He Had a Queer Aversion for Slugs

I had a friend at Oxford, a big strapping lad by the name of Hale; Joseph Hale. He used to get called Hearty on campus. Hale and Hearty. It wasn’t much of a nickname but none of them were. I went by Zimmo, for obvious reasons and, even now, when I bump into any of the old guard, up in London or down at Cheltenham during racing season, I’m still Zimmo to them. I daresay Hearty would be Hearty too, though they’re unlikely to run into him. Last thing I heard he was out in the colonies. He’d married a local girl and settled there. No doubt he now goes by his proper name.

Anyway, Hearty was a decent chap. A solid scrum half and a regular whizz when it came to the books. He used to ace all his papers with practically no prep. He had a full scholarship in Latin and postgraduate offers from several Ivy League outfits in the States. A chap like that, might well have been a tad full of himself. But not old Hearty. He was a down to earth sort of fellow, always the first to get a round in, always asking after your folks and such a gent when it came to the ladies. Everybody loved Hearty and Hearty loved the world and all that was in it with one small, slimy exception. Hearty had a queer aversion for slugs.

We could easily have spent four long years living in each others’ pockets and never discovered this; slugs were not the sort of things which came up regularly in conversation and Hearty wouldn’t have gone out of his way to introduce the topic. But it just so happened that our third year digs were infested with the blighters. Four of us had taken a house in a backstreet near the library and were endeavouring to pass ourselves as modern men, cooking, cleaning and generally doing for ourselves. The cleaning was non-existent. The doing was going much better, with a veritable stream of young ladies keeping the upstairs landing in business. The cooking, we struggled with, yet persevered: boiling, roasting, frying and occasionally nipping down to the phone box on the corner to consult a distant mother about the difference between Fahrenheit and Centigrade or how to rescue watery gravy. Our main problem was the facilities. The kitchen was damp, mouldy and blessed with a two inch gap between the door and back step, through which crawled mice, bugs, spiders and slugs, all making a nightly assault upon our larder.

The first down each morning would have to pick the slugs off the larder door in order to get to the cornflakes contained therein. Though unpleasant, three of us managed this task manfully, armed with nothing but a pair of sugar tongs. Hearty, on the other hand, did not do well with slug-duty and could be found cowering in the corner, brandishing a rolled up copy of The Guardian if and when he was unfortunate enough to arrive first in the kitchen. It was odd to find all six foot two of him, tucked behind the table, quivering and terrified by a creature so small and insignificant. At first, we joshed him dreadfully. We hid slugs in his bed, left slugs in the bathtub and even, placed a pair of the boyos in his lunchbox, right next to his ham sandwiches. Later, when we came to realise this was no joking matter and Hearty was liable to pass out at the mere sight of a slug, we felt bad about this, especially the ham sandwiches.

However, everyone had their own queer obsession -Lester was the dickens for shoplifting lipsticks, Buff was always eating onions raw and me? I was battling a crippling fear of stairs which left me sleeping on the lounge sofa for much of my final term- we were inclined to give Hearty and his slugs a bit of grace and would have done so if we’d not found out about the salt. It was one thing to turn apoplectic at the merest mention of a slug, another thing entirely to keep a ring of salt around your bed, for fear of being attacked in the night. It was not the salt itself we objected to, nor even the hysteria it represented, so much as the way it had stained the bedroom carpet. We knew the landlord would never return our deposit and, though now it seems, unnecessarily cruel, used this as an excuse to boot poor Hearty out before his slug fixation grew worse. Last thing I heard he was looking to move somewhere warmer; somewhere decidedly less sluggish. 

We felt bad for a few days, then swiftly forgot about Hearty. Our new housemate Rolly was a laugh a minute. As far as we could see there was nothing queer about him. He was studying geography. He had a beard. Time would prove us wrong. When the first body turned up in the backyard we began to see Hearty in a whole different light. We wondered why we’d been so hard on him. We’d have covered the entire house in salt for a housemate who wasn’t a serial killer; we’d have picked the slugs off the floor with our bare hands.

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1942 novel Five Little Pigs