April: Let Sleeping Snakes Lie

There was a big black bank of cloud hanging across the horizon that morning. I should have recognised a portent when I saw one. Nevertheless, I wanted to check our water meter. According to our bills over the last few years, our water consumption has gone from as low as 28 cubic metres (shurely shome mishtake; maybe the counter got stuck during cold weather) to 127m³. So the price we have to pay for it has been equally variable. I normally stay away from the meter, because it’s underground and the hole is full of insects that proliferate under the polystyrene insulation that protects the meter from extreme cold. The water company usually sends an e-mail to urge customers to do this, thereby absolving themselves of responsibility. 

So... just a quick look to check the counter, compare it to the last official reading, do a calculation of sorts and evaluate whether there could be a subterranean leak somewhere between meter and house. I removed the first chunk of browning polystyrene – and put it straight back again when I saw something wriggle and slither. A snake! I’d disturbed its annual hibernation. And not just any snake. I’m not given to exaggeration – that’s the Good Wife’s province – but this was the biggest snake I’d ever seen outside a wildlife programme. It was, too, a rather beautiful snake, ringed with black hoops that seemed to oscillate as it slithered off into a dark corner of its bedroom. It was probably just a rather large grass snake and not a fugitive cobra from the local charmer’s wicker basket, but you don’t mess with a serpent rudely awoken from a season-long slumber.

All this I gauged in the fraction of a second it took for me to shut the lid. I decided there and then, remarkably calmly in fact, that I would read the meter another day. If something is leaking, so be it – and damned the expense! I went back inside to report the incident. My wife was on her phone, probably checking her next rendezvous with a client. When she’s on the phone, she’s good for nothing else.

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake, in our water meter,’ I announced casually.

‘Mmm-hmmm?’

‘No, that hasn’t landed, has it?’

‘What? Sorry, what did you say?’

‘I’ve just seen a giant snake…’

‘Oh my God! Where?’

‘In the water meter hole.’

When it did get through, she seemed more perturbed than I’d been, although she, too, recognised that it had probably been a grass snake. We’ve both become quite sanguine about snakes after 30 years or more of country living. I go by my wife’s maxim that we’re surrounded by them outside the privacy of our own home, but they’re probably more afraid of us than we are of them. Nevertheless, I have on occasion lifted a stone to find a sleepy viper shading itself from the glare of the sun. Those little critters are small but perfectly poised to jab you with poison, whereupon you have to rush out to the nearest pharmacie for an antidote before you die. A grass snake is about as long as a whip and as thick as a saucisson: the stuff of childish nightmares, but I believe (and I cannot testify for sure) totally harmless. You see the poor creatures from time to time squashed on a road, looking like a length of perished rubber.  

Country living, if nothing else, prepares you for the vagaries of nature. About this time of year, the ants begin to mass like marines, ready to invade. Every spring we have several Ho Chi Minh trails, as we call them – in the kitchen, in the reading area, in the bathroom. If they become too invasive, we resort to those round plastic things with tabs that you snap off to activate. The ant wanders inside looking for booty, attracted no doubt by some artificial hormone, then returns to the nest to contaminate its colleagues with some lethal insecticide. We try not to use them. After all, we’ve made peace with the wasps. Every year, they nest under the eaves of the mezzanine and/or in the concave roof tiles. I gave up trying to obliterate them years ago in favour of diplomacy. I step outside onto the top balcony and make a deal with their leaders: Listen, we’ll leave you alone, if you leave us alone. Thus far, it has worked and, to extend the metaphor, the price of oil hasn’t rocketed.

The mites in the pantry, however, are not so ready to deal. They’ll be out soon, ready to plague us for another year. The situation seemed to improve last year when I moved our annual 5kg bag of walnuts from Gisèle down to the cave, to hang from the ceiling by a hook. Nevertheless, we’ve learnt to store all foodstuffs in tightly sealed jars and to fix nasty sticky papers around the pantry to entice the little bleeders with some other brand of artificial hormone. Changing the papers is not a job that I relish. There’s no way that you can peel back the protective paper once affixed to the wall without getting sticky stuff all over as you try to stop them coming away from said wall. Few things in life are guarantee to put me into such a foul humour. 

In our time here, learning to live in harmony with nature, I’ve dealt with a viper in the house (involving a long period of deep reflection and the inelegant use of a cardboard box) and my poor wife has been stung twice in one evening by a hornet, thus murdering sleep for the entire ensuing night. Our dog attends to the mice brought in by the cats, but I’ve not yet learnt to be phlegmatic about flies. Tics regularly attach themselves to cats, dog and occasionally humans (often in the least accessible places). Giant green grasshoppers, mange-touts as we call them, sneak in during high summer, then scare the wits out of you by taking off without notice and landing right beside you. Punaises, or shield bugs, have the same tendency to alarm and also come with the horrible smell of almonds past their sell-by date.

But country life has taught us to adapt, survive and live mainly in harmony with our natural surroundings. City life, by contrast, does not generally equip one for the hazards of nature. Trouble can arise when urbanites visit the countryside expecting all the predictable facets of suburban life. When I looked after a couple of holiday homes in the area to supplement my wages as a writer in the days before Her (now His) Majesty’s Government decided to pay me monthly for being old, there was a family from south-east London that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mike Leigh play… Not long after settling them in and showing them the ropes, I was summoned one evening to face a barrage of complaints from Mother, Father and Grandmother, provoked by an invasion of flies. They took me outside and showed me the back wall of the house where, for some reason best known to themselves and certainly not in this case the lure of an artificial hormone, local flies had gathered en masse. They took it as a slur on the cleanliness of the house. I sympathised with them and grovelled abjectly, but there was really little to be done. If you live in the middle of nowhere, there will be flies. Yet they honestly expected me to call the French equivalent of Rentokil to spray the entire wall with something noxious. By the time I made my apologies and slinked away, I was ready to slap them, one and all.

Similarly, wasps will gather around a swimming pool in search of water. What realistically can you do? In the other house I managed, some nouveau riche Liverpudlian toe-rag gave me a dressing down in front of his (rather more pleasant and probably abused) wife as if I personally had summoned the wasps to disturb his post-meridian aperitif by the pool. Were it not for the fact that he was nearly twice my size and would probably deck me, I would have expressed a wish that he would die soon.

I’ve spent half my life in various big cities and the other half in the heart of the heart of the countryside. Both have taught me some important life-lessons. Among others, city life taught me how to use public transport, which areas to avoid at night and where to find the best music bargains, but I’ve actually learnt many more practical lessons since Iiving in the countryside. This recent one I feel compelled to pass on: never check an underground meter till spring has passed. Let slumbering serpents snooze.