OUT of ONE’s DEPTH

Ponds are environments of mystery. What dramas are enacted beneath their tranquil surfaces or even at the surface when one is elsewhere? By definition, they possess something intense, complex, profound: namely, depth. They are separate, contained worlds, by far the greatest part of which we are unable to observe. Yet we are instinctively drawn to them.

When we moved to our present home in the dying years of last century, we inherited a pond. Between us, we mustered pretty limited experience of managing such facilities. How much is there to know? We bought books and read websites. Mostly, we learned hands-on.

The pond was near the house, just across the drive from the conservatory. It was around forty feet long, up to fifteen feet wide and shaped like a peanut shell. It was pretty shallow – if you waded in, the water didn’t reach your knees. And it was choked with weed, notably so-called fish weed (elodea crispa) that I characterised as like soft Christmas tree. We needed to drag out huge clumps at regular intervals, leaving it for some hours at the pond edge so that any aquatic creatures had the chance to slither back to the water.

Blue orfe

Halfway across the narrow middle protruded a rickety wooden jetty from which, on his first day in residence, our second puppy launched himself to his great shock and surprise. Apart from its shape, its shallowness, the jetty and the fish, the other notable feature of the pond was a net stretched across the whole area and supported on slowly rotting wooden posts. This was meant to protect the residents from marauding herons. The previous owner told us that he had had to restock after every fish had been taken.

The pond soon became a source of great pleasure. I affected that watching the fish was more satisfying than watching the telly (and often it was). But it was too near the house, it was too shallow and it was approaching the end of its useful life. We persevered for a few years, never sure how heavily stocked it might be. Occasionally, a fish carcass appeared at the surface. We introduced a few newcomers – shubunkins, comets, ghost koi.

David’s sister gave us a large common carp, grown too big for their own pond. As he had hatching marks on his back, the girls had called him Chubby Checker. Another carp came from a friend’s pond in London, David transporting it all the way by car (it proved a reliable navigator). He was our biggest fish and we called him Big Bill Broonzy. The distinctive members of our aquatic community did, we felt, merit names. We didn’t know how to sex fish and so, with no discriminatory intent, we referred to any fish generically as “him”. But these big guys seemed very hemmed in, sometimes swimming proud of the water.

As essentially a “wild” pond with no filtration, it played host to many creatures aside from fish, especially frogs and newts. For a few nights in the early spring, we would suddenly find the drive and surrounding areas swarming with frogs looking for mates. We had to step carefully then, keeping the dogs on leads and guiding them through the vulnerable amphibians.

The characteristic blue and orange markings of a shubunkin

Already in residence in the pond when we arrived were seven orfe that I liked very much, five golden and two blue, but one summer all but one of each colour died in quick succession. We tried to monitor the water condition but it was tricky. What’s more, herons still visited. I once saw one striding across the pond, flattening the net as it went. The heron is a fine sight, a huge, ungainly bird that seems utterly out of place in an English garden. We once had one perching on the roof, like a Hitchcockian threat. We referred to successive visiting herons generically as Ron. Whether any Ron managed to hoik any fish under or – horrid thought – through the net was hard to tell, as we never had a stock inventory. But occasionally frogs or birds would get fatally entangled in the net and it became much holed. The pond was clearly unsatisfactory.

So, four or five years ago, we decided to relocate our water feature. As we have two acres of meadow-ish field, there were plenty of options. We settled on a partly shaded corner that was already backed by a long mound, the basis of which was the spoil from the old pond. We took some professional advice from a pond specialist, Mark. And we hauled in our builder, the late Micky the Brickie, to dig a hole.

I had read that water doesn’t freeze if it’s at least eight feet deep so we decided to go down eight feet. Using a succession of increasingly hefty JCBs, Micky went at it with a will, clearly having a whale of a time. The spoil started to form a croissant-shaped mound protecting the pond. When he got to eight feet, we all decided he should push on. At twelve feet, Micky reached the bedrock. It was now a mighty excavation, some fifty feet long, thirty feet across at its widest point (it was pear-shaped) and deep enough for me to stand on David’s head and know that I’d barely break the surface (we didn’t actually test this notion). Fargo the Great Dane gazed mournfully into the hole, picturing all the bones he could bury there. But he and Tati, his fellow dog, and the rest of us could walk down from the staggered shallow end and stand in the pit and marvel at its dimensions. It was going to be a serious pond.

Mark the pond advisor secured us the appropriate size of liner and he and his assistant spent the best part of a day draping it so that no unnecessary folds would create pockets of problem. We ordered ten tons of rocks from a local quarry and enjoyed the relish with which the truck-driver lowered them around the pond with his crane. The protective bank was very barren but we knew the bare look wouldn’t last long.

The next thing to do was to turn a hose into the hole. The water ran at full power without cease, 24 hours each day, and it took a week to fill. Fargo thought we’d taken leave of our senses. We knew we needed to let the water mature so we left it for a year, October to October. During the winter, we learned that water freezes even when it’s twelve feet deep. In the spring, I ferried countless netloads of tadpoles from the old pond to the new – there must easily have been a thousand. I figured there would be enough microscopic life for them all to feed on by then. An undisturbed body of water out in the open develops a vast culture within a very short span. Certainly there was already evidence of countless newts well dug in.

In the second October, we transferred the fish. Mark and his mate came over to catch them all for us and identify each one by type. The last golden orfe had died so there was just the blue left of the original shoal. We decided to call him Orpheus. He was the first of the fish that I put into the new pond with my own hands so I felt a special bond. All told, there were almost a hundred. And jeepers, they were excited by their new home. All that first evening, they swam round and round in a single shoal close to the surface, a fabulous sight. We were so entranced by them that we neglected to take a picture.

The gorgeous kingfisher

In the morning, it was quite different. They had swum down, found the bottom, rootled in the accumulated sludge on the pond floor and clouded the water. They no longer swam together but explored confidently and alone, luxuriating in the colossal amount of space. The water was now the colour of the mint tea you get served in the countries of north Africa and it has remained so ever since.

Before we introduced the fish, we had installed a pump, lowered to the bottom and used to keep a certain amount of circulation constant in the water. It returned as a water course, tumbling over rocks into the shallow end. In its path we planted watercress to help cleanse the water. But, as before, there was no filtration. Only hardy fish would survive our conditions: no koi, only the stalwart ghost variety.

We introduced a few other fish, including some sterlets and a couple of tench to graze the lower water (we never see them but we know they’re there) and a few more eye-catching comets. The pond has been a great success and little trouble. The number of residents has grown hugely with successive generations of fry and plenty of space in which to hide and survive. There have been very few casualties that we know of – no visible deaths for at least two seasons – though most springs have been marked by many frog bodies in the pond. These appear to be the result of over-active fornication on the part of the frogs rather than any systemic issue in the pond. This year, unexpectedly, there were barely any such calamities but David has still noticed dozens of tiny froglets in the grass while working around the pond.

But predators are still a problem. We have seen rats in the pond and there are plenty of places for rats to hide and even live among the woodpiles and other havens we have provided. I don’t know whether rats take fish. Two summers ago, I happened upon a fish lying on the bank. It was quite a substantial specimen – a mirror carp, I think. I assumed it was dead – its head was bloodied – but then it twitched a bit. I hurried off to get a bucket so that I could scoop up some pond water and transfer it to a place of safety. The first bucket I found turned out to be holed. With a better pail, I ran back to the pond. The fish had gone. Then I found it a foot or two away in the grass. I lifted it carefully into the bucket. Needless to say, it died during the night.

A majestic heron in flight

I felt sure that the mirror carp was too weak to have flapped itself so far. A heron would never have returned so soon if it had been disturbed. I figured that the predator must have been a rat. They are strong hunters, especially if hungry. But would a rat dive into the water, fasten onto the head of a fish as large as itself and haul it onto the bank? I have consulted the internet where, as on any other topic, there are as many opinions as there are commentators. But the balance of finding is that rats only take small fish, if at all. The great danger of rats is that they introduce Weil’s Disease into the water, harmless to fish but potentially deadly to humans if the bacterium enters through a cut on the skin. Fifty people die of this in Britain every year.

We have seen a kingfisher at the pond. He sits on one of the rocks and bides his time. He’s a rare sighting because such an alert bird is aware of you before you are of him unless he’s very preoccupied. And he’s a truly beautiful sighting, as exquisite and exotic as any species you might see in Asia, Africa or the Caribbean. If he makes off with the odd small fish – ones without names – we can’t begrudge him.

But what of Ron? Well, generations of herons, young as well as full-grown, have visited the pond. David grows a lot of bamboo and the canes he discards are handy for creating barriers at the water’s edge that ought to baffle and deter the heron, either from trying to land or from trying to walk into the water. We aim to surprise them so that we can see where they were standing and increase the defences accordingly. And the pond is little help to Ron’s cause. The shallow end is limited and slopes away abruptly and fast. There are few vantage points at the water’s edge and all of those are barricaded. There are few large plants established in the water and certainly none that could bear a big bird’s weight. The rocks must be too high for the heron to spear fish from without overbalancing.

A common carp. Big Bill was not as big as this

For the first few years of the pond, I felt sure we had made it Ron-proof. There was no evidence of fish loss. All the named specimen were present and correct. There was never physical evidence of any kind of struggle. We decided that Ron would satisfy himself with finding frogs in the grass.

But I fear I have been complacent. For weeks and indeed now for months, I have seen neither Big Bill Broonzy nor Orpheus. Nor have I spotted a single shubunkin – we must have had eight or ten when the pond was still new. Chubby Checker is still reporting at feed times and the ghost koi, aggressive and splashy feeders, seem all to be present and correct. I had thought both Big Bill and the orfe were pretty safe, although each had his vulnerable behaviour pattern. Orpheus was comparatively conspicuous, being so white (blue-white) and for the first year or two he seemed happiest in the shallows. But while he was often the first up for food, he was always very fast, both in reaction and in flight. But a heron evidently does strike with lightning speed. And it is prepared to wait patiently for hours, standing absolutely rigid, its eye fixed on the water. Orpheus has been apparently absent for long periods before – weeks, even – but I hardly think he can be expected to resurface now, after what may well be three or four months. I am sad. He had lived here longer than have we. He must have been at least fifteen years old.

A heron can handle a damned big fish

Big Bill the carp was a substantial specimen, a good eighteen inches long and heavy-set. He had quite a lot of orange coloration on his back and a swirl of blue behind his head, like a striking birthmark. Maybe we should have dubbed him Gorbachev. His vulnerable habit was to cruise lazily just below the surface and close to the edges of the pond. That would make him of great interest of Ron, I can see, but I always assumed he would be too much of a challenge. However, looking at Google Images, I came across a photograph of a heron brandishing a full-grown rabbit by the ears (too distressing to post here). I fear I have badly underestimated Ron.

We shall go on monitoring Ron’s visits and bolstering the barricades. I read that the favourite hunting time for herons is first light. He would be undisturbed at our pond for a good long time then. I also read that they are highly intuitive and resourceful birds, adept at learning how to bypass hazards. I think we can only be sure that we have outfoxed him when a whole hunting season has passed without a sighting of him.

Meanwhile, our pond is a glorious haven. There is nothing more restorative than to sit in one of our Adirondack chairs with a glass of chilled white wine or a vodka tonic and a stimulating book or a sparkling conversation while the sun sinks over the willows and the insects start to stir, ready for the bats to fly in at dusk. The encircling mound, full of grasses and wildflowers, shields the view of us from the lane and deadens any traffic sound from the distant main road. All we hear is the gurgle of the watercourse, the occasional splash of a fish and the extensive and complex dialogue of the many birds that frequent our field.

At the centre of it is the mystery – dare I say, the miracle – of our wondrous pond.

I’LL GET MY COAT

Our lane expires in a T-junction with a main road. Before the coming of motorways, this road was the main arterial route to London. Despite the parallel motorway section a few miles to the north, which opened forty years ago this year, the old A road remains busy; indeed its use has discernibly increased in the thirteen years that we have lived here. Just by the turn into our lane is a sign signalling the end of the speed restriction that obtains through the village strung further along the main road. But few drivers restrain themselves until they reach that sign; they put their foot down as soon as they have cleared the identifiable shops. The road seems especially like a racetrack around teatime.

Late yesterday afternoon, a man sauntered down the lane, crossed the main road and weaved through the gateway opposite the end of the lane. This gateway is a sort of fixed kissing gate that allows access to pedestrians and their dogs but thwarts cyclists, prams, wheelchairs and anything of comparable or greater un-manoeuvrability. Beyond it, a small housing estate spreads across a greensward and beyond that is a corner shop, which was the man’s objective.

Having fulfilled his errand, he retraced his steps. As he approached the weave gate, he saw that a cat was ambling ahead of him towards the gateway. It slowed, stopped, sat on its haunches under the lowest bar of the gate and looked around laconically at the man. The man stopped too. He evidently was calculating that to approach the gate might alarm the cat into running ahead. A narrow pathway skirts the road on the gate side (there is none on the far side) but the cat could hardly be relied upon to turn onto that pathway. Cats are more apt to spring forwards and hope for the best.

Rather than be responsible for the cat being squished by a vehicle, the man set off to his right. Between the main road and the little-used ring road around the small estate runs a hedgerow, grown up around a wire fence and punctuated with horse chestnuts. The man paced a few dozens yards until he came to a gap in the hedge where the wire had long been beaten down to allow access. There was still plenty of low growth in the gap and he stepped gingerly for he knew that the stings of nettles, which easily penetrate ankle socks, are especially potent at this time of year.

He then took an extended step towards the roadside pathway but, as he did so, his trailing foot caught in something unyielding – a branch of ivy perhaps or a trailing length of fence wire – and he sprawled forwards. The momentum of the step that he had been in the process of attempting carried him across the pathway and he landed face down half in the road itself. His sudden fall gave no time for the approaching driver to brake or swerve and the vehicle passed over his head, killing him instantly.

I was that man. Apart (clearly) from the last sentence, my account of the incident is as accurate as I am capable of making it. As I fell forwards towards the road, I distinctly thought: “I am going to die now”. As I hit the road, I turned my head towards the oncoming traffic but, amazingly, there was none. I scrambled up. Vehicles passed on the other side of the road – one car tooted at me but I couldn’t tell how to read the toot. Then the traffic stream resumed on the near side including, almost immediately, two juggernauts. Just a few seconds either way would have sealed my fate.

Becoming aware that my left wrist and left knee were both fairly painful and that the left knee of my jeans was slightly torn, I walked slowly and carefully back up the pathway until I was opposite our lane. The cat was nowhere to be seen and, thankfully, was not a flattened mess on the road. I was already thinking about my Dad who died trying to cross a busy road, a victim of his own impatience and the speed of a driver who was fined £120 for his pains. I waited until it was clearly no sort of gamble to cross over.

My partner persuaded me to apply a pack of frozen peas (which we keep for such eventualities) to my knee and to my wrist. The cold diminishes the swelling. It was not until the next day (today) that I noticed that my watch, which has always kept impeccable time, was running ten minutes slow, evidently a product of the knock it must have received. It, like its owner, is lucky not to have been smashed beyond repair.

In the colour magazine of the Saturday edition of The Guardian, called ‘Weekend’, there is a regular questionnaire feature called ‘Q&A’, an exercise based on the so-called ‘Proust Questionnaire’ in Vanity Fair. One of the standing questions is: “What is the closest you’ve come to death?” I always think it’s an absurd question (although, of course, I find all the questions absurd). We walk constantly in death’s shadow. At the edge of a road (or a garden pond or a high window or a river or a cliff), we can be literally one step from oblivion. We are but a bottle of pills or a kitchen knife away. The heart attack, the brain haemorrhage, the murderer or the accident could strike at any moment. Or, like Phil Silvers and Ian Richardson and Sheridan Morley, we could just drift into sleep and never return: merciful for us, horrible for our close ones.

Linda Grant catches this very well in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs: "You take a misstep, you turn your head the wrong way when you cross the road, you gargle with bleach instead of mouthwash, it's just ridiculous the doors that are slightly ajar between life and death. Life's extreme fragility is all around us, as if we are perpetually walking on floors of cracked glass" [p 48, Virago 2008].

Four weeks ago today, there was an incident outside a local community centre. Two men old enough to know better got into an altercation. The older knocked the younger down. In falling, he cracked his skull on the pavement and, as he lay there stunned, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The attacker was detained by the police and later released on bail. The local paper, as the media are apt to do, used the lurid phrase “murder probe”. Clearly, though, manslaughter will be the charge if any is preferred.

The man who died was the local builder, universally known as Micky the Brickie. Round our way, he would have met with few opportunities to work with bricks because almost everything, even the new builds, is fashioned from stone. He might better have been known as Jason the Mason, but Micky was his actual name – he was not of the generation to be called Jason, being only six years younger than me. As the police held onto the body, his family could not bury him for three weeks, plenty of time for everyone to discuss the case. For Micky was indeed known to everybody and, I should have thought, liked by everybody. He was always full of fun and a great talker, with the down side common to that condition that he wasn’t much of a listener. But you forgave him anything because he was instinctively generous. Ours is one of scores of local houses containing some perfectly chosen item or material rescued for recycling and gladly handed over, offers of payment waved away. My partner accounted Micky’s great quality “generosity of spirit” and I think that gets it exactly.

Micky’s death genuinely shocked people because it was sudden and, as his widow remarked, “so unnecessary”. What she was alluding to has subsequently become clearer. It seems that the man who knocked Micky down and who is out on bail was her first husband. This has brought a noisome overtone of soap opera into what had seemed a small but affecting tragedy.

We do walk always in the shadow of death. In the bath this morning, I found myself reminiscing about a trip to Scotland with two pals from university. One of them, John, was an experienced climber. He had scaled several of the major peaks and had lost several friends to the enthusiasm, one of whom (his best friend) fell to his death while roped to John, leaving the survivor the melancholy (and dangerous) task of climbing down into a crevasse to retrieve the body. John was a lovely guy, a big golden bear of a man with a melodious Barnsley accent.

In Scotland, John contemplated the other two of us – Neil, a level-headed geologist, and me, capable sometimes of behaving sensibly – and decided that we could safely drive to Glencoe and go for a clamber. It wasn’t a proper climb but it was strenuous work. We then walked the length of a ridge high above the glen. I no longer recall our route – it’s more than forty years ago – and whether it can have been the legendary Aonach Eagach I somehow doubt, but it was certainly a testing scramble and it took several hours.

At one point the ridge grew very narrow, a row of jagged rocks with a 200-foot drop on either side. Radiating calm, John led the way and we gamely followed, me bringing up the rear. I suddenly managed to trap one leg under the other thigh and was stuck, perched on a sliver of rock and with no space in which to improvise. It occurred me that I was in genuine peril. I saw the others were moving on so I hollered. Neil turned, saw my predicament and started to panic. This, it turned out, was a lifesaver because it forced me to be ice-cool and logical. I lay back, gripped the rock beneath me with both hands, arched my back and lifted my thigh so that I could pull the other leg clear. Then I managed to raise myself to a crouch and inch along until I was on a wider part of the ridge. I saw John’s grinning face up ahead. “All right?” he called. We continued our ridge walk without mishap.

John, I remember, used to fret about my smoking, which was beginning to get heavy. “You know, I’ll be very cross with you if you make yourself ill with cigarettes” he told me one day. After he graduated, he went back to the north and married a woman whom he’d met on the same occasion that Neil and I met her. A few years later, he had surgery for a brain tumour. He and Sue came to London and met up with old pals including me. John showed off the huge scar on his skull that he generally kept covered under a woolly hat. I never saw him again. He died of a recurrence of the tumour. He was 33.

This week, it will be 29 years since I gave up smoking for good. Another friend grew stern with me one day concerning my drinking habits. I was getting through rather too much at the time. He warned me that it might undermine my health. It’s more than 15 years since he died, in his mid-40s from Aids. I don’t make this or any other observation in this posting to, as it were, “score points”. Some of us make our end inevitable by dedicated application: George Best to alcohol, Simon Gray to cigarettes. But for most, the end either comes as the culmination of illness or suddenly with little or no foreshadowing.

As one grows older, inevitably, the proximity of death nudges one more often. It brings no certainties, though, save when it comes wrapped in incurable disease. In his 90s, John Gielgud agreed to a television interview with Jeremy Paxman. In his forthright way, Paxman pressed the great man on his attitude to and preparedness for death. Sir John was visibly distressed to be obliged to contemplate the subject. I wanted him to point out that there was nothing to say that he would not outlive Paxman and that, unless the BBC kept the programme untransmitted until after his death, it was a certainty that some of those watching the interview would pass before Sir John did. And I remember a wonderfully feisty comeback from Katharine Hepburn when asked somewhat imperiously by her interviewer, Barbara Walters: “do you actually own a skirt?” “I’ll wear one to your funeral” Kate shot back. I like to think I too can take that attitude to the grim reaper.