The really big pond

Chapter 12

“I know what we need now,” I say as Bob sits down with a glass of wine, after work. His project has moved from Birmingham to Rugby so the commute is even longer than when we lived in Oxford. This rather defeats the purpose of moving closer to his job but, “I’m not leaving this place” he says. He’s hefted to the land now. “So what is it that we need?” he asks warily. “A really, really big pond” I say.

From the experience of the raised round pond in Oxford, I know what pleasure there can be had from a piece of water. In my opinion, the bigger, the better. There is a ready-made pond on a narrow terrace halfway down the Worcester garden but it’s tiddly. A surface area of about three dustbin lids. Despite the smallness, to my delight it’s full of newts. They are not something that I’d seen in ponds before. The dew ponds in the fields of my childhood had frogs and even small fish but I don’t remember seeing newts. These little brown mermaids with their five fingered hands and long toed feet, as well as their long tails, are a magical treat. I quickly notice that my bright pink wellingtons put them off, so in order to sit by the pond and watch them come to the surface, I buy some black wellingtons which they are indifferent to. I am as well.

Before starting the project, Bob the engineer needs to plan angles and the volume of water against the density of the supporting land, and that sort of thing, as the pond will be dug into the lowest slope. This planning stage is unfortunately taking some time. One day, I take a shovel down the garden and begin to dig the pond hole. Praying silently that Bob will come and help at some point. Within hours he is down there with a wheelbarrow and another spade. We work out the details as we go along.

At this time, I passionately want to have our own swimming pool and think that if the pond is deep and wide enough, I could swim in it. As the August heat belts out, the slog of digging heavy clay continues steadily. My approach is to do a few wheelbarrows of soil three or four times a day. Maybe one before breakfast, one after coffee time and if the cartooning is going slowly, a ruminative dig in the afternoon.

Bob potters about on Saturday mornings, and then arrives fully kitted out in muddy shorts and walking boots, just before I knock off for some lunch. Then he digs non-stop for six hours. Then he studies his spirit level whilst I stand in the bottom of the hole, and tried to work out if the water would be up to my chest yet. The huge amount of spoil from the digging, conveniently forms the far side of the pond “wall”, where there was previously a slope.

Through my new experience with circle dancing, I’ve found Sunnara, who teaches the local circle dance group. We easily slip into a good friendship. One of the things I like about her is her interest in everything. Naturally I invite her to come and look at our garden. We stand in the bottom of our large crater. It’s about a metre and a half deep now. She studies the steps that we’ve carved into the side of one wall. They are intended for plants to rest on at various depths. Her eyebrows disappear into her fringe. “It looks like a Roman amphitheatre” she says finally. The final depth of water is nearly two metres. We stop digging when we unearth the old TB hospital rubbish dump. There are lots of green glass medicine bottles, mostly broken. Also, earthen wear foot-warmers for the patients in their unheated cabins. Rags, socks, one slipper which I find a bit unsettling, and lots of fragments of thick china. Not ideal for laying an expensive rubber pond liner on.

After a quick salvage ,we tuck it all up with a layer of sand, topped with old blankets. Between us we drag the heavy folded up pond liner down the garden. “Hold on” says Bob, “I want to work the positioning out.” He does this by folding a piece of paper into the correct number of pieces to match the bundle of rubber. It should now unfold with the longer side of the rectangle lying over the widest stretch of the pond. The theory being that once we’d opened the rubber parcel, like Pandora’s Box, we’d never get it shut again. With Herculean strength we drag the thickest rubber pond liner that we can afford, over the crater. His cunning plan with the folded paper works! He still talks about it with pride. And I still don’t know how it worked.

The great oval earthworks had been dug during the whole summer and had softened into the landscape. We deliberately left the area alone for a while so that the newly built supporting wall at the far side, had time to settle as these things do. Weeds had popped up all over it in the friendly way they have. Now we have a deep wide hole covered in black rubber, with a three foot frill spreading out over the surrounding path. It looks hideous, like a gigantic oil spill.

A week or two later we’re having coffee in the summer house. Yellow leaves are already floating from the trees after the dry weather, though October has barely started. Jessie The Healer has taken a job in Plymouth and my lovely Nura has decided to move back to Manchester. We are awkward and clumsy on phone calls. I feel as if my Oxford roots have been severed, so I get on with the garden here. Looks like I’m hefted as well as Bob.

We both love mind blowingly strong coffee and limit ourselves to drinking it mid-morning and after dinner. So we are sipping slowly. “Do you ever think something without knowing that you’re thinking it?” I ask Bob. “I don’t know” he says. “Cos I’ve realised that until recently, I’ve thought of trees and fields and flowers as sort of grown-ups. Looking after me, as if I were still a little child.” “Okay” says Bob. “And now it’s changed. I feel more as if the trees and fields and flowers are in an equal relationship with me. Like we’re peers and we just share the planet with everything and everyone else.” He says nothing. “Do you know what I mean?” I ask. “Not really” he says, “I just like trees and fields and flowers around me.” I’m a bit disappointed that we don’t experience things the same way. I wonder if he’s missing something or I’m bonkers. Possibly both are true.

We plan a path of flat paving stones around the edge of the pond. But this will leave a strip of rubber liner showing for about six inches above the water level. I have a cunning idea to hide it. Shouting encouragement at my ancient sewing machine, as it chews through the tough material, I stitch lots of oblong hessian sacks. After filling them with soil, they get laid side by side around the pond edge. Held firm under the stepping stones, but with the long side hanging over the edge of the pond. Then I dump lumps of grass turf on top, from anywhere that I can take an inconspicuous graft from. I thump them vigorously to settle them in. Within a couple of months the turves take root in the soil bags. Grasses and wildflowers have sprouted from them, making a pretty pond fringe. Sedges, queen Anne’s lace and hogweed also arrive in the clay rubble which forms the back wall of the pond, softening the rather odd and unnatural looking slope. I put in a large leafed gunnara at the base of the far side which bushes up nicely and makes the pond look more settled in its surroundings.

The following March, I find some water loving tenants. Coming back from circle dancing in Malvern one rainy evening, I turn the corner on a country lane and the road ahead is a seething, hopping mass. Dozens of frogs and toads are crossing the road to the big village pond in leaps and bounds, well the toads don’t leap, they crawl. I had not known until this moment that these creatures can carry out a mass spring migration. There are quite a lot of squashed bodies on the road where some have been run over. Driving very slowly I pick my way round them, sometimes stopping to move a hopper out of the way. Back at home I find an empty biscuit tin. Then I return to the same spot and kidnap about half a dozen of them. “You’ll love it in our pond”, I say, “And as I’ve seen leeches in there, you won’t be disturbed by me swimming alongside you.”

The abducted frogs obligingly lay a small quantity of frog spawn. And, very exciting because I’ve never seen any before, the toads produce long strings of toad spawn. This has been thoroughly wrapped and threaded through a stand of ornamental grass under water. How they lay the string and then weave it around the stems, I can’t imagine.

During the spring and following into summer the eggs hatch into tadpoles and throughout this time, appear to have full time babysitters. When I go down to check the pond in the morning, there is a pair of frog or toad eyes, like a periscope, just above the surface nearby. The frogs have sleek, streamlined limbs like young athletes clad in lycra. The toads are etched with ridges and knobbles along their backs, giving them a gnarled and ancient quality. Newts have also found their way into this pond and eat lots of the frog spawn. The babysitter appears indifferent, perhaps in a creche this large, they don’t keep a register.

Bob designs and builds a curved seat on stilts also edging the far end of the pond. It looks back across the water and up the whole sloping tapestry of our garden, which is blooming in tiers of peach and yellow, below the tier of blue lavender, topped by the pink border.

At this point it’s time for a pond opening celebration. We invite the newly acquired bunch of jolly friends, introduced to us by Jane and Richard, our neighbours. Bob has calculated that the new seat will comfortably hold and support the weight of six people. He hasn’t allowed for thirteen guests piling onto his newly constructed seat, sitting on each other’s knees and bouncing up and down screaming “Speech, speech”. When we prise them off, they begin synchronised paddling by arranging themselves into a conga line and dipping first their right feet in the water in a rowing motion, then turning and repeating with their left feet. A spontaneous and unrepeatable version of “Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream” is sung too.

The next year, the first artificially introduced arrivals in the pond, return together with last years offspring. On warm still spring evenings, Bob and I go down to the pond after dark, with a torch. The chorus of lovelorn croaks comes from every direction around the pond. Our interested, and slightly embarrassed by the voyeuristic aspect, gaze, reveals frogs and toads procreating everywhere.

As the pond year rolls on the taddies form great wriggling clumps around the shallows at the edge. A few weeks later, they disappear from view. I very rarely see the process of them metamorphosing into frogs or toads but in the summer, I find half grown toads nestled in the compost bays, their chocolate brown, matt bodies already daintily warty. Only the eyes shining.

The pond isn’t the only place producing babies.