Let’s face it, most of us have been there, packed sardine-like in the car, luggage carefully crammed into every conceivable convenient corner, if not three, at least two kids in the back whinging about how long will it be and
“are we there yet?”
You could be going anywhere, the sea side, nanna and granddad’s or even on your way to the airport, when, just at the least helpful moment, just when you don’t need to hear it...
“I need a wee wee!”
Panic-stricken, you have to make a split decision. Do I slam on the anchor and reverse back to the lay-by one hundred yards gone or thrust the accelerator through the floor to get to the next possible safe place to stop before the flood gates burst?
You might think we are the only members of the animal kingdom to go through this coming of age initiation ceremony, but you’d be wrong!
Early this morning whilst hanging out the washing (I’m a new man – apparently), I was quite stunned to see a pile of “clotted water” dumped unceremoniously in the corner of the deflated children’s paddling pool, that I still hadn’t gotten around to putting away since the end of our torturously short summer last year.
Whilst pegging out various pairs of pants I was instantly transported back to two simultaneous locations: my childhood and my favourite part of the English GCSE that I used to teach – Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist, to which I shall treat you now; I hope you enjoy it.
Death of a Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the bank. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The flattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass and the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
Seamus Heaney
I had this delightful little poem going in my head as I hung the last pair of odd socks that were forlornly hoping to be reunited with their dry counterparts in the airing cupboard. Standing back to admire my handiwork I spied the ideal container to use to safely move the spawn to my little water feature – a cheap plastic ersatz half barrel that is wonderfully unkempt with lots of algae and a daring blue water iris tempting a frosty fate by poking its tender little green spears above the water level, the sides of which are coated in acres of green sustenance for the anticipated arrivals.
Safely transferred I mused the scenario of the male frog clamped to the female, driving their froggy equivalent of my 806, her complaining to him, “Are we there yet?” Then sending him into overdrive, by declaring “I need to spawn!”
I can see him now screeching up beside the flat blue paddling pool.
“Ere you go luv, this’ll do!”
As they say in the frog world, “When you gotta spawn, you gotta spawn!”
