toads

I disturbed my first toad of the season today.  I was digging up clumps of grass in the island bed in the back garden when suddenly my forkful of soil contained something brown and knobbly that was not a stone.  I stared, transfixed and horrified, until the toad extended its legs and hopped away.  Phew, I didn't skewer it.  I dread the day that the tines of the fork come up with a toad body impaled on them, but it hasn't happened yet.  I don't know if that is just luck, or goes to show that toads are quite tough.  Later on I unearthed another toad, or maybe the same one twice, and cupped it carefully in my hands and put it into a thick patch of foliage where I knew I was not going to dig that afternoon.  It felt vital and alive through my gloves, and not keen on being picked up, but it was for its own good.

I really like toads.  I like them as a token that the environment is healthy.  Amphibians, with their moist skins, seem vulnerable to infections, and I feel that a healthy toad population is a sign of a healthy and thriving garden. I like them because they eat slugs, and are the gardener's helper.  I like them for their own sake.  I don't find their warty looking skin off-putting, or consider them ugly.  They appear to me to be rather dignified little creatures, with an alien air of self-sufficiency that appeals.

I've enjoyed The Wind in The Willows, in book form and, when I was a child, as a pantomime, but I don't know where Kenneth Graham got his idea of Mr Toad from.  Ratty and Badger are quite convincing characters, if you accept the notion of anthropomorphised water rats and badgers, likewise the stoats and the weasels, but the toads I meet are not loud and blustering.  They seem enigmatic and shy creatures.  George Smiley is a more likely personification of a toad in literature than Mr Toad.

Legend has it that the toad has a precious jewel in its head.  Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.  So wrote Shakespeare (As You Like It).  Though, as I have already said, I don't think the toad is ugly.  It is not strictly venomous either, though it does secrete substances that deter many predators from eating it.  One of our previous generation of cats once came into the house drooling severely and looking very ill.  We took him to the vet, who said he had probably licked a toad.  He spent 36 hours sitting in a chair, wrapped in a towel and dribbling, then leapt to his feet and was fine.

Philip Larkin didn't seem to take kindly to the toad's chilly, squatting aspect in his poem Toads.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts
They don't end up as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

However, Norman MacCaig had a kinder view of them.

Toad

Stop looking like a purse.  How could a purse
Squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
Full of satisfaction in a man's house?

You clamber towards me on your four corners -
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.

I love you for being a toad,
For crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
And for not being frightened

I put you in my purse hand not shutting it,
And put you down outside directly under
Every star.

A jewel in your head?  Toad,
You've put one in mine,
A tiny radiance in a dark place.

I'm in the MacCaig camp on the subject of toads.  I was convinced that Robert Graves had written a poem that used the toad with the jewel in its head as a metaphor for the ugly but faithful lover with hidden merits, but I can't find it.