But towards the third week of February, everything started to change as the earliest spring began and there was much less of the chatter and idleness that had characterised the winter years. Rebecca began to go out on to the surface more, cheered by the growing lightness of the spring days.
From her very first venturing on to the surface, she loved the smell and colour of trees and plants. At first it had been the acorns cracking down to the ground, the rustle of the last falling leaves, autumn fruit and the surprise of bright holly berries thrown in a red huddle by an entrance after a storm.
As February advanced, the slow growth of shoots and new leaves enthralled her, and she would run up into the wood day after day, sniffing the cold spring air, to see what new delights she could find. One day it was the yellow delicacy of winter aconite rising among sodden leaves and stem bottoms as pale as the spring sunlight. Another day she crouched for hours before a cluster of snowdrops, their white petals dancing in the cold wind, the black leafless branches of a great oak hanging starkly above them.
Then she was amazed at the speed with which shoots of dog’s mercury rose up into the spring light, but quickly learned to take paths avoiding them because of their rank smell. If she had to go through a patch of them, she would run and hold her breath as she did so, emerging gasping and laughing, often with a brother or two in tow.
As spring advanced, she found the flowers grew more scented and she would bring them, wild and sweet-smelling, down to a place near the entrance to the home burrow so that their scent met any mole who entered. Her mother would tell her the names, and Rebecca would repeat them over and over, mingling them into verses with names of other flowers Sarah told her about, but which were not yet in bloom.
Adults got quite used to young Rebecca dancing with her brothers, singing flower songs, leading them in a game of her own invention, whose verse might run:
Vervain and yellow flag,
Feverfew and rue;
Some for my mother,
Plenty left for you.
And they would tumble about laughing, mock-fighting and rolling on the wood’s floor.
Now Mandrake found it harder to control her. It was not that she, Rebecca, was disobedient in any way, but her spirit was, and that seemed something neither of them could control. It was almost as if her life, and love of it, thrived on his malevolence. Not that, for a moment, she ever enjoyed annoying him or being the subject of his anger. But each time he knocked her down, sometimes literally, up she would get to run off somewhere and, despite every good intention on her part, do something else that displeased him.
‘You’re not to play so roughly with your brother,’ he would say, but she would.
‘It’s dangerous up on the surface now by the edge of the wood,’ but there she would be found.
‘You’re to stay in the home burrow today because there are things to do,’ but she wouldn’t.
She managed to do terrible things without even trying. Just before the April elder meeting, for example, she couldn’t resist having a peek about the elder burrow, somewhere she had never seen and which, since everymole was always talking about it, she thought she would have a look at. So she did, and very impressive she found it. After she had left it to wander off around Barrow Vale, a terrible cry went up: ‘The worms, the elders’ worms! They’ve been eaten. Somemole has been into the elder burrow and eaten all the worms!’
She heard it, and it was true, dreadfully true! She had eaten them! Well, she had seen them in a pile in the corner of the burrow, squirming about in a delightful way and, yes, she had had one, but she had hardly thought about it because, well, she was looking around the burrow, and yes, then she did have another one; no, it wasn’t intentional; yes, she did eat it, the burrow was so interesting, you see, and she was hardly thinking, and… Oh dear, another one, were there really five missing? She couldn’t possibly have eaten five, perhaps another mole came in… No? Well, she could always…
Only old Hulver laughed when he heard about it. It was a sign of the times, he thought, that everymole took the whole thing so seriously. Mandrake attacked Rebecca viciously and also hurt Sarah, who was trying to protect Rebecca; the elder meeting was held in an atmosphere of acrimony, though it was nomole’s fault among the elders.
If that had been the only incident it might not have mattered, but despite her sincere good intentions, Rebecca did other things as bad. One day, for example, she managed to lose not one of her brothers in the wood, but all three. One of them nearly got killed by an owl and the other two were gone for two days and were only brought back to the home burrow by, of all moles, a Marsh End female. ‘It was Rebecca’s fault,’ they wailed, though they were by now nearly adults.
Rebecca tried to explain to Mandrake: ‘It was only a game of hide-and-seek and I thought it would be fun to go a bit further than usual in the tunnels and perhaps for a moment or two on to the surface I’m terribly sorry I didn’t know where we were but it wasn’t hard to find the way back I don’t understand how they got lost for two days and there weren’t any owls about I’m sure please…’ but Mandrake was furious. Indeed, so furious was he that few moles had ever seen him like that and survived. His anger with her on these occasions was always out of proportion to the crime, if crime it was. Yet still her spirit seemed to thrive on it.
But while she grew big and headstrong like Mandrake himself, she also became smiling and graceful like her mother. She loved to touch things and to dance or find some quiet spot in the spring sun and lie softly, with the ecstasy of it on her snout. She would chase her brothers like a growing male yet comfort them when they were hurt as the kindest female did.
There was a fine lightness of spirit, of life, about her and perhaps it was this that Mandrake, in his black anger, would try vainly to catch and crush. As she grew older, Mandrake’s only recourse was to increasing violence towards her, and as the spring advanced, she found it best to keep her snout down, and well out of the way.
There came a time in April when suddenly there was wild blood in the air, and Rebecca found it exciting. Mating time was starting. She knew she shouldn’t go on to the surface, but Mandrake himself seemed to be gone more these days and her mother was losing interest in the autumn litter because it was almost full-grown now. So though Rebecca felt tied still to her home burrow and was still not really an adult, she was drawn by the life in the air up and out into the busy wood.
Busy and noisy. Birds darted and flitted about the trees, which were now heavy with bud. Anemones, celandine, daffodils were almost everywhere. Some days, it was true, the sky would be grey and dark with the air around the trees and undergrowth heavy and still. But only some days. Increasingly she would poke her snout out of a tunnel entrance early in the morning and see a magical, light, swirling mist running through the wood, white and pink as the sun broke through it. The buds and flowers about her seemed to be opening, reaching up through the light mist to the sun beyond.
‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘How beautiful!’ Near her a cluster of celandine, yellow petals half open, reached up softly to the sky. The mist thinned before her eyes until it was almost gone, and she ran across the surface among the trees feeling she was part of the spring excitement of the wood. From afar off to the Eastside, the soft caw-caws of rooks carried to her, long and slow compared with the trilling of the blackbirds and thrush that darted in and out among the trees as excited as she was. She ran to the centre of Barrow Vale to watch the wood wake up as the last of the thin wisps of mist swirled away into the sunshine. A warm, moist, nutty smell had replaced the rotting smell of winter, which she now saw, for the first time, was unpleasant and hung about the tunnels still.