Vipers Long Ago to HERE are hardly any snakes in
the part of England where I live, and when I was a boy I regretted this very much. I was keen on snakes. In retrospect it seems likely that my choice of this aberrant hobby was in Part due to a desire to be different. At my private school the two recognised things to 'collect' were birds' eggs and butter- flies. What might be described as the Bullingdon set went in for birds' eggs; the dimmer, worthier boys collected butterflies. I collected snakes. Beside's the desire to epater, illegality added a certain relish to this pursuit; fOr we were not unnaturally forbidden to have anything to do with the adders which were fairly common in that region of Dorset. Apart, however, from these unworthy Impulses snakes 'really did have a fascination for me. They are of course extremely beautiful creatures. A grass-snake swimming in clear water is a sight at once infinitely graceful aind mildly mysterious; and at this time of year, when it has s'oughed its old skin and the black zigzag down its spine shows UP against silvery green scales, an adder coiled on sunlit turf is none the less lovely for being sinister at the same time. My mania, which absorbed most of my spare time during the summer terms, expressed itself in two ways : I kept grass- ‘s.nakes, and I killed adders and skinned them. I usually had three or four grass-snakes at a time. They lived in an old play- box and were fed at irregular intervals with frogs and also, I am sorry to say, with nestlings taken from the hedges. These hapless creatures were left in the playbox and. although the 'inakes took no interest in them while one was watching, by the next morning they had vanished and the circumference of one or more of the snakes had increased. Snakes. I soon discovered; are not much help if you want ," win friends and influence people. When, at the Parents' Wicket Match, in .my first year, I proudly produced my not serpent for inspection by my mother, even I could 0(It help noticing a certain lack of true rapture in her exclama- .'ons of delight; nor did I fail to mark the looks of horror and disgust from the Mums in adjacent deck-chairs. But the universal unpopularity of my dumb friends was not always a dead loss. Once, travelling home for the holidays, I ecided that the most efficient way of transporting snakes 0" bu (so to speak) the hoof was to carry them in my sponge- ag, a handy receptacle in which I could at a moment's notice sati -s.Y myself as to their welfare. The journey was a long ()nc, the train crowded. There came a moment when, glancing a Pwards at the rack, I saw that the snakes had made a bid for freedom and were undulating with their usual air of clueless but dignified composure above the heads of the passengers o1utlding pposite. Muttering apologies, I recaptured them. Character- is perhaps the best epithet with ,which to describe the experience of putting, at the age of eleven, three grass-snakes into one sponge-bag in a railway compartment full of angry tits; but after the next stop we had the carriage to ourselves. Killing adders was the nearest one could get to big-game bh 'uting at that age. They never, in my experience, attacked, 2t When cornered they struck fiercely at the stick you were of at them with and you felt at times uneasily aware "hit Your bare legs and gym-shoes. Moreover they were not tventiful nor easy to surprise; they generally lay coiled up on the of a patch of brambles or gorse or near a pile of rocks. and speed were needed to intercept them before they slithered into cover. Snakes are the easiest of all animals to skin. You simply slit diem down the belly with a pair of scissors and peel them like a banana; then you tack the skin on to a board to dry and rub alum into it. Early in the summer an adder-skin is a pretty thing. But soon the silvery-green changes to pale yellow or pale olive green and after that gets steadily darker, so that the smart black zigzag markings merge into it and by August most adders look drab and unremarkable.
It was probably pride rather than filial piety which made me send my first skin home as a present to my mother. She professed herself delighted with it and in a rash moment wrote that she was having it made into a bandeau, a circlet-like arrangement with which at that period ladies sometimes bound their tresses. Dimly apprehending that women like to have several different specimens of the same thing (such as a hat or a skirt) to choose from, I sent her more adder-skins.
Summer terms last a long time. Perhaps the skins faded, or stank; perhaps the fashion changed. At any rate, when we were at length reunited, I observed with chagrin that my mother's brows were not bound with the spoils of the chase; and though 1 seem to remember that she did once put the bandeau on for my benefit, it was clear that my contributions to her wardrobe had not been of a fundamental nature.
I had a friend who used to come adder-hunting with me. and we formed the ambition—which, though common among big-game hunters today, was not so then—to take a photo- graph .of our quarry. It was quite difficult to get near enough to an adder to hit it with a stick; it proved quite impossible to take a photograph of it with what I think was called a Box Brownie. So after much thought, and not without twinges of our artistic conscience, we decided that the only thing to do was to abandon all hope of photographing an adder in its natural surroundings and to get one to pose (as it were) for us in a place from which it could not escape. The obvious choice for this venue was the squash-court.
By this time we had reached a fairly high standard of adder- manship. It was not long before we managed to pin one down with a forked stick, although it had been rather battered in the process. I got hold of it just behind the head and we carried it back to the school; for the last lap of the journey, across the playing-fields, we could be seen by authority, and I had to stuff the adder, still clutched convulsively by the throat, into my pocket.
By the time we reached the squash-court the unfortunate adder was in a bad way. It curled itself morosely up in the corner where we put it down and we duly took a photograph of it with the Box Brownie. When this was developed its subject was seen to be indistinguishable from a cowpat. After that we gave up trying to photograph snakes. STR1X
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