The Boy Next Door

Elsie the Mole had never felt so miserable in her life. She had a terrible headache and an awful cold and to make it worse she was in love with the boy next door who didn’t even notice her.

She had caught the cold because she kept tunnelling up to next door’s lawn in the middle of winter. Down in the tunnels where she lived with her mother it was damp and warm, but up above there was a thick frost on the grass and dark grey clouds full of snow.

‘It’s your own fault,’ said her mother. ‘Chasing round after that boy like that.’

‘He doesn’t even know I exist,’ complained Elsie, sniffing loudly.

‘Well, no nice mole would want someone who rushes around like you do,’ said her mother.

Elsie’s heart-throb was different from all the other moles. He didn’t live in dark tunnels like the rest of them. He was a brave and fearless adventurer who spent most of his life tightrope walking across the garden. He had a brother who was just the same and together they performed an amazing double act high above next door’s lawn. Sometimes one of them came down on to the lawn but Elsie was too nervous to speak and just peered out from the flower beds with her little heart full of love.

The reason Elsie had a headache was because of her cold. Moles who spend most of their lives in dark tunnels don’t need to see and so they are nearly blind. They find their way round with their noses but because Elsie had a cold she couldn’t smell anything. Usually she could pick up a worm’s sweat twenty metres away, but now she couldn’t even smell her own armpits and kept crashing into everything. Every time the tunnel went left or right, Elsie didn’t. She went flying straight on into the wall and that was why she had a headache.

‘Nobody loves me,’ she wailed. ‘I wish I were dead.’

‘Why don’t you just curl up in the nest and I’ll bring you a nice hot slug?’ suggested her mother, but Elsie just couldn’t sit still. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the boy next door and had to go rushing off down the tunnels to find him.

Her eyes were streaming and her head was throbbing and even though she could hardly see past the end of her nose, she could tell that her hero was not there. She was heartbroken and waddled back to her nest to cry herself to sleep. He wasn’t there the next day or the next. In fact, it was over a week before Elsie saw him again. By then she had decided that she would never love anyone again and would spend the rest of her life stamping on earwigs and kicking worms.

After a week her cold was getting better and she decided to go next door one last time. The winter sun shone softly through the cold air and there across the lawn, dark and mysterious, was her great love. He was lying asleep in the grass all black and dull like rich velvet.

It’s now or never, thought Elsie and tiptoed shyly out from the lavender bushes. She ran across the lawn towards her sweetheart who lay in a dark blur beneath the clothes line. As she drew close, she tripped over a clothes peg and landed right on top of him.

‘Oh, my darling!’ she cried, flinging her stubby little paws around the dark frostbitten shape.

‘Oi,’ said Neville the rat, who had been hiding behind a concrete gnome, ‘that’s my sock. I saw it first.’