Croak!
The story behind my new musical for young singers
Summer afternoons in my garden in the middle of the Chiltern hills: the sun is always shining, the birds singing in the woods behind me. I’m leaning over the stones around our small garden pond and watching, silently, as the underwater world reveals itself.
Happy childhood memories.
I must have spent hours by that pond. Once I saw a snake, cooling itself in the waters. Mysterious dark shapes moved silently across the muddy bottom, never quite near enough to the surface for me to know what they were. A flash of golden scales every now and then as fish darted past.
Even the water snails were fascinating. Moving so imperceptibly slowly, and yet the clean trail on the lining plastic behind them, just as wide as their bodies, confirmed the fact that they were actually shifting forward. And the wonderful squelchy, sucking sound if I ever pulled one off…
But best of all was the late spring when the tadpoles had hatched. Some years there was a mass of dark, wriggly bodies squirming round the entire circumference of the pond. Every day I would study them, watching as they changed from straight lines to the rounded body and tail. The moment I noticed the legs had started appearing was wonderful.
And occasionally I would stay into the early evening when the frogs would all stick their heads out and then crawl onto the rocks around to start calling to one another. That unique, croaky, guttural intonation, so impossible to imitate as a child, however hard I tried!
The numbers of tadpoles would slowly reduce in time as the fish got fatter. But there were always a good number that slowly transformed, and eventually the distinctive angular shape of a frog became noticeable, and the tail gradually shrank away. Those mini frogs were such a joy to watch (and hold) as they scrambled around in the waters and then found their way to the outside world beyond the pond. I felt I could almost hear them croak for joy at those first few, unbelievably high, bounces!
I guess I was a bit of a dreamer. My internal dialogue created an underwater kingdom, where creatures either remained, sometimes frustrated, in the waters forever, or were seen to disappear at certain times of the year, never to be seen again. I longed to hear those conversations where one of the dragonfly nymphs or tadpoles promised to return to tell the rest of the pond what the outside world was like. And did these creatures even know that they would one day change? They were not simply animals and insects. These were characters in my imagined story, having personalities and adventures of their own.
And then I left the pond myself. I left home and studied, started working, got married and had children of my own.
But the pond didn’t leave me it seems. Those visceral childhood images have stayed with me so clearly, inspiring me to write.
I felt compelled to recreate a story in which the garden felt as summery and full of life as the one from my memories. And I wanted to tell the story of one of those little tadpoles discovering that change can sometimes lead to extraordinary things.
Croak! is my musical interpretation of those childhood dreams. Those hours of contemplation and wonder stayed with me and have now been themselves transformed into music and story.
The daydreams continue.
