THE 'SWAMP'

Dad wasn’t fond of the Dell, you could tell because he called it ‘the swamp.’

The truth was a little more complex. It was not that he didn’t like the Dell so much as he was not entirely enamoured of its inhabitants. I found this out, much to my amusement, when dad found the ancient white enamelled laundry bucket, complete with matching lid, hidden under a pile of leaves behind the garden shed, I might have noted earlier that dad was just a little inquisitive, so, finding a bucket hidden in a pile of leaves, autumn leaves that should by all accounts have been long gone, he decided to take the lid off of the bucket. If he had been a little more observant he might have seen that the lid had been very well punctured, he might have deduced that the punctures were to allow air into the bucket, but he didn’t and he removed the lid.

In the kitchen, mum heard the most blood curdling scream and it was followed by dad running in the back door and through into the front room where she found him sitting in his armchair hiding behind a very shaky newspaper.

“What’s happened?” Mum asked him, concerned as to his plight. Eventually there came a reply.

“Frogs.” Was all he said.

My dad had been ‘Out East’ in Burma and India during ‘The war,’ he had an infinite supply of war stories about jungle warfare, but it turned out he had a deep, dark secret, known only to my mum and him, he was afraid of nothing, except frogs.

When we first saw the television series ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ about an army concert party in the Far East during ‘The war,’ one of the soldiers looked suspiciously like dad, rising to his full height of just over five feet from his boots to oversized solar toupee Gunner Sugden of the Royal Artillery was the image of my father as a young man. He might never have lived this down if, in later years he had never grown a moustache, because he reinvented himself militarily to become an almost exact facsimile of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army.