I used the techniques I had learned, never quite sure if the stories and beliefs were genuine, but I caught all the moles I wanted to catch, and that was enough. I became a very good molecatcher, and word got around. Soon I was getting telephone calls from people who had been given my number by a friend of a friend, and I was getting up on winter mornings to go and meet angry householders who had tried to deal with the mole themselves, and succeeded only in making their lawn worse and training their mole to avoid capture.
I have caught moles in pastures, sports fields, tiny city gardens and immense rolling country estates, and no matter what the land is used for by humans, it is mole territory, and catching them is always the same.
I catch moles for money, and it keeps me busy when the gardens are resting. But of course there are personal reasons that make somebody attracted to this kind of work. When I tell people at parties how I earn my money they laugh. Not that I go to many parties. To people of the towns, understandably, molecatching is some kind of music-hall joke, something from the colourful rustic past, like being a chimney sweep or a comedic mechanical from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
When they stop laughing they become curious and ask lots of questions, mostly about killing things. When I tell them that I have been a vegetarian for fifty years they show me their confused face. Things don’t seem to add up. Life is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like. I prefer it that way. Reason is just one of the many important ways of experiencing the world.
When I was young, people would taunt me for being a vegetarian, and call me feeble, weak or squeamish. My younger brothers used to wave meat from their dinner plates at me and say ‘Meeeat, it’s delicious!’ I called them coffin-gobblers, and said I was not a zombie and would rather not eat bits of a corpse. I got slapped across the face for trying to put them off their dinner. None of us changed our minds. We all do what we want to do, and we rationalise it afterwards.
I AM OLD; I have done many things. I went to art school and studied painting and sculpture; I gave it up because I wasn’t good enough. My hands are too big and clumsy: they were bred to handle a soldier’s rifle, a pickaxe or spade, not a pen or a brush. My body is lumbering and incapable of delicate movement; I am uncoordinated and I make a mess. My handwriting, too, is illegible, but nevertheless my sketchbooks were always full of words. Alongside the scrappy eager drawings of naked women and hopeful flowers and birds were instructions on how to temper steel tools, copied notes about what fire was made of, instructions on how to make a particular shade of blue and why I liked it. There were poems and haiku, but I was at my happiest outdoors swinging an axe, or climbing a hill.
I became a gardener to pay the bills, and to maintain a creative kind of life. When I was homeless I brushed through plants and walked on them, made beds in them, and slept with them against my skin. Woke with green juice on my cheek. I smelled of them. Plucked and chewed on them. How could I spend the rest of my life isolated and not touching their flesh, smelling their infinite palette of individual scents? I began painting with flowers instead of pigment, making and tending gardens. Although poorly paid, there is always work for decent gardeners, and I was determined to learn all that I could.
Naively, when I first began to teach myself about gardening I thought that it would be a nurturing, pastoral and sensual occupation, mostly about flowers, lawns, fruits and trees. I soon learned the pests were part of my job, too. I had to deal with moles, slugs, greenfly, wasps, rats, weeds and many other things that were just getting on with living. For some people much of gardening is about killing things. This has always been an area of conflict for me: my favourite places were the wild ones where I had no killing to do. Killing came hard. But it was either them or me: I had a job to do, a job that I needed in order to feed myself and my family. But killing an insect is one thing, killing a mammal is another. Before I started I wondered what my limits were, what kind of man I was: could I actually do it, and how would I feel when I did?
I was brought up with violence but not with killing. Killing can be, but rarely is, peaceful and kind. Violence is never either. The countryside is full of both. Before molecatching I had never had any need to kill anything deliberately. If there was a fly in the room I would encourage it out of the window. Eventually the time came when I had a real reason to kill something, and I needed to see if I could do it. I tried to focus on killing the moles without doing violence, to do it as humanely as possible.
At 7 a.m. I took her tea in her big white mug
she smiled her waking smile from our white bed
slatted with diagonal lines of cold sunlight
I ate porridge, pulled on thick wool socks
and boots and left
driving my van to the red-edged morning sky
through narrow country lanes and to the hills
the invincible planets move on and
creatures stir, and drawn to play my part
as if on a chain with a ring through my nose
I drive the ‘A’ roads that coil through small towns and villages
and tie people’s lives together
the dry copper bracken
rolls in redhead waves
to black mountains crushed squat and bowed
under heavy watered blue-black-ink flat cloud
and round a corner slashes of sunlight
flashing off the jagged river far below
then in the dip, autumn’s muted shades
distant trees ghostly in dawn’s cloud
and the flat-topped flailed leafless hedges
glow pink in the stormy morning sun
as I drive my little van between neat hedges singing
into a mist-filled dip then up a hill
and suddenly I’m looking into clear blue sky
and I am not at home any more.
Golden Moles, Star-nosed Moles and Famous Moles
MOLES ARE IMMENSELY strong. His massive hands, each of which have two thumbs, are as wide as his head. He has a thick knot of muscle in his neck and shoulders which is as hard as a pebble. I am a working man who lives by the spade and a mole’s hands are stronger than mine: a living mole can easily peel my closed fingers apart and escape. The rest of his body is fragile, soft and flexible, so that he can turn around in a tunnel no wider than himself. His nose is wet and pink like a dog’s. The mole that I hunt, Talpa europaea, the European mole, is as long as my hand and weighs around as much as an empty leather purse. He is covered by dark, blue-black hair that is soft and velvety and brushes just as easily backwards, forwards and sideways, so that the mole can go backwards in the tunnel.
He feels like the best piece of velvet cloth you can imagine. He has whiskers and tiny needle-sharp teeth, so small they look like slivers of glass found sparkling on the kitchen floor days after an accident, which, if I don’t catch him, will wear out in a few years as he eats worms filled with sandy soil. There are no visible ears and, if you look carefully by brushing the fur, his eyes can just be seen in the darkness as shiny black dots not much bigger than this full stop. He is a smooth velvet sausage. His back feet and legs are tiny, thin and fragile like a mouse’s, and he has a bristly