Here I am, pen in paw. Autumn sun is dappling my desk. A perfect place, a perfect time to write. But paw and pen remain suspended. Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing in this notebook. Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this scene. Perhaps it should be from a different point of view. Perhaps this is the wrong novel. A drop of ink plops onto the page, spreads and I contemplate folding it in half and creating a Rorschach pattern, subjecting myself to a bit of self-analysis.

Truth is I am frightened of making the wrong decision. So frightened I freeze. The tiniest question can swell itself up and taunt me from the writing pad, prance about in the wet inkblot, bullychant: You’re going to make the wrong decision. You’re going to make such a mess of this. Everyone is going to think you are incompetent. Nanananana!

Tante Mathilde was a great one for perfection. Don’t open your mouth until you know the whole poem perrrfectly. Mistakes were slapdash, slipshod and lazy. Mistakes were unpatriotic and would call the whole Mole family into disrepute. Even coughing or sneezing were signs moral degeneration. Tante Mathilde NEVER made mistakes.

Mistakes were locked up in Tante Mathilde’s day, sent to institutions, never mentioned. All those steps between start and finish never existed. And the finish of some other mole’s oeuvre was so far removed from the start of one’s own that it was beyond emulation. Dear Tante Mathilde, how many of your trials went onto the bonfire so that they might never be seen?

Mistake – I try to roll the word around, make it my chum. Mis-take, Mi-stake. I try to squeeze it to Risk-take. It won’t quite go.

Am I really such a tremulous mole? I find my chest puffing up at the thought of it, my snout quivering with indignation. Shying away from a sentence? Where is the brazen activist
of yesteryear? Deep in my little moleheart there lurks a Garibaldi. I have been known to carry placards, stood firm against hecklers, made rousing speeches. Does courage only come when an injustice hurtles straight to my firebrand belly, ignites it and makes me roar.

Would it be so terrible if this were the wrong notebook? Isn’t it my notebook. Can’t I cross things off or tear things out or stick things on? Is there such a thing as a wrong scene – or is it just a step, a way of testing or material that might be used later? Wrong point of view? Perhaps, but at least I’d know. Wrong novel? It will only descend into chaos if I fail to take it in hand. Wouldn’t it become the right one because I made it so?

The next time I feel timorous I shall head to a cupboard deep in my burrow. I shall hunt out a pair of broomsticks, an old sheet, a pot of paint and a brush. And you will see me at the barricades proclaiming the wise words of Anne Lamott:

‘Perfectionism is the Voice of the Oppressor, the Enemy of the People.’*

*Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

A decade or so ago I began to feel a craving for winter so deep I wanted to howl for the lack of it. I yearned for monochromatic landscapes, blizzards, and air so cold it hurt to breathe. And then for reasons bleak, I found myself thrice returning to a European winter. Two of those were among the coldest on record. Deep snow that didn’t melt – just added to itself, layer upon layer. For the most part, ground and sky were indistinguishable. On the few occasions the thin sun appeared it dissolved only enough snow to lengthen the icicles that hung from the gutters.

I still love the winter. I feel invigorated by it. Snow is an essential element for me. But the craving is no longer so painful. At least it hadn’t been until earlier this week.

The second of those very cold winters was four years ago. I had been in Switzerland for several months, winding up the parental home, but was not yet ready to leave this country of my growing. A dear and enduring friend, a fellow hermit, gave me sanctuary. She, along with her dog, two cats and a tortoise, lived on the edge of a small farming village. Her house was a Stöckli, a tiny, three storey wooden house with external steps up to the entrance on the first floor – so that it could be reached even when the snow was deep.

We were comfortable together. She had known me from when I was eight or nine, cut adrift from my moorings, at sea in a foreign country. She recognised me then as a fellow solitude, a being whose heart beat out of time with the rest. An only child, her life criss-crossed countries, too. Her stories, whether about the days doings or the deep past, were vivid, details and emotions remembered, and told always with dry humour: the grandfather, bigger than life itself, training horses at Chantilly; a big lemon car with my friend, always tiny – tinier still when young, lost in the upholstery of the backseat. The fortunes of English family rose and sank – at one time owners of London pubs with Russian names. She told tales of her indomitable mother, and of her small son, so enchanted by trains he would clamber onto them at the village station, trains that reloaded at this small Swiss town and were heading for Moscow.

That winter we entered a daily rhythm. We breakfasted together, each with our preferred pot of tea. Then I struck out into the morning dark, crossing snowy fields, striding through beech and pine woods and across the railway tracks to catch a train into Berne. I’d spend the day burrowing through archives, pausing briefly for lunch in the canteen.

I had found a pile of coupons in a desk drawer whilst clearing out the parental home. Some were still valid. These I cashed in for punnets of gourmet soups which I brought back to the Stöckli each night. And so in one fell swoop we managed to avoid money and cooking, those pitfalls of mutual obligation, and thanked my dear late Papa for his hoarding.

I heard at the beginning of this week that my friend had died and I could feel myself longing for that intense cold again. This morning, on my walk, I looked up at our local mountain. It was coated with thick snow. So deep and only May. More snow than I have seen on Mount Wellington for years.

Each day after lunch I have a little ritual of listening to the wireless while I plunge my paws into the washing up, and I never know what delectable chance encounter might come my way. Today, I was twiddling the dials when I caught a man’s voice introducing a programme called The Poet and the Murderer. Well, a title like that and the promise of an intriguing tale – I twiddled no further. And it was a riveting tale, but that was not what got me going.

The poet in question was Emily Dickinson, and it was a line from one of her poems:

‘Tell the Truth, but tell it slant…’

Hmm, I thought. This needs mulling on. It lingered with me all through my washing up, and by and by I felt a little murmur coming on. And here I am, pen in paw.

That sounds so smooth, doesn’t it; a chance remark, a mull, a murmur, a pen and the whole caboodle flowing onto the page. Alas, there are times (more than I care to name), when somewhere between thought and flow, things come to a sticky standstill. I know exactly the spot where it happened today; it was between mull and murmur. Mull had first drawn me back to the few times I visited Toad Hall in my infancy. Looking back, I think Great Uncle Mole and Uncle Ratty were rather cautious about exposing a young mole to Toad; thought he might be a bad influence. Although Toad was very old by then, he still loved to put on a good show and his enthusiasm of the moment was a small cinema he had set up in the wine cellar. Oh dear, I must get to the point. The films Toad was showing were made in the war. They were black and white and usually historical, but their historical nature was a veil, a pretence that they had nothing to do with the war. When I watch them now, all I see is targeted messages of courage and self-sacrifice.

That, I mused on, although told slant was not the truth, but propaganda. More interesting would be the fertile ground of writers and artists living under totalitarian or otherwise oppressive regimes who were driven to use fable, symbol, or poetic metaphor in order to tell their truths.

This was where I should have stopped, but no. I began to look for factual back-up for my vague thoughts. I opened tomes, read both erudite and crazed interpretations, pattered down unknown alleyways. But all the time I was shining my headlamp in search for perfect examples.

I dazzled them and they fragmented before my eyes.

What I had lost between mull and murmur was that space in one’s freewheeling mind that allows inspiration to take hold, the thought that comes out of left field, the trick of light that one sees from the corner of one’s eye. What I had missed was that Truth is also best heard slant.

When I crept out into the darkness of pre-dawn the other morning it was so chilly I had to rub my front paws together. Indeed, there was a whiff of Antarctica on my snout. Puffs of condensation clouded the air in front of me each time I exhaled. I was reminded of an oil painting of cows I once saw in a Swiss art gallery, and each one had a delicately brushed puff coming out of its nostrils. In German this breath is called ‘Hauch’, the last ‘ch’ is just the sound of the air as it passes through the back of the palate, and so the word ends just before the Hauch becomes visible to the eye. It was astonishing to me that some two hundred years after their demise, I could still see the Hauch of these cows, still see the evidence of their breathing selves.

I was still musing this eternal breath when I reached the end of Poet’s Road. The last street lamps before the forest path are in a slight dip and I saw under their light that the windscreens of the cars were patterned with frost. I can’t tell you how tempted I was to scratch Good Morning across each one. Not a little Good Morning but a bold lovely, looped script capital G to start it all off, and an equally lovely looped small g to finish, reaching from one side right to the other. My whole body quivered with excitement. Was it to do with size? To write so enormously would require great sweeps of the shoulder, stretches from my hind legs to high above my shoulder. My paws so twitched with desire, it was only that killjoy Consequences who stopped me. He hectored in his hissy voice about the mayhem that would ensue when I triggered all the new-fangled alarms. I let out a long disappointed puff of Hauch.

But then the deliciousness of the Hauch grabbed me again. I blew it out in short bursts, and long ones and then a veritable morse code of Hauchs, and I was suddenly transported to Great Uncle Mole’s hearthside and our regular sit-downs to listen to the thrilling adventures of Paul Temple, the wireless detective. In Paul Temple and the Alex Affair, the serial begins with a body in a railway carriage – and the word ‘Alex’ is discovered scrawled into the condensation on the window. It all felt doubly wicked because as small moles we were told scrawling in condensation on windows whether on trains or elsewhere was absolutely not allowed because it made extra work for the window cleaners.

But oh how I wanted to – and sometimes did, when no one was looking, and haven’t for years and years. And when was the last time my paws twitched to write something as much they did the other morning in the frost, when stopping myself from writing was almost too much for my body to bear?

And I’m NOT going to stop myself next time, am I?

Something deeply satisfying stirred my moleheart a fortnight ago when I went through the ritual of winding the clocks back an hour. I would have long cosy evenings again. And instead of having to cajole myself into waling in the pitch dark, for a little while at least I would be leaping out of bed for the sheer joy of experiencing that wonderful transition from night to day.

Alas, that evening I may have gone to bed a mole but the next morning I woke up a sloth.

At first I rather enjoyed my slothfulness. Lying snuggled in my nest, dozing on and off, dreams ebbing and flowing into my consciousness. The trouble was that the slothfulness clung to me as morning moved into day. Without my early walk my paws began to drag. My sleep-dulled eyes peered at the papers on my desk without comprehension. By noon all I could think about was how lovely it would be to be nestled back under my doona. Had I been more alert, I might have been surprised, or even alarmed, at how quickly I assimilated slothful attributes, how soon and thoroughly my molishness retreated. Days turned into weeks.

Now, I have nothing against sloths. They are beautiful creatures with gentle natures. They might on first acquaintance even appear to be a deal more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than moles. But something began to niggle. Sloths are not very grounded. In fact, I could hardly have chosen a less earthbound body to morph myself into. Nor are they very curious.

The fact is, I began to miss being a mole.

But could I remember how to gather my moleparts back? Could I even remember what my moleparts were? It was then I remembered the rather shabby shamanic text that Uncle Ratty had picked up on one of his voyages. I managed to summon just sufficient molish energy to rummage for it in the box room. And although I reverted to armchair slothfulness I rallied enough molish perseverance to delve into the secrets of Totem Mole, Guide to the Underworld.

Piece by piece, I gathered myself together: my paws that tunnel down into unknown territory; my snout that sniffs for rich meanings hidden in those depths; my pelt that feels every nuance, and tries, though does not always succeed, to trust those feelings; and my moley curiosity that ponders and ponders until revelations come and can be brought to the surface to share with fellow creatures.

And then there was my love of the earth and fresh air. Ah yes.

These last three days I have woken to a slither of moon in an indigo sky. My snout has twitched, my paws have touched the earth before my mind has even engaged. By dawn I have reached the summit.

I have been reconstituted. My molehood has been reclaimed!

The days are shorter, the air cooler, and although my pelt is a lovely, cosy, velvety thing there are some crisp mornings I hanker after an extra layer. It is jumper time.

I love woollies; not just for their snugness. Each jumper tells its own tale. Each one’s providence extends the sum of my internal experience. It is an enriching membrane that both grounds and delights.

I first learnt how to knit from Uncle Ratty. I had been fiddling with a loose thread in the hearth rug, and Great Uncle Mole made some comment about devils and idle paws as he grunted himself into his armchair for his after-lunch nap. Uncle Ratty winked at me, and told me to fetch his duffle bag.

It was a grubby old thing, a sort of oily indigo, and had H.M.S. PH X stencilled on it in peeling white paint, but to my young mind it was a cornucopia. He told me to sit on the Egyptian hassock while he rummaged. I fidgeted. He pulled out a ball of string, or rather strings. It was made up of lots of shorter bits all knotted together, different browns, some red, some green, thick and rough, and soft and slimy, the odd bit of wool, too, and even lawyers’ tape. His paw plunged back into the bag again and hovered there until Great Uncle Mole’s snores signalled that it was safe to talk about the sea adventures that made his earthy body queasy. Uncle Ratty drew out a pair of white sticks. ‘Whale-bone’, he whispered. ‘When I was a cabin-boy….’ And he taught me to knit. They were uneven squares with dropped and erratic stitches, because once he had taught me the basics, I didn’t want to interrupt his stories.

Later Mathilde, Tante Mole’s companion, made me unlearn Uncle Ratty’s clumsy style. She knitted the Continental way, wool wound around her foreclaw, faster, tighter. She was a demon knitter. Casting on at tea-time, an entire stocking would be cast off before supper. Mathilde was a stickler, too. I had to undo rows and rows if I absentmindedly purled a stitch instead of plaining it. When I protested to Tante Mole, she told me that Mathilde had won prizes for knitting while still at school in her home town of Mulhouse. And she had been given medal for bravery in the Great War. ‘What did she do?’, I’d asked. ‘Knitted’, said Tante Mole. ‘She sat on the railway sidings and knitted codes into jumpers, different stitches to represent enemy armament and troop movements.’ Speed and accuracy still represented life and death to Mathilde.

Later, I became a knitter, too, – always had something between my paws. I still salivate over colours and their names: heather, moss, dusky woodswallow, periwinkle, spinifex and tawny owl. I still stroke wool samples with longing. I knitted until a decade or so ago when my poor sore paws could knit no more.

But I still love wearing woolly jumpers, one in particular. When nobody is around I hunt out a disreputable old rag of a thing. Its colour is indeterminate. There are stains – port, I suspect, and engine grease. It is a mass of dropped stitches, holes, patches and loose threads. I found it in Uncle Ratty’s duffle bag a week or so after he’d breathed his last.

As you have probably guessed, straddling darkness and light in this season of change has been providing fertile pondering ground for one mole. The pondering takes many forms but it tends to hone in on the way a mind fills the gaps that direct knowledge fails to provide. And so, in the dark on Knocklofty, I have learned that the thumps I hear in the undergrowth are made by bounding wallabies, and the rustling in trees is created, I imagine, by birds that I have startled.

In the tower the pondering on light and dark was fuelled by the absence of electricity for a few weeks. Well, not a total absence. A long flex from the cloisters was coiled round the central column of the spiral stairwell and attached to a single lamp in the ringing room. The lamp cast strange shapes, illuminating odd corners and pitching other more familiar spaces into darkness. It was hard not to be distracted. We lost our places and our timing became erratic as shadows confused themselves with ropes and befuddled the bell-ringers. Yet this must be how it had been for centuries – oil lamps hung from nails in the walls. Or perhaps a lamp would be centred in the middle of the circle, lighting up the snouts of ringers from below and evoking nativity paintings like Rembrandt’s Adoration of the Shepherds, or Edward Hopley’s A Primrose from England. In Hopley’s painting the faces of homesick migrants are uplit by a primrose which issues a similar glow to the child in Rembrandt’s manger. For us it was more prosaic, but nonetheless made secrets of what we could not see.

Les Murray, in his latest book of poetry, Waiting for the Past, writes of the ‘snapped dazzle’ when electricity was wired into the place where he grew up. And how ‘the old lampblack corners and kero-drugged spiders’ were now turned vivid. In our tower, we now shield our eyes in the brightness and wonder whether we need to don poker players’ peaks. The new glare startles the shabby carpet as if it were caught in its nightdress, and our token rubber bat hangs dismally in its corner, faded and dusty. Little is left to the imagination.

And the rustling in the trees on Knocklofty? A friend down the road revealed to me last week that there were bats in the reserve, and I knew immediately that no birds would make that sound. But still, I can’t see them, and somehow their hiddenness makes me feel better about the poor specimen in the tower.

This morning I discovered a note clothes-pegged to the back-door of my burrow. I often find notes pegged there. It is how I and my dear neighbour most often communicate. The notes are written on coloured scraps, old music sheets, official letters, flyers. She is a wordsmith, too, and the notes are filled with quotes, or word definitions, or references to leaks, bills, electrical faults, or arrows to vegetables or bowls of soup left on the step, or all of these.

The note pegged onto my door this morning was to tell me that Sister Sarah had died.

A decade or so ago, when I was drowning in my opus, my neighbour told me about a retreat near a beach not far from here. It was run by nuns three times a year. It was silent. Ten days. Meals were provided. It didn’t matter that I took no part in their religious programme. I was left to my own thoughts. This was where I first met Sister Sarah.

I went to all the retreats but I craved more – more silence, more absence of clutter and distraction. I craved the small table under the window in that unmolishly attic room, and I craved the sight and sound of the sea. Sister Sarah said to me in her lilting Irish way that I would be welcome to stay whenever I liked just so long as the place was not being used by others. I took to cooking up cauldrons of soup on Sundays, freezing it into blocks, so that I could transport myself, my food, my papers, my books and my pyjamas by bus each Tuesday.

I had been hunkering into this rhythm for a couple of years when Sister Sarah came to the attic and told me she was returning to Ireland. She had been sent to Australia when she was still in her teens and now she wanted to re-enter the convent near where her family lived. Shortly before she left we spent the day making an inventory of all the sheets and coat-hangers and towels and teapots; lists and lists of every single item. She stood at the window when I left that evening.

That image haunted me. It haunted me more when I heard that she hadn’t been taken in at the convent in her home village.

And so a year or more later, I journeyed to Ireland. It was a fiendishly cold and icy winter and not many planes were landing. My arrangement with Sister Sarah was that I would catch a train to her village – about halfway between Dublin and Cork. She was waiting, small, birdlike and alone on the platform. Her brother sat in the car. It was early afternoon; I had planned for an hour or two and had made sure I would not impose on any mealtimes.

It was after their mealtime, but they had put some aside for me. They sat and watched as I ate – Sister Sarah, her brother and sister-in-law and some great nephews and nieces: chicken and vegetables and a big pile of mashed potato and pudding, which I tried to do justice to on top of the lunch I had already eaten. They’d made up a bed for me, too, thinking I might be staying.

It began to snow. Sister Sarah wanted to show me the neighbourhood. I got into the back of the car and her brother drove. Snowflakes splatted heavily onto the windscreen. The wipers screeched and struggled. Sister Sarah wanted us to start from the house where she’d grown up and follow the route they’d taken to school, so that she could point out where they had crawled under the hedge or crossed a brook or taken blackberries. We skidded at a walking-to-school pace. She showed me the home of her grandparents and the homes of each of her many siblings, mostly deceased, and the homes of the siblings’ children. The car came to a standstill when the windscreen wipers gave up the ghost, and we scuttled back to the brother’s house. A peat fire had been lit and we drank strong tea. Then they took me back to the station.

It was pitch dark on the platform and far too cold for Sister Sarah to see me off. The train was on time. But in Dublin the roads had become so ice-impacted, so deep in snow all public transport had been cancelled. It took me two hours of slithering and clutching at railings to reach the place I was staying. I’m glad it took so long, was so memorable.

‘Wer kein Kopf hat, hat Pfoten’, my Tante Mole would say, whenever she left her spectacles uptunnel or the marmalade so long on the stove that it congealed in the saucepan.

‘Auf Englisch’, her companion, Matthilde, would then chide. ‘The little one will not understand otherwise. “Who no head has, has paws”.’

Of course the little one understood. This and countless other wisdoms bore daily repetition. The little one was a deal more familiar with ‘kein Kopf’ than with the times table.

I have been being busy. My apologies for inflicting a sentence that bears the hallmarks of an English grammar exercise, but nothing else will do. A simple ‘I have been busy’ would imply that the busyness has been imposed, but I want to be quite clear that the problem lies between my ears. Yes, I have taken rather more on than one mole can manage, but the point of kein Kopf is that busyness begets busyness. I was letting several tasks bleed into each other, was doing one task but thinking of a second and third. By Wednesday I was so frazzled I overslept by two hours and had to relinquish my morning stroll up Knocklofty.

But then, in the afternoon, I lay my podgy self on a treatment table and my dear acupuncturist performed a choice piece of needling. It was the harmonising Zero Point that sent ripples down my pelt. In the human ear Zero Point is at the junction of the conchal ridge and the root of the ascending helix, but imagine the precision and dexterity required to perform this delicate operation on a creature like me. We moles, as you know, have no outer ears – no concha, nothing to perk or twitch or turn to the breeze. Nothing to needle, you would think.

That night I slept a deep sleep, the sleep of an unburdened mind. In the blackness of the pre-dawn, I vaulted from my snug little bed, sniffed the air and moseyed up Knocklofty. There was a time when such blackness alarmed me, when I imagined no-good-boyos lurking behind the trees, but not on this morning. It is true that it wasn’t pitch dark – I have taken to wearing a headlamp, especially since my chum Acorn tumbled off some rocks and broke her paw.

There was a hint of dawn as I neared the summit. I sat myself on a hand-hewn bench and watched streaks of orange breaking through the low, leaden cloud. I sat and watched the orange suffuse the cloud and tint the water of the estuary. I sat and waited while the earth tilted itself towards the sun, and I never once had a thought for anything except what was unfolding before my eyes.

My paws had brought me to a place where I had no need of my head.

I am a hoarding sort of mole. This parlour (the one in which I am sitting as I put pen to paper) was not long ago a repository for boxes labelled perhaps Bells Restoration, or Cumulus, or Tasmanian Cherries, or Stamps, or Wires That Don’t Match. I have spent years trying to lessen the jumble. Every so often I would don my late Mama’s pinny, place my paws on my hips, and hope that if I concentrated hard enough her strength of purpose would somehow infuse me. But only moments after embarking on the first box, my mind would be conjuring up a pot of tea and ginger biscuits. And no sooner had the thought insinuated itself than the pinny would be off and the kettle on and that would be that for the afternoon, the week even, or the month. Then, at the end of last year, something changed.

As you already know I am not only a hoarding sort of a mole but also a solitary one. It is rare that I have creatures coming to my burrow. But in December I invited some friends to supper on New Year’s Eve. And then I panicked. My table was not big enough and besides it held family papers and diaries, and it couldn’t be pulled out anyway for want of space. I cleared this parlour of its boxes. Still I felt as Great Uncle Mole had when he brought Uncle Ratty home to his burrow for the first time, and saw it suddenly through his friend’s eyes: its smallness, its darkness, its lack of food and drink, its air of neglect. I could sense the weight of Great Uncle Mole’s gloom billow through the generations and fog up my own burrow and this parlour.

It was of course Uncle Ratty who rescued Great Uncle Mole. He encouraged and cajoled with remarks like how capital the little place was, said he could think of no better treat than a tin of sardines. He lit a fire, and when the field mice came and sang carols, he sent one off to buy food, and they all sat around the fire with mulled beer and had a feast.

My friends arrived with hampers of food and wine and soon the friendly chatter subdued the uneven card tables I had set up, the odd chairs, the air of curiosity shop.

On New Year’s Day after I had washed up, I came into the parlour to dismantle the tables, but then I stopped. The space was vibrant, inviting. I ate my lunch here and then did a jigsaw puzzle. The warmth of my friends still hung in the air the following day and the day after that, too.

And now, nearly three months on, shafts gentle autumn light glow through the roses on the rickety table and there is nowhere I would rather be than sitting here in the parlour of my burrow.