A Flashback!

I have a memory from primary school of the death of a frog.

A glass aquarium sat on a bare pine shelf at the back of the room, where it caught the late afternoon sun. It was quarter-filled with water that cast a lengthening, algae-tinged glow over a part of the wall behind and onto the map of the World, reaching deep into Brazil before the end-of-day bell rang and, in receding pandemonium, we tore off home.

In it, to teach us about nature, I suppose, our teacher had installed a stone, some oxygen weed and a large green frog. He must have got it somehow from the thickly-reeded pond we knew well as a place for mud-fights. On top of the tank he placed a sawn rectangle of plywood, to stop the frog jumping out. A “frog monitor” was appointed to catch flies and other small insects to drop into the tank every morning.

Then one morning, the frog wasn’t there. The plywood cover was ajar and the green water was unusually inert. A few dead insects lay motionless on its iridescent surface. Some blame was directed at the “frog monitor”. But the frog monitor that week was Dave and he was too good at rugby to shoulder blame for long.

During lunch break, one of those girls-who-see-everything caught a glimpse of green and gold behind the cast iron radiator that circulated hot water in winter. She told the teacher who lay on the floor and began poking away back there with the blackboard pointer.

From that moment, the frog came to be seen with growing group enmity as a “bad” thing that had somehow broken a social contract with us by leaving its tank to run wild behind the radiator, in a cramped niche it wriggled ever more tightly into as, at every opportunity, it was hunted and poked at. The radiator was battered with the duster until  paint flakes flew to “scare it out”. At one point, under our teacher’s supervision, water was poured down the back of the radiator in an fruitless attempt to flush it out. Out of its place, the frog was getting unprecedented attention… and it became a perceived as an enemy. Who could guess what consequences might follow? I think it was actually hated.

Then came the gagging smell. Our teacher pinned a note for the janitor to the door and the next morning our room smelled of disinfectant and the aquarium was gone. The late afternoon sun shone unobstructed on the map of the World that day. Brazil was no longer green.