Life in Britain
Reinterpreting the Nature of Britain
How moving to London forced me to re-examine the symbols of my childhood
I think it started with the snails.
I can still remember the time I stepped out the door of my first London house and felt the eggshell-crunch of a snail under my foot. I recoiled, alternating between curses and apologies. With a horrified shiver, I understood that rainy weather in Britain meant playing a game of dodge-the-snail every time you leave the house.
I had rarely seen snails in Ontario. Certainly not on the streets of Toronto. They were there, of course, but not like London. Not marching across the pavements in their thousands on every rainy evening. Not climbing the brickwork and eating the flowers and sealing themselves into their shells, hanging upside down on the inside of rubbish-bin lids during the day. According to one estimate, “…there are several thousand gastropods lurking in the average British garden.” Just one garden.
I thought of the dozens of books and illustrations that featured children in wellies frolicking among happy snails. As a child, I’d seen similar images over and over. Snails were associated with rain. It was a kind of unspoken, but fanciful, rule that didn’t really translate into my own experience…
