But now the time had arrived for me to return to my work in Scotland as soon as Irma came back from Belgium to take charge of her wayward teenage daughter. but first I had to make all kinds of plans to make my house and what was inside safe, as there was a lot of burglaries around just lately. We have a man called Zhivago, who runs a gangster outfit, and he gets the youngsters onto drugs, and then make them steal, after which he sold the stuff and provide the youngsters with drugs.
He also, according to the villagers, have a few murders on his list, and although he went to jail for a few years, he was out again, and now the burglaries and beating up of people had again begun! But strangely enough, nobody had ever touched my little house, and I am sometimes away for up to eight months.
But my curiosity was satisfied when one morning, as I was trying to work out how to best cover my frost prone plants with shading net to protect them, a car stopped at my gate, and a smartly dressed brown man came up to me, and after introducing himself, he told me that he loved my house, but didn't buy it because of the snake!
I was a bitty dumb struck for a moment, and all kinds of weird thoughts crossed my mind, like the strange noises I sometimes hear in the roof, but I pretended to know what he was talking about! After making some smalltalk for a few minutes, the man left, but I saw him look back at me with a strange, puzzled kind of look on his face before getting into his car and drive off.
The next day Charmaine came to help me a bit, and I asked her about it, and she went kind of grey, and said that the people do believe that a huge snake was living under the thatch, and they couldn't believe that I wasn't killed yet. She helped me pack up a lot of stuff, but when I asked her to get up the ladder and put some of the boxes on my platform I had made by putting an old door on the rafters, she flatly refused.
I tried to tease her, but she just went all silent, and told me not to talk so loud about the snake, as he might get cross and come for both of us.
I knew that the villagers were scared of snakes, but thought that owls really freaked them out, as once when an owl sat on my fence, there was consternation, and nobody walked on the road passing my house for about a week, and when they started again, they threw kind of scared looks my way.
Then I began thinking of the strange looks people sometimes gave me, and how Danny's children would stand staring at me quite fearfully, and I realized that this people might think that I was a witch!
But If they thought that I was happy enough, as they would then not break into my house, as long as they don't decide to burn me on a stake!