Art Pact 46

"Mole Squad assemble!"

That was the rallying call of the premier almost-blind underground super-hero group of the nineteen-seventies. Moles of my generation grew up with their pictures on billboards and splashed all over the front-pages of newspapers. I had Mole Squad pyjamas, and a nightlight that projected a picture of Mega-Mole fighting Nega-Mole onto my bedroom wall. Where in school tunnels of the centuries before people would have played Worm Run or Vole Versus Rat, now they were the scenes of titanic battles between the Mole Squad and their mortal enemies, the League of Evil Diggers. I was small for my age, and not popular enough to be one of the Mole Squad themselves unless I was playing on my own, so at school break I always had to be Mouse-Trap, the cowardly scout who was always the first to be caught when the LED hatched one of their evil schemes. Such games proceeded mostly by rote - there were favourite stories which everyone knew, and which were played out as though scripted. First of all the LED would meet and discuss their plan to take over all of the underworld - usually by kidnapping the queen, but sometimes by undermining the government tunnels so that the senators would tumble through into the lower caves.

The choice of plan was affected by the available players, which was in turn affected by one of the subtleties of the school hierarchy. Clearly, the queen was a goodie. That meant that she could only be played by one of the more popular children, and as the queen was also legendarily beautiful it was an honour that the popular girls would fight over - simple, except that the queen's place in the story was to be kidnapped by the LED, so whoever played the queen would have to accept that she would be tied up and spending a lot of time with the unpopular kids consigned to represent the League's villainous ranks. Finding a popular and good-looking girl who was not afraid of being tied up and left in the company of the despicable was not a trivial task. It became a task of compromise - how far down the ranks of the beautifully people would a girl have to be to be willing to spend time with the losers in exchange for everyone acknowledging briefly that she was good-looking enough to be the queen? Sometimes there were no takers, and it was in those situations that the League's alternative plan came into action.

After the kidnap (or the initial digging), events played out like this: The Mole Squad's leader (Mega-Mole, the underworld's greatest sleuth) would discover a clue that would either start them on the trail to finding the princess or the tunnel-works. They would be sent to a rough part of town where they would be ambushed by the League's lesser members, who they would fight off (more or less roughly, depending on whether they thought they could get away with it). They would find a clue that would lead them to another location, where I (as Mouse-Trap) would be trying to find out information on - something or other. It was not usually specified, and when it did it often didn't make sense since being popular enough to play Mega-Mole - and therefore dictate the terms of the story - did not automatically confer a child with a natural skill at plotting or logic. Whatever, I would be captured by the Mole Squad and then tortured for the information that would allow the Squad to home in on the League's evil lair. As children we had not grasped the idea that the Mole Squad were not keen on torture, and the play interrogation I was subjected to, while not real, was not gentle either. I was often brought to the point of tears, despite being perfectly willing to divulge any knowledge I had. The player of Mega-Mole, of course, being the storyteller as well, decided when I had had enough. I was not told the information I was to pass on beforehand, only we he deemed that I had received sufficient motivation, so I could not simply blurt it out.

You'll notice that I talk as though the mole-child playing Mega-Mole was always the same. That is not quite true (there were a few blessed interludes), but it is largely the case. There were no competing priorities in the choice of Mega-Mole. It was good to be in the Squad, and best to be him. For that reason Mega-Mole was (unless he was ill or away) always played by my nemesis - the boy whose muscled velvet silhouette had overshadowed me since we were both pups. My next-door neighbour.