I never found out where the pond was that the toads came from. I asked more neighbours but got nowhere. Eventually, after searching Google Earth and finding no leads, I found a local history page on Facebook, the type of group where old people reminisce about sweet shops and post photos of roads and buildings in days gone by.
‘Does anyone remember Woolworths?’
‘Ooh yes, we used to go for penny sweets after school on a Friday.’
‘Does anyone remember the rag ’n’ bone man with his horse and cart?’
‘Oh yes, I broke my foot once and he gave me a lift to hospital!’
It’s a nice group, soothing, amid the noise of everything else. And full of people who might have remembered toads.
I ask if anyone who lived in my road or neighbouring roads remembers a pond. I tell them I know there was a pond in the park until a child drowned and it was filled in, but that I don’t know where toads might have been breeding since then.
People write back, mostly to say they don’t remember anyone having a pond in the neighbourhood but confirming that there was a pond in what’s now the park.
‘My dad was best friends with the kid who drowned.’
‘My uncle tried to save him.’
I start to think I may have opened a can of worms.
But then I get more. I’m told a nearby road is named after a brook that used to run all along here from the Downs, that there were farms with ponds where car dealerships now stand. I don’t get dates but I’m beginning to build a picture of the landscape of the area before today, when life was a lot wilder. If there was a brook, a large pond, a farm with ponds, this area would have been wetter than it is now, with plenty of opportunities for toads and their frog and newt cousins. As the patchwork of habitats was gradually taken, they would have been squeezed into ever-tighter habitats but somehow, remarkably, the toads have survived.
I’m always upset when I hear of rivers and streams that have been buried underground; living things that no longer see the light of day. Where are the fish that used to spawn in its pebbles, the dragonflies that used to lay eggs in the weed? Were there kingfishers along this stretch of water, were there otters and beavers and swallows? My toads have a space to breed now but they deserve a better landscape, they deserve a proper home. Come the revolution I will be there, with my pickaxe, fighting to reclaim the old East Brook.
Gulls Allowed continues. We meet for drinks and make plans for how to deal with Drone Bastard next year. Lin has written to our MP and we are looking at trying to get the law changed, so that those who fly drones are not allowed to use them to deliberately disturb wildlife. I suspect we’ll need a change of government to see this through but we will wait, we’re not going anywhere. (Neither, sadly, is Drone Bastard.)
Happily, despite his efforts, the gulls on the factory roof successfully raised their chicks. And Lin has recruited me as a gull rescuer. She texts me when she hears of gulls that have fallen off roofs and we head out together, me with oven gloves and her with an umbrella to protect us from their dive-bombing parents, and help them out of the road and back on to a roof. Sometimes I have to go on my own and I have further recruited neighbours with loft conversions so I can lean out of their Velux windows and deposit chicks directly on to roof tiles. Sometimes, if the weather is bad, they have to stay with me for a few hours, much to the irritation of our ever-patient Tosca.
Pete from my local rescue centre has asked me to show him how to raise butterflies and I’ve asked him to teach me how to rehabilitate birds, like robins, when they fall or are taken from their nest. Our nature-loving community, like my ivy, continues to knit together and grow.