LIFE & OTHER TADPOLES

MOSELEY MEMORIES Life and Other

Tadpoles

Big city life was not always the way it is usually portrayed on television. We may not have mixed with pigs, sheep and cattle, but we knew a little about biological life from direct experience. Cannon Hill Park seemed so far away, with the long walk down Salisbury Road and the longer one back uphill. One major attraction was seeing real anglers fishing for carp and other big fish in the two large pools. The anglers resisted our interest in their catches and showed contempt for our little dipper nets, used to get tiddlers for our jam jars. Another disincentive was the park keepers’ protection of The Golden Lion, the old Tudor inn that had been rebuilt there when the City Centre expanded. Uffculme Park was altogether different. Established by a family originally from Uffculme in Devon, a few miles from Tiverton, Uffculme House and grounds were gifted to the City in the nineteenth century for public use. A later City Council repaid the benefaction by renaming the park Highbury, as part of its promotion of Joseph Chamberlain’s house as a business and wedding attraction. At the Queensbridge Road end, an open-air school was built for the many Birmingham children suffering from respiratory diseases, particularly tuberculosis. We would see them, laid out on simple beds under blankets to enjoy the presumed healing power of fresh air as we went on our exploration. One was my sister’s best friend Diane. Uffculme House became a tea room and display centre. The attached walled garden, with its pool, originally built to

provide fish for the kitchen, was closely tended, and there was a stable yard housing a couple of horses and pieces of agricultural machinery, such as a wide mower. The rest of the parkland was given minimum maintenance, to our pleasure. Nearby was a small pond surrounded by trees, which every spring was full of frogspawn. Jam jars hung on carefully tied string were trailed across the surface, then taken home and put on the kitchen window sill. By the time the tadpoles had hatched and grown four legs, and their gills and tails started to shorten, interest had waned and Mom’s fear of frogs hopping 36 bus to the Maypole where there were fields, some containing cattle, where we would roam, picking hedgerow flowers to take home to our mothers. A hundred yards or so down Bell’s Lane, though, was a working smithy. Usually, the smith was making or repairing pieces of farm machinery or things like heavy hinges and handles for gates, but occasionally we would be fascinated as he shoed a horse, seeing and smelling the smoke rising as he pressed a red-hot horseshoe onto a hoof. Mostly, they were rich kids’ ponies or light field horses, but once we saw him tenderly handling a huge carthorse, which

about the house meant they were either taken back to the park or flushed down the outside toilet. Life’s casual cruelty. At the bottom of the slope at Uffculme was a much larger pool with a stream going out under Moor Green Lane. Its great attractions were the sticklebacks and other tiddlers and the ever-attentive ducks. It had a naturalness lacking at Cannon Hill, especially in the trees, bushes and bullrushes surrounding it. Before the last one in 1952, we usually travelled on trams, but they only went to Alcester Lane's End. We' caught the could have broken his back with a single kick. It patiently allowed him to hitch up a massive leg between his as he worked. The horse knew it was beneficial. As our limbs grew, we stopped being tadpoles and moved out of one element to explore another. The jam jars on the kitchen window sill no longer held frogspawn or stick insects, but concentrated solutions of alum and copper sulphate to grow specimen crystals. Secondary seriousness took over from junior excitement. -David Spilsbury