A touch of pink in the grey air and I start to think about coffee, and the thought drives me from my bed. While the coffee hisses into the jug I pick up my cat, who mewls for attention, and we share warmth as I look for a radio station that will give me neither unbearable news nor offensively chirpy music. I’ve lived through the lives of many cats; I haven’t been without one for over thirty years, since Peggy and I have been together. We became a couple and we got a cat. This one, Mimi, is fat and sensuous; she writhes on my lap while I stroke her.
My coffee nearly gone, I feel a little sick; perhaps I am allergic to coffee too. A comedy on Radio 4 Extra about the troubles of a family who have never known fear or hunger.
It is almost properly light now. The dark lasts longer than the light, it is cold, it is December. The breeze is rattling the crisping leaves. I could light a fire and stay inside with Peggy and the cat and watch the day, but I am drawn out as always. I’m not for the indoors, and there is work to do: traps to set, traps to check.
4 a.m.
I woke in a cold dark room
unable to breathe from a bad dream
in which I couldn’t breathe
with distance between us
feeling homeless and full of flight
my head beached on the white pillow
like a sand-clogged conch
breath’s tide flows in and out
noisily
working through the blocked chambers
drowning
In 2 hours the heating will click on
In 4 hours the sun will start to rise
In 5 hours Peggy will wake up
I look out over the thin winter wood
where buried things will remain buried
until the land is full
and the houses come
and I feel like I am drowning
With a click then a boom
the heating comes on
two quick dark hours gone already
I’ve been watching the stars
cold and distant yet always there
did I sleep again?
I’m not sure
from a clear starry night the unwanted dawn
crawls across the Rookwood
and beneath the handful of frosted rooftops
in the bare branched wood
the people are waking
and scraping their cars
the rooks perch
and wait for the warming sun
and I struggle to breathe
Peggy stirs
and her head rolls onto my shoulder
heavy and warm
while the scraping continues
and the crows crowd a bare ash
the beetles beetle
and the crows start to crow
and the nearby river
not yet frozen still runs in its flow
while Peggy’s stale morning breath
steady and deep
keeps me anchored
with comfort to blanket and pillow
and flow, I think about the flow
and try not to drown
light comes in blinking
and Peggy opens her sticky eyes
and in from chasing woodmice
across the frosted grass
my icy cat curls her cold fur
against my bare feet.
Scything a Meadow
MOLECATCHERS PRODUCE ADVERTISING flyers and build websites. They tell you that moles on airstrips can cause serious problems for landing aircraft, that the tunnels they dig can cave in under the weight of a galloping horse and riders can be thrown. Horses in paddocks can break a leg by tripping in a collapsing mole tunnel and have to be shot. A handful of moles can cover a vast area of arable land with molehills which are quickly covered in weeds, and so crops and yields are reduced, land becomes useless for grazing and farmers suffer financial loss. Moles make more moles, which move to fields next door and spoil yet more crops and grazing.
It used to be that molehills ruined the cutters on the farm machinery used for harvesting grains. Soil from molehills mixed in with grain will spoil it and make it worthless. When this earth is accidentally harvested in animal feed used for silage it can cause listeria in cattle and their milk, and make it unfit for humans. For these reasons farmers have paid out of their profits to employ molecatchers. For hundreds of years, it has made financial sense for them. But things change over time, and farmers are now advised to raise their cutters to avoid many of those problems. Modern machinery is designed to do this, and it works well.
Most gardeners manage a kind of frustrated acceptance of the continual bad weather that can flood a garden for weeks on end. Creatures like rats seem to be universally despised, and will be trapped, poisoned or shot; woodmice are usually enjoyed, hedgehogs are loved. Bee and wasp nests colonising a garden shed and making it out of bounds can be frustrating, but the actions of none of these invaders seem to be taken as personally as those of a mole.
Apparently sane people lose sleep over the chaos the moles create. We do not like to lose control of our property: it makes us feel uncomfortable, impermanent, weak. Moles can ruin domestic lawns, and I have seen real hatred developing in homeowners as they lose control and ownership of their gardens. I have seen people in a temper cursing across the garden. An obsession grows and an endless, unwinnable war can take over their lives.
Moles are tiny, they are cute, and like the rest of nature they do not care what we feel. They are devastating, and they always win. Perhaps some of our anger comes because we like to think of them as being gentle and kind, with an individual personality like Mole in The Wind in the Willows, with his big glasses, his good-natured bookishness, his innocence and eagerness to please. Yet in reality the mole is not as introverted and self-effacing as we would like him to be. He takes advantage of us. Maybe we come to think that he is cleverer than we are. Or maybe we have a deeper relationship with and a pride in the things we own and display to others. Ownership of things that appear permanent gives us a sense of permanence. We feel ourselves immortal because of our possessions and the mole coming in and damaging them, taking them away, challenges something buried deep within us.
The effect of his burrowing far outweighs the mole’s physical size. When I show a customer a dead mole, many urban gardeners are surprised at how small they are. In the imagination the troublesome mole can grow to gigantic proportions. But usually they don’t want to see the dead enemy, just the lawn, the bright shiny lawn, just grass all neat and flat and stripy, under control, safe, for ever.
The mole disrupts the artificial serenity of a lawn in a way that is unacceptable for some. Gardening is not nature: it is using the laws of nature and science to impose our will on a place, and for some people this need for control goes to extremes. I once had a customer with a neat town garden who was obsessed with the branches on his gorgeous magnolia tree