Notwithstanding: Stories From an English Village Page 19

  His new house was named Mole End Cottage, and with good reason. When the estate agent from Messenger May Baverstock had pointed out to him that because the house backed on to a large meadow, there was a problem with moles in the garden, he had not been particularly concerned. He had no plans to play croquet, and it occurred to him that soil from molehills might be ideal as a potting medium. He looked benevolently upon the three dozen heaps of upturned earth, and reflected that one could live with moles easily enough. ‘Live and let live, that’s what I say,’ he repeated to himself whenever the topic popped into his mind.

  Out in the garden Royston Chittock trimmed the hedges neatly, installed edging to the beds, created a modest rockery, spread pea shingle on the paths and planted a miniature ornamental cherry. He put a small bird table in front of the kitchen window, and a bird bath in the middle of the flower bed. The lawn he left to the moles, until winter had passed, and the difficulty of mowing it began to irritate him.

  The fact was that you couldn’t mow unless you flattened the molehills by spreading them around, in which case you ended up with squashed muddy discs, or you shovelled the spoil into a barrow and dumped it elsewhere. Royston Chittock chose the latter course, reasoning that he could use it all on the rose beds.

  He had bought a second-hand Suffolk Punch cylinder mower in good condition, and with this trusty machine he created immaculate stripes up and down the lawn. On one weekend he would mow lateral stripes, and on the next he would mow longitudinal ones. It all looked very smart, until, on following mornings he would look out of his bedroom window and see new heaps of soil dotted evenly all over its surface. He could live with it, he decided. Yes, of course, he really could live with it. Live and let live.

  He noticed when mowing that if the ground was the slightest bit damp, his feet would quite often sink into the surface. He would fetch soil from the rose bed to pack into the little declivity. Once or twice he nearly sprained an ankle. ‘Bloody moles,’ he began to say to himself, but of course he could live with them really.

  Within a year Royston Chittock had succeeded in becoming a member of the West Surrey Golf Club, because an unusually large number of elderly members had recently been translated to the Great Nineteenth Hole in the Sky, and he had managed to get himself proposed by a member from whom he had bought a collection of stamps from British Guiana for a deliberately overgenerous sum.

  The problem with golf, of course, is that it very quickly becomes an obsession. One is inevitably hooked from the first moment that one does a beautiful drive straight up the middle of the fairway, or sinks a twenty-five-foot putt on a roller-coaster green. Mr Chittock was not exactly a beginner, since he had trifled with the game for years, as a necessary part of his business life, but this course was very different from the overcrowded ones in the orbit of London. It was old, the holes were long and well thought out, it was heavily wooded, there were not too many people on it, and above all it was a course that required some intelligence and subtlety from the player. It was the ideal course for someone such as himself, thought Royston Chittock.

  The first hole sloped gently upward, and had an interesting ridge across the middle. The second was a par three with an elevated green surrounded by bunkers. It was on this hole, on his first round of golf as a full member, that Mr Chittock lofted a beautiful shot into the air, saw it describe an aesthetically perfect arc, saw it descend elegantly and discreetly, saw it run as if with intent, saw it strike the flagpole, skip into the air, hover a moment and descend into the hole.

  A hole-in-one; Chittock was almost too thrilled to play on. Even so, he managed five pars and two birdies thereafter, and his head began to buzz with the notion of entering and winning tournaments. He was sure he could do it, even though he had scored ten on the sixth hole because of slicing into trees, heavy rough and a bunker, and then doing three putts.

  When he got home Chittock wrapped his ace golf ball in a duster and placed it reverently in his sock drawer. He took it out several times a day to caress it and sniff its lovely aroma of gutta-percha. Because he now could not stop thinking about golf, he mitigated the resultant insomnia by taking the sacred ball to bed with him. He would never actually use it again, because of its totemic power. From its nest in the sock drawer it would emanate concentric success-waves that Chittock felt he could pick up on his internal antennae as he played.

  He had to all intents and purposes discovered the meaning of life, or at least the meaning of his own. He played all day, every day, even using a red ball in the snow, once scoring an eagle on a par five because the ball skidded for miles on a patch of ice, and ended up two feet from the hole on a temporary green.

  It inevitably occurs to golfers that it might be a good idea to practise their putting at home. They begin on the carpet in the drawing room or the hallway, but of course the ball goes too fast, so that when they get to the course they find that their putts stop short. Then they try the lawn, and realise that the grass is too coarse, so that when they get to a real green, they hit the ball a long way past the cup.

  The old professional at Wentworth, Tom Haliburton, used to say that one drives for pleasure and putts for money. Royston Chittock knew very well that matches are won on the green and not on the tee, and he was interested in winning every club competition that he could, so he kept his handicap artificially high, and decided to dedicate himself to the study of putting. Like so many golfers before him, Royston Chittock decided that the only solution was to make a proper green on his own lawn, one that could be kept closely mown, and weeded and rolled. Fortunately one of the greenkeepers who worked at the West Surrey lived in Cherryhurst, the row of council houses near the Institute of Oceanography. His name was Dick, he talked like a Londoner, and he lived with young Robert’s mother. Robert referred to him as ‘Uncle Dick’, but most people were fairly certain that he wasn’t that kind of uncle.

  For a very substantial sum Mr Chittock engaged Uncle Dick to make him a putting green in his spare time, and so it was that one afternoon he came round to Mole End Cottage in his black Ford Prefect in order to survey the garden and work out the best plan for a green.

  ‘You’ll have to get rid of these moles, squire,’ said Dick, as they walked the grass. ‘They’ll make a right mess of everything if you don’t. Wouldn’t even be worth starting.’

  ‘Is that difficult?’ asked Mr Chittock.

  ‘It can take bleedin’ years,’ said Uncle Dick. ‘The buggers keep coming back. You kill one batch of them, and that just makes accommodation for some more little buggers to move in. Drives you barmy. Best bet would be to get the moleman.’

  ‘Is it difficult? I mean to get rid of them oneself?’

  ‘You can get the traps in Scats,’ said Uncle Dick. ‘You get three of them, and I’ll show you how to do it.’

  Accordingly, Royston Chittock went to Scats, a great barn of a place on the outskirts of Godalming, where one could wonder at and acquire all sorts of implements and contraptions whose uses were known only to farmers and those who kept horses. Unable to identify a mole trap, Mr Chittock enlisted the help of a comely seventeen-year-old assistant with the kind of thighs that could make a shire horse wince.

  He came away with three gadgets that worked like doubled scissors on springs, with a sort of a tongue on a chain that would release the jaws of the trap if a mole moved it. In his kitchen at home, Royston Chittock discovered quite soon that the tongue also caused the trap to snap sharply and painfully shut if one poked it with an enquiring finger.

  When Uncle Dick returned two days later, with young Robert’s pet rook perched on his shoulder, he found Mr Chittock standing in the middle of the lawn gazing forlornly around at his molehills. He looked up and said, ‘Well, I’ve put the traps in the molehills, but I haven’t caught any.’

  Uncle Dick took off his cap and scratched his head. He sighed and said, ‘You don’t put them in the molehills, sir.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you? Where else would they go?’

  ‘I
t’s like this, sir; the hills is at the end of side tunnels, and they scrape the spoil out of the main tunnels an’ up the side tunnels, just to get rid of it. They don’t come back, and if they do, they’re always pushing some soil in front of ’em, and what gets caught is the little bit of earth they’re pushing. You don’t hardly ever catch ’em by just sticking those things in the hills like that.’

  ‘Oh dear, what am I supposed to do then?’

  ‘You stick ’em in the main tunnels, sir. Here, I’ll show you.’ Uncle Dick pulled the traps out of the hills, and walked about very slowly, scrutinising the ground beneath him. Finally he stopped. ‘Here we are,’ he said, pressing down with his foot. ‘See that, sir? The ground gives just there, so there’s a tunnel right underneath. If you’d fetch me a trowel, I’ll show you what’s to do.’

  Mr Chittock went to his potting shed and returned with a gleaming stainless-steel trowel that had clearly seen little service, and Uncle Dick knelt down and cut a neat square out of the turf. He excavated the hole a little, and put his hand in to investigate. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘the tunnel goes straight through there, so I’ll put the trap in.’ He set it carefully, and inserted it into the hole. Then he fetched a couple of handfuls of long grass and packed them loosely around the trap, sprinkling a little soil on top. He took a twig and stuck it into the ground beside the trap, saying, ‘Just to show where it is. It’s easy to trample ’em accidentally, like.’ He took the remaining two traps and recommenced his careful walking about. ‘Now look at this, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s a very, very small molehill, sir. That’s what I call a housekeeping hill. The tunnel goes right beside that, so you take a dig in it and find out which side the tunnel goes. Then you dig it out a bit more and set the trap as usual. And one more thing: moles are dead good smellers, so you don’t wash your hands with soap. In fact, it’s best to wear your gardening gloves or do some gardening first, so your fingers don’t pong of anything but soil.’

  The next morning Mr Chittock found that two of the traps had been sprung. One was empty and the other came out of the ground with a large tube of dark-brown velvet mole in it. The jaws had clamped across its chest and neck, and its nose was bright red. Chittock felt a pang of guilty triumph. It was the first mole that he had ever actually seen, and he was fascinated by the big bony paddles fore and aft, the marvellously smooth close fur and the sharp little canine teeth, immaculately white.

  Royston Chittock became fairly good at setting the traps, and he caught his quarry a good 50 per cent of the time. On each occasion that he caught a mole, he would clear the hills off the lawn, tip the soil on to the rose beds, and visualise all over again what it would be like to have a perfect lawn that was good enough to putt on. He might even install a bunker so that he could practise chipping out of it.

  Inevitably there would be new molehills within five days. ‘Like I said,’ Uncle Dick informed him, ‘you should call in the moleman. As long as there’s moles in that meadow out there you’re going to get them coming back in here.’

  So the moleman was summoned. Joshuah Entincknapp was a man in his sixties of stout peasant build. He was fond of saying that ‘Moles ’ave only got feet, they ’aven’t got legs’. He dressed in hobnail boots, corduroy trousers and a thick cotton shirt closed at the collar by a tatty old green woollen tie. Beneath his shaggy tweed jacket he sported a waistcoat of his own manufacture, consisting of precisely one hundred mole skins. There had been a time when he’d supplied a local furrier with best skins at sixpence each, and it had taken seven hundred skins to make a fine lady’s coat that would sell for forty guineas. He’d stretch the skins dry by nailing them to a board with one nail through the snout and one through each foot, so you wouldn’t damage the skin itself. Nowadays there wasn’t much of a market for them.

  The most striking feature of the moleman’s appearance was the lack of his right eye, which did not have even a glass substitute in the socket. This loss had been brought about by a Rhode Island Red pullet when he was a toddler, his parents having left him in the chicken coop, under the illusion that he would be safe in there while they painted the kitchen. It felt odd to look at his face, depending upon whether one focused on the concave empty socket, or on the bright dark eye that gazed ironically from the other.

  Joshuah Entincknapp had heard from Uncle Dick that Mr Chittock was something of a townie out of his depth in the countryside, and he therefore made a point of speaking slowly and carefully to him, to compensate for his backwardness. ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘Dick yonder was quite right. You can trap as many as you like in this garden o’ yours, but they’ll still be slippin’ in from that meadow, and I don’t reckon you’ll ever catch up with yourself. No you won’t. And what’s worse, this garden o’ yours, it’s like a main road, you got those moles passing through all the time when they’re going somewhere else, ’cause those moles don’t like to get too crowded, they like to live on their own, they do, so they got their own living quarters, and they don’t let no other moles in, and they also got these main roads that they share and share alike, and they use them roads to get from place to place, and it so ’appens you’ve got something like a Kingston Bypass going through ’ere, so you’ve got residents and you’ve got passers-through. Do you follow me, sir?’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Mr Chittock, ‘isn’t there anything you can do?’ He began to fear that he never would have a lawn good enough to putt on.

  ‘Well, it so ’appens that there is, but it all depends.’

  ‘Depends? Depends on what?’

  ‘Cats, sir. Do you ’appen to like cats?’

  Royston Chittock gave the matter a moment’s thought. ‘Well, I can’t say I’ve ever known many. I’ve never had one. I’ve known one or two, to pat on the head, so to speak. Why do you ask?’

  ‘’Cause I got a cat and I hire ’im out, sir, but I’m warning you he’s expensive. He’s the best moling cat in Surrey, sir.’

  ‘A moling cat?’

  ‘Yes, sir, a moling cat. You see, cats are specialists, sir. You get cats who only do birds, and you even get cats that only do pigeons. You get cats that do rabbits and voles, but they won’t touch birds and mice. You even get cats that do frogs and nothing but. It so ’appens that there’s occasional cats that do nothing but moles, and it so ’appens that I’ve got one. But he’s expensive, sir.’

  ‘How much is he, then?’

  ‘Fifty pounds a week, sir, plus livin’ expenses, and I get the moles for the skins.’

  ‘Fifty pounds a week? That’s an awful lot. Really, fifty pounds a week?’

  ‘Best moler in Surrey, sir. He’ll clear that meadow ’til there’s not one left. He’s guaranteed.’

  ‘Really, it’s too much, Mr Entincknapp. I think I’ll persist with the traps.’

  Mr Entincknapp shrugged. ‘As you wish, sir, but you know where I am if you change your mind. Mind you, there’s other things you can do.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘You can dig a trench all around this garden o’ yours, three feet deep, and that’ll put ’em off. But it’ll cost a lot more’n fifty pound, and it won’t help your trees much. Or you can pour diesel down the tunnels. They hate that. Or I once knew a gentleman who just laid the garden to concrete.’

  ‘Really? Concrete?’

  ‘He was that desperate, sir. But he liked his concrete, sir. He came from Croydon, and that’s what he was used to. “Mr Entincknapp,” he says to me, “no more bloody moles and no more bloody mowing,” and I says to him, “Just you wait ’til it’s summertime, it’ll be so bloody hot out in this garden o’ yours, you won’t be able to stand it, you’re gonta bake like a bloody steak and kidney pie,” and it so ’appens I was right about that one. It was south-facing, and it got so bloody hot it peeled the paint off his windows. Served him right, silly bugger.’

  Royston Chittock persisted with his traps, but after the passage of another month it seemed that there really was to be no end to the invasions of his garden, and there never was
going to be a nice lawn good enough to putt on.

  So it was that one day Mr Joshuah Entincknapp arrived with a basket containing one very large, short-haired, amber-eyed, smoky-blue cat with a huge head, an uneven moustache, bristling whiskers, smart white dickie and white spats.

  It was released in the drawing room, and introduced to its host. ‘Mr Chittock, sir, this is Sergeant Corker. Corker, this is Mr Chittock.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Sergeant,’ said Chittock, bending slightly at the waist, as he looked down at the cat. The cat gazed back with the kind of expression one reserves for those who are beneath serious notice.

  ‘Sergeant Corker likes to sleep in an armchair,’ said the moleman. ‘He likes to come in and out through the window, so you’ll have to leave one open, and he only eats Felix. I’ve brought you his bowl, and he doesn’t like to eat out of anything else.’

  ‘Oh, do I have to feed him? Doesn’t he eat the moles?’

  ‘No, sir, he only catches ’em. You’ll find he has a very generous nature, sir.’

  ‘A generous nature?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir, you’ll see what I mean soon enough.’

  The moleman scooped Sergeant Corker up into his arms, and the two men went out into the garden. Over the fence, Mr Entincknapp displayed the meadow of molehills to the cat, and a kind of quivering excitement came over it. Its eyes seemed to be popping out of its head with eagerness, and it was clearly straining upon the start in the moleman’s arms. ‘You get to work, then, Corky,’ said the moleman, allowing it to leap down. The cat twisted through the pickets of the fence, and trotted out into the meadow. ‘You probably won’t see much of him,’ said Mr Entincknapp.

  Every morning and evening Sergeant Corker reported in for his Felix, and every now and then Mr Chittock had to resign himself to reading his newspaper in his second-favourite armchair. In truth he rather liked having the cat around. It was quite a responsive and friendly animal, purring gratifyingly when addressed or caressed, and chirruping and rubbing up against his legs when on the cadge. It had a very focused and tranquil attitude and somehow made the house seem more complete. Out in the meadow it would sit upright, patient and motionless amid the molehills like a feline heron. Often Sergeant Corker could be seen sitting companionably with Troodos, the Barkwells’ cat, a specialist in voles.