This article by Tom Sharpe was published in the Evening Standard on 20 October 1989.
Like a living Chamber of Horrors, London Zoo’s Reptile House fascinates and appals in equal measure. Novelist TOM SHARPE found it also made old memories come slithering back
It is, I am told, an established fact that people going to the zoo either make a beeline for the Reptile House or avoid the place like the plague. Frankly, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue.
In the 10 years I was in South Africa in an area supposedly pullulating with black mambas, I met only one snake and that was a mere stripling of a puff-adder that sent me hurrying out of a wood.
On the other hand, I do know what havoc snakes can play with some people’s psyches. I had a girlfriend in South Africa—come to think of it she was my fiancée—and trying to think of something to amuse her one Saturday, I took her along to the Durban Snake Park.
Now the Snake Park is more or less what it says it is, an open space with one or two trees surrounded by a narrow moat filled with water and then a smooth wall to prevent the inmates climbing out.
At feeding time a bloke with leather gaiters and gloves came along with a large bucket of frogs and handed out the goodies to the assortment of puff-adders, cobras, ringhals and boomslangs who’d begun to feel a bit peckish.
The thing that kept the spectators busy laying bets was to see what sort of frog lasted longest, the introverted sort who sat dead still and pretended to be stones or the more athletic and extrovert ones who bounded away from one danger only to find themselves becoming a mouthful to some frightful cobra they hadn’t noticed.
I seem to remember putting my money on the shrewd frogs who headed for the moat and did their damnedest to imitate U-boats. Not that it helped much because there were always one or two snakes swimming round and round and in the end…
Anyway to get back to the girlfriend, we’d hardly taken our places with the punters when a puff-adder stuck its head and what in any other creature would be its shoulders out of a bush and I was lucky to catch the poor girl before she hit the concrete. Fainted clear away and only recovered when I had fanned her a bit.
Of course she broke off our engagement. Said she wouldn’t dream of marrying a bloke who was as insensitive as I was. Looking back on it, I can see there was a deeper psychological motive which had nothing to do with snakes at all. All the same I had nearly married someone who wouldn’t have entered the Reptile House.
An example of someone who’d have dashed into the place without a qualm has to be the first Mrs Sharpe. I remember all too clearly the day she was offered the python. It was a fair sized python too and I was damned if I was going to please the crowds by handling the thing. But she did. I mean she really did and came walking out with the creature coiled tamely round her neck as though it were nothing more unusual than a scarf.
I think that must have been the day I knew our marriage had to end. I could see I had taken on rather more than my match.
But even her preparedness to use snakes as drapes seems to have been exceeded over here. As one enters the Reptile House at the London Zoo the keen-eyed observer will notice a list. Two in fact, each naming people who have “adopted” every sort of reptile from alligators to skinks.
Don’t ask me why anyone should want to adopt an extremely poisonous snake, particularly one like the Gaboon viper that can kill with a mere drop of venom, grows to two metres and weighs 18lb, and looks absolutely frightful into the bargain. But people do.
Even more alarming is the ignorance exhibited by even the most eminent snake-lovers. Take the case of Dr K P Schmidt of the Chicago Field Museum and whoever sent him a boomslang to identify back in 1957.
Now any damned fool in South Africa could have told Dr Schmidt that boomslangs are poisonous. Even my 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica says so, but Dr Schmidt evidently hadn’t done his homework and was duly bitten by this irritated back-fanger.
According to the card outside the boomslang’s domicile in the Reptile House Dr Schmidt took 24 hours to die and kept a record of all his symptoms until he passed out. This has to take the crown for devotion to science.
But even this didn’t convince everyone that boomslangs were lethal and for some time afterwards they were still being sold by pet shops in this country and the US. Some people obviously take a long time to learn. Anyway I was glad to see that no one had adopted the mambas, black or green. Their reputations have gone before them.
The notice outside the black mamba’s home in the Reptile House has to admit that they frequently attack, that one black mamba killed a family of five in Natal and that they can travel across country at 12mph.
I thought it was gratuitous of them to add that they can go even faster downhill. In South Africa it was said that a mamba could keep up with a galloping horse. I wouldn’t quarrel with that.
I would on the other hand quarrel with the blighter who devised the section dealing with the effects of snake bite.
The colour photos count among the most grisly I’ve ever seen and have been enough to turn me into one of those millions who avoid the Reptile House like the plague.