Read Snuff Fiction for Free Online Page B

had to be careful of. Snakes and the beetles that bite.
    Of snakes there was much common lore, which was passed mouth to ear in the playground. All snakes were deadly and all snakes must die, it was get them before they got you.
    Gunnersbury Park was the best place for snakes, or the
worst place,
perhaps I should say. It was well understood that the park fairly heaved with the buggers. They dangled from the trees, great anacondas and pythons, lurking camouflaged amongst the leaves, eager to take the heads off foolish children who dawdled underneath. The ornamental pond and boating lake were homes to water vipers, slim as hair and fast as Stirling Moss.
    It was well known that if you took a piddle in the boating lake, they would swim up the stream of pee and enter your knob. Once inside they blocked the passage and you filled up with pee and died. The only cure was a terrible one: they had to cut off your willy.
    Snakes loved to get inside you by whatever means they could. A boy from Hanwell, it was said, had taken a nap in the park and slept with his mouth open. An adder had slipped down his throat and taken up residence in his stomach. The boy, unaware of this, had eventually woken up and gone home. He was soon taken poorly, however. No matter how much food he now ate he remained all sickly and thin and complained of great churnings in the gut. His worried mother took him to the doctor, who placed his hand upon the boy’s stomach and realized the awful truth.
    This boy was lucky, for he didn’t die. The doctor starved him for two days, then wedged his mouth open and hung a piece of raw meat above it. The hungry adder smelled the meat and came up for a bite. The doctor was able to drag it out of the boy’s mouth and kill it.
     
    The snake was now preserved in a jar and many claimed to have seen it.
    My friend Billy (who knew more than was healthy for one of his age) said that the story was palpable nonsense. In his opinion the boy would have choked to death had the adder been lured out of his throat.
    Billy said that it came out of his bum.
    But the threat was real enough and no one napped in Gunnersbury Park.
    I do have to say that although I spent a great deal of my childhood in that park, I never actually saw a snake myself.
    Which was very lucky for me.
    The other great danger was beedes that bite. Earwigs were the most common, for, as everybody knows, these crawl into your ear at night and lay their eggs in your brain. Our local loony bin, St Bernard’s, was well stocked with incurable victims of the earwig. Their horrible howls could be heard in the night, as these cranial parasites drove them to distraction with their gnawings and scurryings.
    Stag beetles were deadly and could take your finger off.
    Red ants could strip a grown man down to the bone in less time than it would take his wife to boil a kettle of water.
    Various spiders lived beneath the toilet seat, ever anxious to scuttle up your bottom and more than three bee stings would kill you for sure.
    What with the snakes and the beetles that bit, it was a miracle that any of us lived to see our teens. But most of us somehow did and this was probably down to either good fortune in avoiding the snakes and the beetles, or to our good health, which was down to our diet.
    We were smitten by disease and by personal vennin that bit like the very devil himself, but although the occasional epidemic wiped out a class or two here and there, our year survived all but unscathed.
    And this was down to our diet.
    It was not down to the diet our parents provided, the cabbage and sprouts and the rest. It was down to the extras we fed to ourselves. It was all down to the sweeties.
    Now, it is no coincidence that we lose our taste for sweeties upon reaching puberty. [2] This is the time when we lose that ten per cent of our sense of colour and sound and smell without our even noticing. This is the time of the stirring loins, when sweeties lose their attraction.
    You see, our