FROGS !

Another posting specially for Gonk

This is culled from one of my other blogs, an autobiographical work in progress at the moment, it might be a bit disjointed, but you might recognise the subject matter.

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The ‘Dell’

When you grow up in the country there is one thing that you never really appreciate and that’s the countryside, it’s just there, all the time.

When visitors approach our house the thing that they notice is that it is framed from behind by large hill covered in trees. There seems to have always been an irresistible urge that affects first time visitors and it draws them to go into our back garden, to look at the countryside.

I’d often cycle up the road to see unfamiliar vehicles parked at the end of our front lawn and drift into the house to find my parents sitting alone with an extra four or five unused teacups on the table to be told that some group of aunties and uncles had arrived for a visit and were admiring the ‘magnificent’ view from the back garden.

It didn’t take long for this sort of thing to become just another normal, if eccentric, part of normal life, it was no more strange to me than the absolute certainty that aunties and uncles from Yorkshire always arrived exactly at the same time and that each pair would arrive simultaneously in their own car, even when they brought their entire family with them the children were never distributed between the available vehicles. Some of my uncles had enormous cars with a single child sprawling about on the back seat, others transported what seemed like an entire tribal group in a tiny car.

The relatives, at least one of whom had never visited us before, used to crowd around the back garden gate in admiration of the magnificent vista while mum and dad sat at the table watching the equally magnificent teapot, the one that only came out if we had visitors, going rapidly colder. It was a wonderful teapot, very 1960s, the shape of a flying saucer, it had a small base and a dainty lid, but it ballooned out in the middle so that although it was about eight inches high, it was well over a foot round. If someone had wanted to design a teapot that couldn’t keep the tea hot, this was it, too big for everyday use but just the right capacity for having ‘company’ to tea.

If it was one of the occasions when cousins had been brought to visit, they too would make a bee line for the garden gate, not to admire the view but get beyond the confines of the garden in order to explore the part of the field immediately behind our house. We called it ‘the Dell’ even though it was just a waterlogged hole in the ground shaded by the surrounding oak trees and filled by a trickle of water from a small spring a couple of hundred yards further up the field. The Dell was the ultimate children’s’ adventure playground, it was a wet and muddy place that, at the right time of the year, had an abundance of frogspawn to play with and, what was more, in the optimum season it was full of frogs. There was always a scramble of cousins trying to find a pair of Wellington boots so as to be able to wade out into the water, some even started to bring their own wellies with them. That is not to say that wellies were any protection in the Dell, because, as evryone knows, water will always find its own level, and in the Dell the water level was always just over the top of any pair of wellingtons that walked into it.

A few years ago one of my cousins brought my aunty and uncle on a flying visit to see my mum, I knew that we had visitors, none of the locals would dare park in my parking space and there was a strange car in it when I drove up the road. I came in to find my mum drinking tea with my aunty and uncle, all chatting away around a coffee table that had an extra cup of tea on it, “He’s in the garden.” My uncle said to me during a gap in the conversation.

I went out into the back garden to find one of the frog catching cousins that I had splashed around with in the Dell over thirty years before looking over the garden gate with a far away look in his eyes. When he realised that I was there he said, “I wish I’d brought my wellies.”

The ‘Swamp’

Dad wasn’t fond of the Dell, you could tell because he called it ‘the swamp.’

The truth was a little more complex. It was not that he didn’t like the Dell so much as he was not entirely enamoured of its inhabitants. I found this out, much to my amusement, when dad found the ancient white enamelled laundry bucket, complete with matching lid, hidden under a pile of leaves behind the garden shed, I might have noted earlier that dad was just a little inquisitive, so, finding a bucket hidden in a pile of leaves, autumn leaves that should by all accounts have been long gone, he decided to take the lid off of the bucket. If he had been a little more observant he might have seen that the lid had been very well punctured, he might have deduced that the punctures were to allow air into the bucket, but he didn’t and he removed the lid.

In the kitchen, mum heard the most blood curdling scream and it was followed by dad running in the back door and through into the front room where she found him sitting in his armchair hiding behind a very shaky newspaper.

“What’s happened?” Mum asked him, concerned as to his plight. Eventually there came a reply.

“Frogs.” Was all he said.

My dad had been ‘Out East’ in Burma and India during ‘The war,’ he had an infinite supply of war stories about jungle warfare, but it turned out he had a deep, dark secret, known only to my mum and him, he was afraid of nothing, except frogs.

When we first saw the television series ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ about an army concert party in the Far East during ‘The war,’ one of the soldiers looked suspiciously like dad, rising to his full height of just over five feet from his boots to oversized solar toupee Gunner Sugden of the Royal Artillery was the image of my father as a young man.

He might never have lived this down if, in later years he had never grown a moustache, because he reinvented himself militarily to become an almost exact facsimile of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army.

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