At the secondary school where I normally work as a librarian, I take key workers’ and other children on a “nature mooch”. We undull our senses. Outside the closed-off science block, we make “deer’s ears”, cupping our hands behind our ears and directing them at the noisy rookery-nursery. There are gasps at the enhanced volume.
We wander to the edges of the playing field, bordering farmland, and hear a skylark singing at what would be the height of the 100m sprint track, were it placed upright. We find muntjac slots – tiny, paired deer hoofprints – a badger-boundary latrine and consider the phrase “ecological niche” when a kite tussles midair with a buzzard. There is a brief, talon-grappling fall through the air, before the birds are back in their own territorial airspace.
I had wanted to show them slow-worms, Anguis fragilis. I know where they are, but we run out of time.
I am assailed by a memory, walking my middle child to her last day at primary school. A slow-worm crossed our path and she picked it up. It wrapped its strong, burnished-copper body round her thin wrist like a protective amulet. We admired its faint, Mona Lisa smile, watched it blink and found its ears – pencilled brackets around its head; things that mark it out as a lizard, not a snake.
More recently, revising Macbeth for a GCSE she will never sit, my daughter and I realised that the witches’ ingredient of a “blind worm’s sting” was the shed end of the slow-worm’s autotomised tail. It prompted the same memory in her, of her last day at primary school, and produced fresh tears at the denial of her last day at secondary school.
The students and I exchange pledges to stay safe. On the way home, there is a slow-worm on the dusty, deserted road: a school ruler’s length of rope, which I might have missed had I not half expected to see one. I stop and pick it up. It coils its cool, tubular body around my wrist, just as one did my daughter’s all those years ago.
With a greyer, polished, blue-flecked body, this one is a male. I wait for it to blink and release it, like a slipped bracelet, among the violets on the bank.
