CHRISTOPHER HART POND LIFE

From amorous toads to the eye-popping mating habits of water boatmen, a magical celebration of . . .

The pond is a place of childhood magic. In fact, really small children are happy with a puddle — usually ending up with quite a lot of it inside their wellies.

Later on, though, it’s the pond with its strange, wiggling, fascinating life-forms that hypnotises us. And then there’s the joy of pond-dipping with a jam jar and a net, often improvised from a pair of old tights and a coat hanger, the hook straightened out and stuck in the end of a bamboo cane. Ah, happy days. Still Water, by one of our finest, most evocative nature writers, John LewisStempel, is an unabashed love letter to the pond. The book takes the form of a diary, moving through the seasons from grey winter, when the pond seems almost dead, to spring and the sudden explosion of life in April and May, the most thrilling months in the nature calendar, and then full-blooded summer and misty, mellow, fruitful autumn.

One amazing inhabitant is the dragonfly, ‘among the most ancient species on the pond, 300 million years old’. Dragonflies were darting and hovering about in steaming tropical jungles when the British Isles were floating around on the equator. They watched the dinosaurs come and go — and today they just carry on as before.

And what colours they can see! Colours we will never see nor even have names for.

humans have three different colour receptors, explains the author: red, blue and green. Yet some species of dragonfly have an incredible 30 different such receptors. Their visual world must be dazzling, unimaginable.

Contemplating swimming in his pond, Lewis-Stempel thinks he really ought to do so in a state of nature: starkers. ‘I, however, am an englishman, thus am wearing floral swimming trunks.’

Still, in his pond or beside it, he spends hours and days observing, wondering.

One of his heroes is George Orwell, also a great pondlover, whose character Bowling, in the novel Coming Up For Air, wondered why people are such ‘ bloody fools’ and don’t spend more time looking at ponds.

Orwell particularly loved toads, and wrote a delightful essay, Some Thoughts On The Common Toad, including an unforgettable description of the toad emerging from his long winter hibernation with ‘a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo- Catholic towards the end of Lent’.

But once nicely fattened up on a high-protein diet of juicy slugs and beetles, toads become rather amorous creatures.

Did you know that male toads actually have sticky little ‘nuptial pads’ on their forepaws, to help them keep a firm grip on the lady toad when, er, expressing their affection?

Should no lady toad be available, they can be pretty indiscriminate. ‘My grandfather once encountered a toad “loving” (he was always delicate in his language) a fish.’

Then there’s a species of water boatman which makes an incredibly loud noise by rubbing its penis across its abdomen.

The little bug is only 2 mm long, but produces a sound of 99.2 decibels, meaning it has by far the loudest penis for its size in the animal kingdom.

It’s one way to attract the girls, I suppose — and cheaper than a Lamborghini.

Lewis-Stempel gives us lovely visual snapshots of animal behaviour, from a pheasant with his ‘ mincing Ming emperor arrogance’, to two mallard drakes at their showoff courtship displays as the two ducks look on ‘monarchically unamused’.

he clearly loves the english past, the english countryside, ‘ the sounds of slow, old england’, and the local folk names for things such as the heron: known as the hernshaw up north, and the longie crane in West Wales.

In the old days, the pond was a crucial feature on the farm or the village green. It was where you watered the cows and horses, raised carp for the table, soaked flax fibres to make linen, grew watercress, went ice skating in winter.

Lewis-Stempel has little fondness for the modern world: ‘Cars choking Britain to death’ and lovely ancient ponds ‘throttled by housing, all scale, wonder and biodiversity gone’. he keeps the eco-gloom to a wise minimum, but is exasperated when he reads a thread on Mumsnet about the need to ‘fill in the pond’ before the new arrival, just in case . . . Yet children have been playing round ponds for centuries, often falling in and learning an important lesson thereby: water is wet, cold, and sometimes dangerous. Don’t fall in again. It is reckoned that we have ‘lost’ half a million ponds in the past century, and our beloved native water vole, Ratty in Wind In The Willows, is simply absent from whole stretches of our river systems. But there are some reasons for hope. The great thing about ponds is that, unlike a mature oakwood, say, or a wildflower meadow, you can create one with just a couple of weekends of hard work and perhaps a hired mini-digger.

You can find space for a pond in even the smallest garden, and soon nature in all her bursting abundance will have taken up grateful residence.

Still Water includes an epilogue full of sensible instructions about how to go about it — although instead of buying a synthetic pond liner, now that we know what a menace plastic is becoming, I’d recommend a (probably cheaper) visit to your local tip to find an old tin bath or a Belfast sink to start with.

Great nature writing needs to be informative, detailed, accurate, lyrical, and, above all, to instil a sense of gratitude and wonder.

John Lewis-Stempel succeeds in all these things triumphantly, taking the reader back to dreamy days spent crouching beside those sunlit ponds of childhood, watching the whirligig beetles and the pond skaters in silent fascination. Magical.