I was seven when I saw my first frog. My dad called me into the garden of our terrace house to say he had found something near the shed that I’d like. There sat a pocket-sized gold monster with a triangular back, and eyes like a cat but without the “I’m going to kill you” stare.
My dad, a wizard with tools, quickly knocked up a hutch. Sadly, the frog had to be freed a few months later when we moved house.
Our new place was an ex-council semi with a garden that felt like a rainforest. That might be because the lawn hadn’t been mowed and the grass was up to my waist. My younger brother fished most of a car engine out of the earth. I got something cooler: a frog on steroids that my dad told me was a common toad.
He was the size of a burger, didn’t move unless necessary, and had terrifying eyebrows. I named him Touchwood after a toad on TV I’d heard about.
My dad got out his toolkit again and built a 3ft-high version of Claridge’s – moss; roof slates to hide under; a sunken bath made out of a mixing bowl. I was very jealous of Touchwood’s living space as I was sharing a bedroom with my brother, who had become interested in welding and used to practise on the carpet.
In a book on frogs that my parents got me, it said toads could live for 40 years. Even if Touchwood lasted 10, he would be around past the year 2000. By that point, I figured, time travel and cloning would have been cracked. When Touchwood finally passed away, I would be able to go back and do a Jurassic Park.
As it was, Mr T lasted only nine more hibernations before he croaked it one summer. I admit that, by then, my head had been turned: I’d got into breakbeat music, and luminous poison dart frogs seemed a better fit colour-wise. Not that I ever owned one, but the clips I’d seen on David Attenborough showed them leaping and eating gracefully. That wasn’t Touchwood’s style. Whenever I dug him up a worm, he’d wrestle it, as if he was trying to swallow a sausage dog.
One morning as a teen, I excitedly thought I’d got Touchwood’s sex wrong and he – no, she – had laid eggs. According to my manual, they came out in a string; as I lifted the sticky threads off its back legs I thought: “I’m going to be a grandad.”
My exhilaration crashed when my mate came over and told me that toad eggs didn’t look like that. Touchwood must have swallowed some long grass earlier; now it was coming out the other end.
In the end, it was my mum who cloned Touchwood when she surprised me one afternoon with a flat-warming present: a fire-bellied toad. Gimlet, as my girlfriend and I named him, used to jump around his tank, and press himself against the plastic to show off the orange flashes on his underside. In the right lighting, it looked like I had a Blackpool player in my front room. As flashy as he was, he was no replacement for the original. Cheers for the all the good luck you brought me, Touchwood.
