These were wonderful days when we were eight or 10 years old. One great thrill was frog-spawn. We collected it in jam-jars, kept it in basins or baths in the garden at home, and also had it in school where in nature study class, we watched the little dot at the centre of the egg lengthen and grow and eventually break out as a tadpole, finally losing its tail and becoming a tiny frog. What happened next? Either the teacher or a couple of the pupils bore the small glass tank away and decanted the whole into a suitable pond. There was a waterworks nearby. Away from school, some of us in the district were fascinated by an old mill-pond which held newts as well as frogs. Lovely, in memory, highly coloured, and a text-book tells us that the males "develop striking breeding dress". Exactly. Nowadays you don't collect frog-spawn without a licence. Why? Are we short of frogs? Well, part of the answer anyway is that moving frog-spawn from place might bring weeds with it which could contaminate, if that is the word, other waters. Anyway to complicate things, you must have a licence. After some conversation with a friendly voice in Duchas, this corner received a licence form to fill up. Teachers, by the way, have no trouble in getting permission, so that classroom instruction can continue as it should. By the way, a dog walker tells us that on the Dublin mountains there is, in one busy area, a huge supply of the commodity. Fertile frogs up there.
Bread-and-cheese was another feature remembered from spring, that is, of course, the just-sprouting leaves of the hawthorn. Have they any nutritional or health value? For children used to chew them as they walked home from school. Now, of course, roadside hedges would carry too much contamination from petrol fumes. In England, Richard Mabey relates in Flora Britannica,a massive and entertaining as well as informative tome, how in Leicestershire "a spring dinner" was made by covering a suet crust with young hawthorn leaf buds and thin strips of bacon, and rolling and steaming it as a roly-poly. The elder is well in leaf now in our parts, and soon we'll be into recipes for the flowers. But, of course, today so many children are ferried to and from school by bus or by parental car that hedges are in no danger of being stripped.
And are cleevers or goosegrass forgotten? That sticky plant which adhered to clothes and hair and was so often used in boy versus girl warfare. Childish courtship. And wasn't March for kiteflying? And wasn't it time for spinning-tops? Y