'Pond Life' : an abridged short story - by writer David Gladwin

I couldn’t say how many childhood hours I spent on my stretch of the Cromford Canal in Ambergate.  Probably fewer than I remember, but as time passes the important experiences seem to choose themselves, and they’re hardly ever the ones that took the longest. 

According to my memory, most afternoons I could be found under one of the two bridges nearest to Chase Road where my parents lived, or somewhere between the far one and the end of the canal, messing with nets and jars, looking for water snails and caddis fly larvae or fascinated with a ram’s horn snail.  The Ladybird Book of Pond Life was my guide in this important work, and with the willow tree’s shade on my bedroom window I would study the text and

illustrations, checking off the plants and animals I had seen, staring into the pictures of those I hadn’t.  

Oh, to have found a hydra, that spindly green freshwater anemone near the back of the book!  I thought I could find anything in the canal, it being just a long narrow pond, bigger than any other.  Everything ought to be in there somewhere, surely.  There were lots of dragonflies, but although they must have been there I never found a dragonfly nymph down in the water, such a scary thing it looked in the book.   

There were innumerable frogs and toads, plenty of spawn in spring, a few newts, whirligig beetles and hover flies, as well as some good-sized beetles in the pastures along the banks, but they were in a different book from Series 536.  Those were my favourites.

   Some of the local boys went fishing, but I didn’t like the dark Amber water or the eddies where it joined the Derwent.  I suppose I was younger than my years, as well as shorter.  When I started to go there on the bus, the lads at school in Belper were interested in music, in clothes and girls and football more than all the dreamy pleasures I would take in my surroundings, the beautiful valley.  I couldn’t see it then, that I was different and rural, but now it’s all over my memories of Belper and school.  So instead I think of the countryside, the holidays, the sunshine and the herby smell of hay from the fields around our house.  After the Chase Road bridge over the canal you can walk for a little way along the towpath, looking over the broken walls and fields to the River Amber and the viaduct.  Then you reach the place where the water just pours away, or at least what overflows does, the canal itself isn’t flowing at all.  You can walk around it, the path carries on but the canal’s gone.  They cut it all away for the gas plant, my dad said.  That was where they used to put the smell in the stuff.  Nobody ever believes me when I tell them that.  Halfway there a black metal bridge over the water carries a great thick pipe from which a big drip would fall every few seconds, washing the towpath back to its pebbled stone.  As a lad I ran under it, or waited for the drip and timed my walk.  I think the pipe takes water from the underground reservoir up beside the woods.  .  I loved the woods, the smell and sound and sight of them.  It was like stepping into another of my Ladybird books, or something by Enid Blyton.

 I met Suzanne at the Poly, where she was doing Art.  She lived in Nottingham and seemed impossibly worldly to me.  I couldn’t believe she wanted anything to do with me, but I’m very happy that she did.  Those days seem a long time ago now, but they made a difference, made me confident enough to get through life pretty well.

   Living back here feels right, although I waited until Mum was on her last legs before suggesting it to Suzanne.  But it was what she wanted too.  The picture I’d painted of growing up in this countryside, by the canal, had been so fond and rich that she’d started to feel as I did, missing something she’d never had.  Now she paints it herself and sells a lot of her work.  It’s better than I ever dreamed, and I only wish our children had been able to grow up here. 

I’m here again, the canal’s still here, and we’ll both be waiting for any grandchildren who might come along.  Perhaps one of them will be like me, a quiet little thing interested in the margins and what goes on away from the crash and clatter.   

Between us, we might even find that hydra.

(This is an abridged version of the story.  You can read the full version here on David's website)