Margaret in the Window

I was bitten on a Wednesday in October, reaching behind a bag of compost in the shed for a pair of secateurs I'd been blaming my husband for losing.

It felt like a hot needle. I yanked my hand back, swore loudly enough to bring him out of the house, and saw her sitting on the rim of a plant pot. Glossy, dark, round as a coffee bean, with pale markings on her back. She didn't run. She looked, if a spider can look like anything, mildly put out.

Within the hour the back of my hand had swollen up like a rubber glove someone had blown into.

The internet made it worse, as I did what everyone does. I sat at the kitchen table with a bag of frozen peas on my hand and typed "spider bite UK swollen" into my phone.

The headlines arrived in a flood. Killer spiders invading British homes. A false widow epidemic. A man who'd nearly lost a leg. Schools closed for fumigation. By the time I got to the photographs I'd convinced myself I had about a week left.

The pharmacist was less dramatic. She looked at my hand, asked if I'd seen the spider, nodded at my description, and told me it was almost certainly a false widow. Clean it, antihistamine, keep an eye on it, come back if a red line starts creeping up your arm. She'd seen three that month.

The swelling went down in three days. My opinion of spiders took considerably longer.

For the next year I was unreasonable. Anything with more than six legs in the house went up the hoover nozzle, and I didn't care whose ecosystem I was wrecking. I wore gardening gloves to fetch the post. I shook out my wellies before putting them on like someone in an Australian safety video.

The shed got a full clear-out. My husband watched me approach it with a torch and a long stick and said nothing, which was wise.

It was the following year when I met another one. She'd built a messy, tangled web in the corner of the kitchen window, the scrappy kind that looks like someone dropped a cobweb and walked off. I recognised the shape straight away. I went for the hoover and then, for reasons I still can't fully explain, didn't use it.

Maybe I was tired of being frightened in my own kitchen. I put the kettle on and watched her instead.

She did almost nothing for days. Then a bluebottle hit the web, and she came out of her corner fast and neat, and dealt with it in a way I found genuinely impressive. I'd been swatting flies in that kitchen all summer and losing.

So I read about her. Properly this time, the slow way, not the tabloids.

The noble false widow, Steatoda nobilis, comes from Madeira and the Canary Islands and probably arrived in Britain on cargo ships. The first recorded sighting was in Torquay in 1879. That's not an invasion, that's a spider that has been quietly living here since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

They are among the few British spiders that can bite through human skin, and they do bite sometimes, usually when someone presses or squashes them by accident. Which is precisely what I did, wedging my hand behind a compost bag into her home. For most people a bite feels like a bee or wasp sting and settles in a few days. Serious reactions do happen but they're rare, and a lot of the cases in the papers turned out to involve infections or other causes entirely.

She has eight eyes and still can't see very well. She eats flies, woodlice, mosquitoes and sometimes other spiders. The females can live for several years, which means the one in my window might well have been there longer than my kettle.

I had spent a year treating her as a monster. She had spent the same year eating the flies off my fruit bowl.

She stayed in the window all winter. I named her Margaret, after nobody in particular, and checked on her with my morning tea. When she finally disappeared in spring I was a bit sad about it, which would have astonished the woman with the frozen peas.

I'm not going to pretend I love spiders now. I still jump if one runs across the bath. But I wear gloves in the shed because that's sensible, and I move compost bags slowly, and when I find one of those glossy dark coffee beans in a corner, I leave her where she is.

She was only ever defending the one corner of the world she had. I can respect that. I've reached for a pair of secateurs in a dark place and found out exactly how it feels to be on the wrong end of someone else's home.