Pondlife Stories , livre ebook

The Pondlife Stories
John Gaulton
with illustrations by Marta Maszkiewicz


The Pondlife Stories
Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021
Tel: +44(0)1227 472 874 www.theconradpress.com 
 info@theconradpress.com
ISBN 978-1-839782-68-8
Copyright © John Gaulton, 2021
Illustrations © Marta Maszkiewicz
The moral right of John Gaulton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk


Francois Frog

Francois Frog was sitting on a lily pad in his pond. The pond was in the garden of the house where the people creature children lived. The cat, the dog, and the big people creatures also lived there.
A lily pad is a waterlily leaf and it is big and strong enough for a frog to sit on.
Francois Frog was singing quietly, ‘A froggy day in London town…’ He knew he had a good singing voice for a frog. The birds had told him and they could sing really well. He was delighted there was a song especially for frogs. He had heard it one day coming from the very big box where the children lived with the cat, the dog, and the big people creatures. He didn’t know it was called a house. He had many houses. Sometimes in the water but mostly under rocks or bits of wood and even in the warm compost heap near the pond.
He had no idea what ‘London town’ was but that didn’t matter. There were so many songs he had heard the children sing and that he heard from their house-box. Most of them made no sense to him but he liked the sounds.
One song that was particularly strange was ‘Ring a ring o’ roses’. When the children sang it they ran around making funny sneezy sounds at the end and then sitting down suddenly. After that they couldn’t stop laughing.
He was happy singing his own special frog song. ‘A froggy day in London town’. He repeated this line over and over again because he couldn’t remember any more of the words from the song.
He could, of course, croak when he needed to. For example to let a lady frog know that he was there. For some reason lady frogs seemed to prefer the croaks to his singing. And croaks were really good for calling out at night when everything was very quiet in the garden.
Nighttime was when he was most active, catching grubs and insects to eat. In the daytime he usually sat quite still on the lily pad, in the water, or under the leaves of plants near the pond. He needed to keep his skin moist because he was able to breathe through his skin. It was a very clever trick that meant he could stay under the water for very long times, for example in winter when he could hibernate in the mud at the bottom of the pond. He could sleep for a few months like that or under the rocks, or in the compost heap.
Sleeping for a long time during the cold winter months is called hibernation. But he didn’t know that name.
Like most of the creatures in the pond he was also cold-blooded.
This meant that he would slow down when it was cold and be more active when it was warmer.
He was an amphibian, a scientific name that showed he could live both on the land and in the water. He didn’t know that name either.
He had many friends around the pond including the fish who treated him well now that he was a fully grown frog. When he was a tiny tadpole he had to avoid the fish in case they tried to eat him. Now he was about three years old and had grown to his full adult size. He had started out hatching from frogspawn laid by his mother and fertilised by his father. At first he had lived in the frogspawn – a sort of jelly, and grown from a tiny dot to a wriggly black tadpole with a long tail. There he had eaten the jelly of the frogspawn and then used a sucker to hang on to plants under the water.
The children knew this and talked about how much fun it would be to live in jelly and to eat it. They particularly liked the idea of a giant strawberry jelly to live in.
Then he ate algae, a sort of tiny water plant, as he grew his back legs and then his front ones. When he was tiny he had gills like the fish to breathe underwater but in a few weeks he grew lungs, like land animals.
Finally, he shortened his tail by slowly ‘absorbing’ it and became a very small frog – a froglet. Not many tiny tadpoles grew up to be frogs. He was very lucky.
He didn’t really remember much of being tiny, only that he always wanted to grow and climb out of the water.
One of his friends was Theodore Toad. He was a distant relative and in some ways they were quite similar to look at. But Francois Frog didn’t like to be confused with the toads. And the toads didn’t like to be called frogs. They were similar because they had both hatched from spawn in the water, and had similar shapes. But toads have dry skin that is lumpy, and they live more on the land than in the water. Frogs have a smooth moist skin and spend some of their time in the water.
But the biggest difference was the one Francois was most proud of. He was a frog and he could jump really well. He knew that because when he and Theodore were small, Francois had suggested that they have a jumping competition. To be precise, Francois had suggested it because he already knew how well he could jump and he wanted to show off. He often practised jumping from lily pad to lily pad and into and out of the pond.
He used his big back legs like a spring to jump a very long way. After Francois had jumped his biggest jump ever, Theodore had just walked a small way and then explained that toads don’t jump, they just walk. And that was that.
Sometimes jumping was a very useful thing to do. For example when the cat was younger and tried to catch him. She had crept up and pounced but Francois saw her coming and quickly made a very big jump away from her. Then she pounced again and he jumped again. It was great fun for a few minutes but the cat soon became bored and gave up.
It was also useful when the dog came sniffing at him. Francois made a big jump and the dog was so startled that he barked and ran off.
Now, they were all older and were good friends.
Francois had been day-dreaming and didn’t notice the children. They were playing and saw Francois on the waterlily leaf. ‘Why don’t you hop it?’ said Joanne and they all laughed and ran off.
Francois didn’t think that was at all funny. He was going to stay where he was. He liked living by the pond. It was a very good place to be.