Frogs and Toads by Paul May

On my allotment in Friern Barnet I have an old cast-iron bath. When Friern Hospital closed in 1993 an Italian named Mario laid claim to the bath, and transported it a few hundred metres to the allotment site. The hospital was originally known as Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and at one time had more than 2000 inmates and hundreds of staff.

There are many Italians who have allotment plots near mine. Many of them arrived after WW2 when the British government was recruiting staff for places like Friern Hospital. Others, like Mario, followed family members or friends who were already here. Mario came from Naples in the early 1960s to work on the hospital's farm. Yes, a farm! On its 75 acres the hospital had extensive workshops, kitchens, recreation grounds, a gasworks and a brewery. It had its own water supply, chapel and cemetery, and even its own railway station. Where once there was farmland, now there is a huge retail park stretching down to the North Circular Road. The hospital also had the longest corridor in Britain and quite a few cast-iron baths, one of which ended up on my allotment.

Source: Wellcome Collection

I took on the allotment in 2016. Half of it was then planted with grapevines which I quickly discovered had been planted by Mario. Apparently at one time the whole plot had been covered with vines. Mario had taken cuttings from a vine belonging to a neighbour of his with the intention of using the grapes to make wine, only to discover that these particular grapes were useless for winemaking. At one time he had cultivated three adjacent plots but now he only had the one next to mine, from which he dispensed horticultural advice to anyone who'd listen, and where he kept a vast collection of stuff that he'd salvaged from skips because it might come in handy one day. He had also salvaged the bath, which was now partly a water store and partly a seat. Mario sat down often because he was really very ill, but he continued coming to the allotment, digging and grumbling and dispensing unasked-for advice despite the efforts of his family to stop him. Looking at his plot, which, despite all the junk he'd collected, was very picturesque, a friend said to me that it could have been anywhere in rural Europe. 

Mario

It was to try to preserve something of that atmosphere that I took over Mario's plot, in addition to my own, after he died in 2019. I cleared all the junk and turned the bath into a pond. I'd already moved the bath once, from my plot to Mario's, but now I had it back again. I moved it to a new location and planted yellow flag iris and marsh marigold. I made a mound so that wildlife could get to the water, but recently I decided that it would be better if the bath was sunk into the ground, so I started clearing it out in order to move it. That was when I found the frogs. They keep themselves to themselves, those frogs. I never see them out and about, but there were at least four in the bath. Hopefully they've all survived their move to a new location.

I like to think that the frogs are like Arnold Lobel's famous Frog. I love the Frog and Toad books and I was delighted to discover, in a children's bookshop in Bologna, that they have been translated into Italian. It's very good fun reading a book like this, one that I could almost recite with my eyes closed, in another language. Toad sounds great in Italian: "Questa casa è un distastro. Ho un sacco di lavore di fare." It's almost better than the English.

And there's a great story for gardeners where Toad's seeds don't seem to be growing and he shouts at them so loudly that Frog tells him he's scaring them and he needs to leave them alone. Mario didn't need to be told how to grow things and he would no doubt have offered slightly scornful advice to Toad. Like most of my allotment neighbours who come from Kurdistan and Italy, Macedonia and Albania, for Mario growing his own food was just something you did, not a lifestyle choice. Perhaps that was why Mario was so keen to offer advice to those he thought were bungling part-timers. The trouble was, there was only one proper way to do things, and that was HIS way. He also ordered me not to cut the grassy path where the oregano was growing. He'd brought it all the way from the hills above Naples, but he really didn't need to worry about losing it because it has seeded itself everywhere. I also have a very fine white-flowered variety of oregano that was brought by another elderly Italian, Giacomo, from his home in Sicily. Giacomo has also since died. 

Most of the Italians are now in their 80s. Half a dozen have died in the ten years since I came to the allotments. But for at least two of them their memory is preserved in the plants that they brought with them from their childhood homes, and that are now flourishing in North London. And the memory of London's most famous lunatic asylum is preserved in a pond in a bath. The asylum was once a byword or perhaps a synonym for lunacy, and even gets a mention in a children's book. "Three cheers for the Hempress of Colney 'atch," jeer the Londoners in The Magician's Nephew when Jadis, escaped from Narnia, proclaims herself Empress.

Oregano from Naples

Oregano from Sicily

The bath in its new location

* There is a famous philosophical article inspired by the Frog and Toad story Cookies entitled Frog and Toad Lose Control by Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith which is only available via subscription to JSTOR, but there are also numerous discussions of the story online, and if you search hard enough you might even be able to find the mentioned article republished somewhere. I know I did manage to read it once.

Writing in the 'cracks', frogs, Portia and pencils.

Recently I’ve been very busy teaching, haven’t had much time to write and am alternating between feeling guilty that I haven’t made time to do so or that I have just plain written so little recently. I’m moderately long in the tooth so I have been here before and struggled with the sense of inertia I now have about getting started again… yet again. I’ve just looked through my notes and found a couple of sentences I wrote down in a hurry, a week or two ago, which related to an idea I know I was quite excited about at the time. Now I can’t for the life of me work out what these now apparently random scribblings indicate! Should have got on with writing the piece then and there! Doh!

Fortunately, some wise words that have sustained me through periods like this come to mind. Once before, when I was complaining to friend about lack of time to focus on my writing, he told me about an article he had read written by a busy working mum and author. Apparently, she talked about how she wrote in the ‘cracks’ by which she meant the small slices of time she had available in between juggling the scores of tasks she had to get done each day. To her surprise she had found that despite only being able to work on a project intermittently and for short periods that she was able to pick up the threads of the piece she was working on surprisingly quickly each time and that she could seamlessly add a little more to it each time, with the result that it slowly built up into a coherent whole rather than reading as if it had been patched together randomly. Inspired by her example I cautiously attempted to start writing a story in this piecemeal manner. Naturally I expected that as I would be in a different mood, in a different creative space, even in a different location when I worked on it each time that the story would read as if it had been thrown together like a collage made at a nursery but surprisingly it worked for me as well! In fact, given that we’re all so busy these days, I’ve passed on this suggestion to several other writers and they have also found that this approach has worked for them as well. Of course if we have longer periods of time to focus on our work, a luxury I’ve enjoyed a few times, then we can get a lot more done but it does seem as though if we can keep the motor ticking over as much as possible that helps to keep the creative juices flowing. The flip-side of this is that as I haven’t even ‘written in the cracks’ recently I’m feeling like a fraud even writing this – hopefully soon I’ll start utilising the cracks again rather than falling through them! Do let me know if this approach occasionally works for you too!

A not unrelated experience for me, when having taken my foot off the pedal for a while, is the degree to which I feel courageous with my writing, or more accurately what I dare to imagine. It often makes me think of a young boy I worked with when I was doing a writing workshop. I was discussing ideas for a story with him. ‘How about one day your house turns into a giant frog, the size of your house?’ I suggested. The boy looked at me, eyes shining, delighted by this idea. ‘Yeah!’ he responded, obviously enthralled. ‘What could happen then?’ I asked. Still grinning the boy thought for a while but then said, ‘I don’t know’. ‘Perhaps it could hop down the street?’ I offered, not wanting to take over too much. The boy’s expression immediately changed and he glared at me with a mixture of resentment and astonishment and as though I’d made a suggestion that defied all rules of logic, science and possibly even decency. He indignantly declared, ‘It couldn’t do that – we live in a terraced house!’ I remain completely at a loss to understand why he was perfectly happy to imagine such an impossible transformation as his house turning into a frog but unable to accept the idea of its being able to hop – like a frog – away from buildings of which it was no longer a part. It reminds me to watch out for when I also can turn a house into a frog but can’t allow it to hop.

Often our own lessons come back to haunt us, don’t they? On many similar occasions children have approached me at workshops and asked whether such and such a character can do something unusual or such and such an incredible event can occur and in response I’ve asked them to give me their pencil. ‘Do you know what this is?’ I ask. ‘Yerss…’ they reply uncertainly not quite sure why this visiting author is asking this question whilst holding up what they clearly know is a pencil. ‘It’s a Pencil of Power!’ I declare… ‘With this Pencil of Power you can mad your characters can do anything you want them to do or you can make anything you want to happen… happen!’ The response is a slightly bemused ‘oh’ and the children then return to their work, hopefully with greater willingness to create frogs that can hop.

I also need to remember my own lesson! How like Portia can I ‘easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.’



Recent publication. The Gobulins and the Globulins; The narrator of the tale inherits far more than a remote cottage in Wales from his uncle…

Page Proofs - how to get rid of nits and lay frogs to rest - Dianne Hofmeyr

With the sea thundering in and the incredible view from this worktop, I’d like to say I’m scribbling away with words flowing faster than my fingers can type. But it’s odd how work timetables catch one out and page proofs in particular have a way of popping up at the least opportune moment. So instead of being on holiday and in full creative mode, I am doing fine-tooth combing on a novel set in a place that couldn’t be more far removed from the sea.

It’s reminded me of how chameleon-like writers have to be.

And page proofs are double-edged swords. It’s exciting to see the formally laid-out pattern the words make on the page – the story is captured never to be undone – but at the same time this moment of absolute finality is terrifying. There’s not much more you can do about it – a comma might help, italics here and there, a word replaced with something that zings more. With a bit of luck one might even get way with a few inserted sentences – a sleight of hand that is made to appear just as a tweak, lest your editor gets too upset. But basically the novel is all there in print. No more ‘what if’s’.

On the other hand, because it’s viewed in print for the first time, the story comes through as a surprise too and often seems much fresher than that tired manuscript that was rewritten and rewritten. Time seems to distance the author from the work so there’s almost the feeling ‘did I write this?’ And if you can forget about the gruelling task that lies ahead of fine-tooth combing, one can almost begin to enjoy the story. In truth even the fine-combing is enjoyable – who doesn’t like to get rid of nits?

And after a very, very long journey, soon the book will be out there

So while I might appear as if I’m staring out over the sea, I’m really in the heart of the Okavango Swamps in Botswana with pythons and man-eating crocodiles and only a red Victorinox Explorer Swiss Army knife for protection against dynamite-brandishing crooks with a sinister goal – to collect poisons from the most venomous frog of all – the Golden Poison Dart Frog in Colombia.

‘It’s not called Phyllobates terribilis for nothing. It has enough toxins to kill ten to twenty people. Poison can last up to a year. Just a single grain on an envelope or stamp would kill anyone licking it.’

OLIVER STRANGE and the Journey to the Swamps is the first of a 3 part series entitled FROG DIARIES that will be published by Tafelberg in June 2012

www.diannehofmeyr.com