The palm tree was not the sort that you find on tropical beaches. It had no trunk to speak of, so its crown was only about eight feet high, while its lower branches hung outwards just a few feet above the ground. Its squat relations were crouched in the grassland leading down to the lagoon at regular intervals, black mounds dotted among the grass gleaming grey in the moonlight.

Kofi and I quietly approached, and saw the snake that was lying across one of the horizontal branches, apparently asleep and certainly quite unaware of our presence. I got the net out, and we prepared to throw it over the snake, but I was apprehensive about the operation because I could not tell what sort of snake it was in the dim light, and Kofi operated on the sensible assumption that any snake is dangerous, and was therefore more nervous than I was.

Eventually, we screwed up our courage and dragged the net across the branch outwards so that the snake fell to the ground enmeshed in its folds. It immediately started thrashing about while I tried to wrap up the net and get it into the bag that Kofi was holding open. One end of the snake, draped in white netting, wiggled before me, but was it the head or the tail? If I grabbed the tail, the snake would know where to bite its assailant, and I hesitated for an instant, after which the net was suddenly empty.

We searched for our prey in the short grass but it had disappeared, and we resumed our wander across the savannah, silver-grey in moonshine. I was disappointed that we had not succeeded in catching the snake, but my disappointment was mingled with relief that we had survived our foolhardiness unscathed …….

One evening, a few days after I came to live in Cheshire in the early 1970s, I was explaining to a stocky bearded Welshman from Anglesey to whom I had just been introduced in the bar of the Verdin Arms, how I missed the African wildlife. 

“It’s a bit of a wrench coming back to this country, Francis, when we had geckos patrolling the ceiling, terrapins in the muddy pool just outside the front gate, puff adders in the ditch beside the road to the school, and an annual deer festival where the local people went out at dawn to catch deer with their bare hands” I moaned. “There’s nothing here but houses, roads and fields”. I spoke as someone who had lived in towns and lived a quite blinkered life as far as wildlife was concerned before moving with my young family to Ghana for three years.

Francis nodded in agreement at my grossly exaggerated description of the plentitude of wildlife on the edge of a small African town, and then diffidently said “Mind you, I went with a chap to watch badgers a couple of years ago.” My interest engaged immediately, I cross-questioned him about it, and extracted a promise that he would take me to the wood in question the following weekend.

And so, a few days later, the two of us sat in a wood just outside town on an early Spring evening, beside several holes in a bank with great mounds of earth forming a sort of stage before them. In Africa, I had learned the pleasure of listening and watching the rest of Life getting on with its business. As we sat there with the light fading, the birds singing their songs and listening to other strange sounds of woodland life, I realized that the same pleasure was available in this country as well. There, with everything around me novel and interesting, I had looked at the world with eyes which were open to what they were seeing, after living for years in Britain in a world which seemed familiar, undramatic and unsurprising.

No badgers appeared. As we made our way back to the car, Francis was apologetic, insisting that he really had seen badgers emerge from that sett a couple of years ago. Elated by the experience and contemplation of an English wood at dusk, I would have none of his apology. We discussed why they had not come up, surmised that they might have heard us coming, that perhaps the alarm calls of birds put them off, and arranged to try again the following weekend.

In fact, we tried again for several weekends, saw no badgers on each occasion, and eventually came to the conclusion that the sett was empty.