The Moles of Intriguer House

Sometime during lockdown, I heard a heavy thud through the letter box and saw a brown paper parcel on the mat. In it was a slim salmagundi of a book: ‘The Moles of Intriguer House’ 

It begins with a savage attack on the shortcomings of the National Trust— throughout referred to as the National Untrustworthy—and, surprisingly, an attack on the entire Morgan family of Tredegar House —in the book, as a tribute to Robert Firbank, referred to as ‘Intriguer House.’ 

As satire, it reads like Jonathan Swift on Mescalin, and when it comes to generalising on the Morgans as a whole, the writer seems possessed by the spirits of Bukharin and Lenin.  He refers to Morgan dynasty as a bunch of megalomaniacs and ‘land thieves’, masking ‘their proclivities (and) greed, mocking human rights and committing vile deviancies. Although well known for their charity giving, there NEVER was an act of charity or a donation” without ulterior motives such as to “lessen death duties and taxes and to protect their own family interests.”

With that out of the way, William Cross, with the aid of the artist, Gerald Whyman, develops an exuberant whimsy of a book with moles running rampant.

The medieval monk loved nothing better than to adorn religious manuscripts with weird and wonderful monsters and everyday creatures made strangely sinister on the page. Every creature told a story, for every creature had an attribute from which a moral hung.

The Medieval bestiary lives on in ‘The Moles of Intriguer House, but unlike the monkish manuscript where fabulous creatures merely decorated the margins, William Cross, under the influence of Covid and curative bottles of Macallans, has his creatures taking over the entire book. 

Open the pages, and you’re plunged into a parallel world where moles have replaced the Morgan dynasty from 1700 to 1962, their activities running side by side with their real-life counterparts:

Sir William Morgan 1700 -1731 becomes a mole, “dubbed ‘Wild Bill’ by Sandy Boggy Mole, his old dirt tutor who patiently tried to coach and teach him the Greek and Latin Mole verse of worms, slugs and centipedes. The precocious, William (his Sunday name) was only interested in . . . following the cockroach racing on the Taffy Mole Hills of Cardiff. So fond was he of cockroaches, that William had them farmed under the Basseleg Fields for racing and for the high table at lavish dinner parties, and his head cook ‘Wee Shug’ gained fame with an accompanying book of recipes and exhibitions as far away as the annual Abergavenny Mole Food Festival.”

Evan Morgan Papal Knight, predatory homosexual and Satanist: 

“In Moleland, the complex skills of tunnel building were much prized. Male tunnels were generally straight, female tunnels were curved, and in each case the systems were arranged at two different levels.

When it came to tunnelling around Intriguer Park the honourable Eddie Intriguer…was only able to dig curved tunnels and his mole heaves of earth were decidedly queer as they were just on one level, and he was never able to keep his tunnels straight.”

Newport was once famed as the ‘Home of the Mole Screw Wrench.’ It may have had Eddie Intriguer in mind.