Remembering the cruel things we did to foolish-looking frogs

DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:ALL ACROSS WESTMEATH there are abandoned building sites, muddy trenches, half-made foundations, roofless houses, and diggers sleeping in the mud; as if everyone had just gone to lunch.

I was walking past such a site last week when I saw a frog, hopping towards town.

There was another one in the open space beside the taxi rank at the railway station.

“Is that fella heading for the train?” a taxi man joked.

I said, “No, I think he’s looking for you.” The frog hopped along the rim of the pavement.

“Business is bad,” the taxi man said, “but this is ridiculous.”

When we were children we used to blow frogs up with straws, and watch them flail about in puddles on building sites in Cavan. It was cruel. But there was a pecking order in the world, and after what we were forced to swallow as children, it was good to hurt something else.

Frogs were not cuddly creatures. The slime on their skin didn’t endear them to us. They had such a foolish look, such a gauche clown-like expression that it was easy to dislike them. Boy frogs may have loved girl frogs as passionately as us teenagers desired each other, but we didn’t care. We didn’t suppose they felt anything.

Years later, in Leitrim, I grew to like frogs.

I dug an enormous hole in the garden in the early days of our marriage, as my beloved watched from the window, dandling the baby on her hip, and handing me out mugs of tea.

Not being experienced with Leitrim soil, I thought that the water that oozed up from beneath the swampy lawn was the sign of a hidden well. I dug like an eejit, until the

hole was as big as a trench in the first World War.

The trickle of water continued, and I became as crazed as the hero in Manon des Sources. I had dreams of the moment when my shovel would hit the rock and I would see at last the clear spring water; it would be a metaphor for our new life, a sign that our adventures, risks, and desperation as artists were being nourished by the gods.

Neighbours weren’t so sure. They wanted to know why I was digging a grave, and who I intended putting in it.

After many years I realised that Leitrim is a floating sod of daub; and that beneath the entire county is a tapestry of underground streams on their way down the hills and into the Shannon below. But by then it was too late to fill in the hole.

It had become the centrepiece of the garden. A focal point in an otherwise undisciplined landscape of weeds, shrubs and saplings. We planted wild irises, which bloomed every summer. The trees sucked up a lot of moisture; but every winter the hole still filled up with water and mud.

The frogs usually arrived in early March. Each year I would see them wallowing in sexual desire and croaking to their hearts’ content while the cat sat motionless on the patio and sometimes moved her

paw forward, as if considering a great leap. This caused the multitude of frogs to disappear instantly beneath the surface of the pool.

I didn’t share any of this with the taxi man. I was wearing a woolly hat, which makes me look daft enough, without giving him the impression that I’m obsessed with frogs.

But privately, I concluded that the frogs of Mullingar must be heading for the “Big Bang in the Pond”. On their merry way to some building site, abandoned by human beings, to some hole or drain where they can enjoy a kind of Glastonbury thing in the mud, with no condoms.

And that night the earth beneath Mullingar froze. The frogs had been fooled by the weather. I woke in the middle of the night with a cold nose, and shivered all the way to the toilet. I even went down and turned on the central heating.

Even then I couldn’t sleep. The water in the radiator kept making noise, and I just lay awake thinking of slimy amphibians sinking to the bottom of the mud; unlovely and repulsive in appearance, except to each other; and what really kept me awake was remembering all the things we did to them when we were children, and why we did it.

mharding@irishtimes.com