees created a near canopy and the new leaves were dappling the surface of the road. The setting exuded calm. There was a chap on a scooter just ahead of me and I was thinking what an exquisite morning it was for riding one. We slowed down at the junction. I thought he had continued into the next street, but he hadn’t. There was an ominous thud.

He wasn’t hurt and nor was I, but the scooter was immobilised. At first my paws trembled and so did his, but our conversation was gentle and wove itself into realms that absorbed us both. We spent a couple of hours together on the grassy bank under the plane trees as we waited for the police and a tow-truck. There were moments when the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting faded from my mind, as did the likely repercussions. I almost felt relief that I wasn’t hurrying to my appointment, but more than this, I felt something akin to pleasure in this unlikely encounter between an ageing mole and a thoughtful doctoral student.

I am sure there will be a time when I hanker after wheels again. For the moment, though, my inner toad has deserted me. Having the car has made anything possible. Without it I will not be able to nip out at a whim. But I realise I feel a little fragmented by all the options laid before me. I like the way walking distances require me to defer and to plan ahead. It calms me to cluster tasks by location and carefully measure their timing. And I love the way walking allows me to slow down and breathe the space between departure and arrival.

I can encounter four-legged, two-legged and stemmed beings under less dramatic circumstances AND smell the blossom on the way.

In the late afternoons I often make myself a pot of tea and take a little pause in my work. On just such a moment last week, I was reclining on the sofa, drink in paws, my eyes feasting on the greenness of the new leaves bursting from the branches of the trees outside the window, when my ears tuned into a programme on the wireless.

It was about a ramble and it delighted my heart.

Uncle Ratty was the one who first introduced me to the delights of walking; not just putting one paw in front of the other, but noticing and imagining, and showing me how every single being experiences the landscape in a different way. Uncle Ratty’s sensibilities lead him to sniff out waterways, remember picnics and romanticise ports of departure. I, though, am more attuned to what is beneath the surface. As I scamper over fields, my mind’s eye traces the labyrinthine tunnels of other moles, I feel the dewy grass, and the contours of daisies, dandelions, coltsfoot and buttercups beneath my paws and, less often than perhaps it should, a shadow overhead reminds me of the perilous, nay fatal, adventure of the ancestor who was taken by an eagle.

In cities these layerings become more dense – so dense that they could become knotted and confused. But to me they are like an archive, a delicious trunk of papers – all muddled at first, but pick one paper, one thread, follow the clues and slowly each layer of the palimpsest is revealed.

Your little eyes re-imagine earlier inhabitants. Your little ears fade out traffic, and telephones, and aeroplanes, hydraulic drills and canned music, and take in older sounds the metal against cobble of horseshoes. Your snout exchanges exhaust fumes for the stench of horse manure.

In a strange place (or even a familiar one) I love being guided by a creature with a passion for a particular subject, and then again cover the same ground with another guide whose passion is utterly different. I have walked and re-walked the streets of Bern, guided by aficionados of diplomacy, folk musicians, espionage, migration, prostitution, literature, football, drainage, domestic service, landscape design and crime fiction. And after a while, solitary walks take on a a richness. Your little body feels it in its bones. The ground beneath your paws hums with those passions.

The programme I was listening to on the wireless the other afternoon followed a group of ramblers walking through Warnscale in the Lake District.* The guide has chosen this rugged landscape to create a walk that will provide deep nourishment to beings who are mourning their childlessness and the absence of a life event that they had anticipated. She has absorbed visual metaphors suggested by the landscape: a stand of dead trees, a fork in a stream, a cleft in a rock. She has fossicked through the diary entries of Dorothy Wordsworth, listened to the lore and language of locals, made connections between laboratory images of fertility and the minutiae of plants. She has drawn together features from personal maps created by childless participants. Each feature invites contemplation like the shrines along a pilgrim way where the walk’s duration, not just the features is a crucial element. The time taken and effort involved allows for the evolution of memories, feelings and thoughts of the future.

Listening to these ramblers, I felt something akin to a new dimension being revealed to me. The pause I was having in the late afternoon ventured into early evening. The green spring leaves might have ventured into autumnal brown if I hadn’t realised that my tea had gone cold.

*https://louiseannwilson.com/projects/warnscale

Sometimes a word lingers. ‘Incorporation’ lingered for long after it came up in a chat with a chum.

The first inkling I got of what a corporation might be was from Grandpa Mole. After a long and sumptuous Sunday lunch he would take a big intake of breath and, patting his stomach, would say: ‘Well, that has certainly added to my corporation’. And then he would go to the kitchen whistling ‘Three Little Maids from School are we’, and turn the taps on to wash up.

Later, as he snoozed contentedly in his armchair, I would watch his paws rise and fall on what might have been a paunch on a chubbier mole, and imagine the roast beef and potatoes, the Yorkshire pudding and gravy and brussels sprouts, the steamed lemon pudding and custard, all encapsulated in this one corporation. They were always whole in my mind, unchewed.

I was quite a small mole then, certainly not yet versed in where tiny moles came from, and I had rather imagined myself to be more or less hermetically sealed like Tante Mole’s preserved apricots. But Grandpa Mole’s corporation gave me pause.

What if I wasn’t the only creature living in my pelt? The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became. Those voices that urged me to unravel Mathilde’s knitting or try out my new colouring pencils on the flyleaves of Great Uncle Mole’s encyclopaedias were not me. Nor for that matter were the voices that told me not to eat the chocolate buns, fresh from the oven and cooling enticingly on their racks in the scullery. My pelt was fairly straining at the seams to accommodate the imps, elves and scolds who had taken up lodgings in it.

I had further pause for thought when one hot summer’s day a stoat from the village came sweating to our burrow door to take our census details. She wouldn’t come in, she said, it was too cramped, but she wouldn’t half like a cup of tea. She sat down on the garden bench with a sheaf of papers and asked if Grandpa Mole was still the head of our household.

The head. If Grandpa Mole was the head, then what were my parents? What was I? A paw perhaps. Did an invisible pelt incorporate the household. Were we all just parts of some enormous mole. And who decided which bit of body we were? I could imagine bloodthirsty tiffs as my kin vied for prestigious parts. Was Uncle Ratty were counted in? He was one of us to all intents and purposes. Would the invisible pelt reveal a certain rattishness? No one could blame him if he preferred the autonomy of being counted, head, paws and tail as the one entity that made up his nesty household on the riverbank.

It was much, much later that I discovered you could conjure up a corporation; evolve a business into a separate legal entity; become the Dr Frankenstein to your very own monster. And that if, unlike Dr Frankenstein, you took your parental responsibilities seriously and nursed your dear monster through thick and thin, that entity could become an object of pride.
My chum told me he found he felt more inclined to nurture this separate entity than he had himself.

And that makes me wonder if, when the scolds who co-lodge within my pelt get too noisy, I might be able to imagine myself into a separate, benign moleskin; one that has no components to berate me or lead me astray; one whose composition is only of encouragement.

I am very happy being a mole. I love being snug in my burrow, love being surrounded by the warmth of darkness, love delving and slowly pondering. My molishness is so encoded into my being I have barely given thought to how it might be to inhabit a different body. But there are times when I am blindly groping that I am ever so slightly aware of some other being, fluttering within me; a being that is somehow able to rise above the task in hand, see the whole spread before me. A few days ago, when I popped down to the store-room for a light-bulb, I got an inkling of who that other being might be.

But I need to begin much longer ago on a warm June day at the beginning of the school holidays. I was staying at Great Uncle Mole’s with two of my cousins who, like me, were just at that point in our lives when the lure of adventure is not yet tempered by the caution of experience.

The three of us had been warned not to go to Trelawny’s field, and certainly nowhere beyond it, but one of us, I can’t remember which, dared the others to break into Trelawney’s cellar. This was very daring indeed. As I have mentioned before, this neighbour was quite mad and had an arsenal of blunderbusses. We had heard he had a still in the cellar, and although we had no idea what that was, we knew from the hushed and disapproving tones that accompanied any discussion that the still must be a very exciting thing indeed. It was. And after we had tip-toed around the tubes and coppers and glass jars and Bunsen burners, we thought we might try the liquid contained in the bottles. I think I was the first. I gasped. Tears streamed from my eyes. My throat was on fire. So I took another gulp to show I was unaffected, and passed the bottle to my older cousin. We dared and dared each other until the bottle was nearly empty and then we left the cellar, two of us giggling and carrying the youngest, who was feeling sick, between us. We reeled out into Trelawny’s field and laid down in the dark.

The next thing we knew it was dark. Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty were standing over us with lanterns in their paws. They were not alone; there were others hovering behind them. They had been out searching for hours. One said we must be suffering from sunstroke. ‘Sunstroke, my eye’, said another. ‘Those nippers are drunk.’

We were put to bed, but early the next morning, although we felt horribly ill, we were led into the parlour and told to sit down. Great Uncle Mole looked furious. Uncle Ratty seemed unsure whether to be furious or commiserate with us.

‘Three little moles went out frolicking…’, Uncle Ratty began.

‘Stop!’, said Great Uncle Mole. ‘This is my story.’ Great Uncle Mole hardly ever told stories. It was Uncle Ratty who was the raconteur; his stories so drew you in, you could quite taste the salt in your snout, shiver at the frailty of your ship tossing in the howling, black-clouded storm, horribly aware that it would take only one more breaker and your ship would be smashed against the rocks and you would end up with the countless other ships and crews whose skeletal remains littered the ocean floor. But even though you could feel and taste and smell these tales you were somehow always knew that you were home and safe and that supper would be waiting.

Great Uncle Mole’s stories, on the other hand, were bare-boned and frankly alarming. Especially when he enacted the parts.

‘Three cousins’, he said, glowering at each of us in turn. He was not sitting in his favourite armchair, but standing with his back against the empty fire-place. ‘Three cousins went beyond Trelawny’s fence and into the fields beyond, WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THEIR ELDERS.’

Great Uncle Mole clambered onto the armchair, knocking over the what-not and only just saving himself from over-balancing by grabbing hold of the top of the dresser. Looming over us, he went on in a voice that we had never heard – a sort of boom, punctuated by squeals:

‘High above them, far out of sight, an eagle was circling, looking out for just such tasty morsels as these three DISOBEDIENT moles. It swooped down over the field beyond Trelawny’s fence, grabbed the middle one in its sharp talons.’ Great Uncle Mole leapt off his chair, grabbing one of my cousins by the collar and falling on top of him in the process.

‘That little mole never, ever saw its parents again’, he wheezed.

The cousin began to sob uncontrollably.

‘Oh, Mole’, Uncle Ratty said anxiously, trying to help his friend up and console the cousin at the same time. ‘You can’t leave it there. You have to tell them about the miraculous rescue.’

But Mole wouldn’t and limped out of the room. Uncle Ratty followed him.

We never went beyond Trelawny’s field again.

I had heard stories like this since and always rather thought them Burrow Myths, cautionary tales tweaked to suit the circumstances. But one day not long ago I was in the store-room looking for a lightbulb and got side-tracked by a box of albums that had belonged to Great Uncle Mole. One of these was a scrap-book filled with newspaper cuttings mostly, it has to be said, about engineering feats, especially tunnels. I’m sure, in fact, that I had glanced at it before and only kept it because Great Uncle Mole had such a passion for the subject. This time though, I saw a cutting that had been folded twice to fit. The paper was yellowing and brittle and I opened it carefully. It was the front page of the Burrow Bugle, and the headline read:

‘Roaming Mole-Child Snatched by Eagle.’

At the bottom of the page there was a photograph of two small moles wrapped in blankets and being led away. The caption read: ‘Trelawny Field. The remaining cousins.’ But what really caught my eye was the photograph that took up most of the top half of the page. The camera had caught the eagle as it rose into the sky. A small mole was clamped in its talons.

It was a terrible story. And I felt a retrospective guilt that we had forced Great Uncle Mole to relive his experience with our thoughtless adventuring.

But the little other being that I sometimes feel within me couldn’t help thinking how thrilling it would be to be lifted up high by an eagle, to suddenly feel the whoosh of air, the world expanding as you rose. How much more wonderful still to be the eagle, with eyes that could take in the whole and yet still hone in on the single mole morsel below.

I did a most unmolish thing this week. I left the burrow. No sense of duty drove me. I wasn’t provoked. I decided, just like that, to up sticks, head for wilderness and spend a few nights in a teepee.

Impromptu.

Nearly impromptu.

I can see now that seeds had been sown. Two weeks ago my amanuensis withdrew all reading, telephoning, all Babbage-influenced contraptions, all messages and seductions coming through the ether. It was a spacious week, with no sense of clocks ticking or deadlines passing. It was calm. That week was a little test to see whether I could retreat while staying in my burrow, and it worked. But what I didn’t withdraw from were conversations and interactions with other beings. It was not a week of solitude.

That was one seed. The second was that I had become so emboldened by my journey to the north of the island, that I found myself toying with the idea of taking a bus to places I’d only ever seen on the map.

A third but vital seed was the unexpected loan of a car. Now a couple of particularly hairy episodes with Great Uncle Mole’s friend, Mr Toad aka The Road Fiend, had put me off motors and roads of any kind. But recently kind chums have offered me their cars, and I have used them, sparingly, to carry heavy things like bags of Epsom Salts or potting mix, or to get me to an appointment the other side of town, or to relieve myself from standing at a lonely bus stop after an evening out. This car, though, had been used to more daring outings.

And my dear neighbour offered to cater for Monsieur Boo.

Could it be that Spring played a hand in this? I felt a stirring in my tummy, a sort of sprouting seed sensation. It spread to the rest of my body and before you could say ‘Wild Wood’ my paw was on the dial and a teepee was booked for the very next day.

It was so sudden that although I deprived myself of the joy of anticipation, I also had no time for the corrosive panic of second thoughts. I cooked. I made big lists: a food list, a clothes list, a writerly list, a what-have-I-got-to-do-before-I-go list and a what-are-the-things-I-need-to-cancel list. Uncle Ratty never had need of lists. What he couldn’t fit into a small knapsack didn’t need taking. And his knapsack always was packed; penknife, torch, a bottle of stout, Captain’s biscuits, woolly socks, Sou’Wester, ginger biscuits, tobacco, maps, and his second-best mouth organ. Great Uncle Mole never had lists either. He would never have known what not to take, and he was such a hoarder he was happier staying at home in his burrow surrounded by all his home comforts.

The back of the car was spacious. I could indulge my Uncle Moleishness and pack my bothy rug, hot water-bottle, a jigsaw, my pyjamas, a teapot and tea cosy, coloured pens and the enamel mug my dear Mama bought me in Prague. I could take a bunch of daffodils and a vase and a bowl of mandarins and nuts, and a sturdy nutcracker thrown in. And perhaps that is all I ever really need to feel at home.

And then I took to the road. Broad and open at first, it became narrower, steeper, twistier, bumpier and wilder the closer I got to my destination. I could feel a little squeal of song coming on, a distant relation of the Shadows”We’re all going on a summer holiday’, I think, except that I remembered it as ‘jolly’; much more to my liking than’summer’.

The teepee was at the end of a winding mossy path, defined by dark green shrubby trees. It was not just any old teepee but had a covered porch with a table and a couple of chairs. It was a teepee with a wood stove and a fold-out bed.

It was a beautiful teepee but it did not begin to be my own until I had lit the fire, put the daffodils in a vase, spread the bothy rug on the not-yet bed, and made myself a pot of tea. It became more mine as I sorted the jigsaw pieces by the light of my head torch in the evening, but most of all it became mine when I woke up in the morning to the sound of wrens and honeyeaters. And nothing else. I was the only mole there for miles and miles.

By day I packed a bag with notebook and pen and my lunch, and explored the ancient mossy rainforest. I slithered in the mud and clambered over trees that had come down in the heavy snowfall in the winter. I got lost and found myself among huge man-ferns and gushing waterfalls. At night I lay on my back in the dark and gazed up to the skies, gobsmacked by the constellations.

I had gone to the teepee to write – but it was really only on the second full day there that I began to find my way into it, and on the third I had to leave. But it was so much more than just a place to write, undistracted. As I drove home to my burrow I could sense a bit of Mr Toad suffusing my mole body.

What I had just had was an adventure!