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?’
‘It’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.