Night Train to Jamalpur(66)

I skipped further down the column on which this last appeared – it was page 33 of the March 1897 issue – and there was the name I was looking for, but not quite the query I had been lead to expect:

Douglas Poole (Walthamstow) wants information respecting the keeping of an adder.

An adder: a poisonous – or rather a venomous – snake, and not the harmless grass snake that Poole had mentioned as being the subject of the correspondence.

Edward Step, F.L.S. replied:

I am not sure it is such a very good idea to keep an adder as a pet. The snake is a small but true viper, and known to be irascible. Adders may strike without warning when handled, and human envenomation from adders results in about a dozen fatalities a year, while deaths among pet dogs run into the many hundreds. I cannot imagine where Master Poole found his adder. In the wilds of Walthamstow presumably, since they are not sold in any pet shop of the normal kind . . .

Further down the page, Mr Step did stoop to answering the question, albeit briefly, as if washing his hands of the matter:

The snake wants a sunny house, floored with gravel, and with bathing arrangements.

I heard a loud ‘How’s tricks, Jim!’ from the doorway, and Dougie Poole himself was walking, somewhat erratically, towards me. I hastily flipped over the pages of The Captain, so that he found me something on ‘The Stamps of Japan’, or so I hoped.

‘Your girl’s over at our place,’ he said, as I stood up and shook his hand.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Good.’

‘Glass of fizzle? I’ve a bottle on the go in the liquor bar. You a philatelist on the side?’ he enquired, as we made for the door of the reading room.

‘Come again?’ I said, and then I clicked: the Japanese stamps. ‘Passing interest, you know.’

The Captains had been bound in blue, whereas I had usually seen them bound in maroon, and they had not been loudly announced as collected Captains, but only by small gold lettering on the spine. Therefore Poole might not have stumbled upon the name of the publication I was reading.

‘Philately will get you nowhere,’ Dougie Poole said, and he smiled rather sadly as we took our seats in the ram-packed bar. Half the bottle was left; Poole signalled for another glass. He was no advertisement for champagne-drinking, and I insisted he give me no more than half a glass.

‘What’s the celebration Dougie?’ I asked.

‘Oh, life itself. Being alive, you know.’

‘And not being . . . envenomated.’

He pulled a mournful face worthy of Leno himself. ‘Why did we colonise a country that had those bloody things in it? All wrong, Jim, all wrong.’

‘But you know snakes,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘when I was a boy I had a vivarium.’

‘A what?’

‘Just like an aquarium, Jim, only without water. A harmless little ringed snake I had in there, I think. One and six from a shop in Seven Dials.’

At the Debating Society dance, he’d said it was a grass snake; and on the pages of The Captain that I’d looked at a moment ago it had been an adder.

‘What did you feed it on?’

‘At first, newts. But that was an accident. I mean, I kept the newts in a vivarium, and Gregory ate them.’

‘Hold on. Who was Gregory?’

‘The snake. Then I got in frogs.’

‘Where did you find the frogs?’

‘In spring there’s plenty of frogs all over the place, Jim. You go to, you know, a pond.’

‘But the rest of the year?’

‘The shop in Seven Dials. About thruppence a piece – far too much for a frog if you ask me. Fortunately, snakes don’t need much feeding; go without for days on end. They’re rather ascetic chaps; don’t even need much air. Perfectly content just being in your pocket for a day, and that’s where I kept him.’

Whether by accident or design, he was muddying the waters. I decided to make my shot. ‘But you wrote to a magazine about snakes, you said?’

‘I was forever writing away for enlightenment when I was a lad, Jim. Did you ever read the Sunday Strand? There was a fellow in there called the Old Fag or some such thing. Back page. You’d write to him for advice.’

‘On what subject?’

‘Life. He was an expert on life, Jim. So I dropped him a line. I’d be fifteen or so. It was after I got my start on the railway, anyhow.’

‘Which railway, Dougie?’

‘Oh, London, Brighton and South Coast. I found office work rather slow, so I sent in a card to the Old Fag saying I’d always fancied myself doing something else: acting, for preference, or writing books. Well, he came down like a ton of coal on the acting. A wandering and uncertain life, dubious company; engaged for three months, and out for six, and so on.’