Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!

Ow!

But I held on fast.

Joyce and I then wrestled away dynamically for a brief duration (it was dreadfully undignified – for both parties). Thirty seconds passed, at most, before I released his tail (so glad Mrs Seelinger didn’t see fit to dock it), by which time the miraculous little mole had sensibly withdrawn.

Joyce was livid and returned to the hole to recommence digging with a renewed (if slightly grim) enthusiasm.

I was covered – covered – in nettle stings: face, neck, hands, stomach.

Ow!

I grabbed the envelope of cash, shoved it into my bag and began hunting around for some dock. There’s always a clump of dock near a patch of nettles. Always. Always. It’s ancient country lore. But …

No. Nope. No dock. Not so much as a whiff of it. Although very much a whiff of … (Urgh. I can’t even bring myself to say it.)

Smarting, stung, defeated, I started back up the road again. No further misadventures (at least that I was aware of) took place in the following few minutes (no lightning-strike, no Martian abduction, no puma attack). I entered Mulberry through the little, cast-iron gate. The bin and an ancient (bad) apple tree to my right obscured the old mulberry (the cottage’s namesake) which I suddenly (No! No, Carla! Stay focused, you idiot!) had the strong desire – in the light of my recent dream – to take a proper look at.

I squeezed past the bin, ducked under the branches of the apple and found the trunk of the old mulberry right up close to the fence, almost obliterated by ivy. I pulled idly at a couple of strands and they came away easily, so I yanked at a couple more, until eventually I was attacking the stump like a madwoman, pulling and ripping, tearing it from the bark.

How long it took me to clear the trunk I have no idea. But eventually it was done and I stepped back to appraise my work, slightly breathless. The tree was dead. Very dead. As a doornail. I tried to recall Mrs Vaughn and her spread-out checkered blanket; that magnificent fruiting tree in its prime, the giant spearmint-green leaves, the succulent berries, but it was difficult to visualize that scene here, where the tree currently stood, so close to the fence. So cramped.

I took a further step back to try and imagine the apple smaller or gone (but it’s an old tree, too – or perhaps simply aged by disease …?) and as I did this, I was stabbed, savagely, violently, in the back of the neck. I screamed. The impact of this tiny, awful blade was so sudden, so vicious: a blinding, bright white pain. I turned around, panicked, and saw a dark, flashing entity which hung in the air before me and then dropped like a tiny stone. A hornet. A hornet! Stung by a hornet on the back of the neck!