The Grim Electric Reaper

I hate mowing grass. I hate it because it's a tedious chore that makes too much noise to let me listen to music. I hate it because it's unnatural, and destructive. Where I live at the moment has no grass. I repeat, not one blade. It has plenty of Shepherd's Purse and Dandelion plants growing out of gaping cracks, and I have found that they make excellent additions to salads, (not the gaping cracks, please, just the leaves).

I have only ever owned one house that had grass. I lived there for barely three years, because after the third week of moving in I discovered that I hated it, and it then took me that long to escape. It was a maisonette, which was the first reason I hated it. I had neighbours either side of me and above me. There was never any peace; if I wasn't annoying them with something I was doing, then one or more of them would start annoying me, either in return for something I had already done, or as a sort of deposit in life's bitch-bank for the future.

But mostly, I annoyed them, and the major way in which I annoyed them was not by doing something that got on their nerves, but it was by not doing something. There are sins of commission, (I do a few of those), sins of emission, (not to my knowledge, apart from belching), and sins of ommission, (mea culpa gigantic-whatever the latin ending should be).
I didn't mow my back garden.

There was a front garden, which was all grass and path, but that rarely needed mowing because we lived beside a large lake in Woodley, and the swans would bring their cygnets round the houses begging for food. In order to signal their arrival and hunger, they would settle on a piece of grass and steadily rip it down blade by blade until a frantic owner rushed out with handfulls of bread and chased them away. I didn't have the heart to stuff them full of starchy white cardboard, so I let them savage the lawn as often as they felt like it. They must have viewed me as the ultimate challange, because no matter how much bread was flung at them by the other residents, they always ended up on my front lawn.

But, after nearly three years of living in this twenty-year old uninspiring block of four-square rooms, the chance came to get out and live in a rambling brick building over one hundred and fifty years old, where nothing was straight or level. It was the worst time to sell, and I accepted that I would lose nearly a fifth of what I paid to buy the place even if I got the best possible price for my maisonette, but I would still be able to afford the new place. I went with it, took the advice of the estate agents, and smartened up the property. Including the garden, they had stressed the need to make the place look as much like the neighbouring plots of land as I could.

So I bought an electric hovering mower, plugged it in, and got to work. The grass was so long that I ended up swinging the thing around in huge sweeping arcs as if it was a giant scythe, and then coming back in for a more normal cut to get the grass down to a normal level. Several times I felt the blades strike what felt like stones, and saw little brown shapes fly up. I assumed that my neighbours had tossed the unwanted pebbles and bits of wood over the fence to keep their gardens clean and make their point about my non-conformist approach to cultivating nature. But as I went around with my second purchase, a rake, cleaning up the cuttings, I found I was wrong. The small brown shapes clattering out from the mower had been frogs and toads.

My garden must have been a sanctuary for them, a place where they could hide from the heat of the sun, a place that always had moist cool spots, and was full of insects and slugs and other things nutritious to amphibious life. For three years they had clustered there and thrived, and then I had visited a catastrophe upon them that was as deadly as the asteroid strikes which allegedly killed the dinosaurs. I picked up a dozen mangled little bodies, and found just three still living. Two had amputated limbs, and one was intact, though obviously bruised and cut.

I put the three survivors on an old plate in a cool spot beneath the Forsythia bushes that flanked the kitchen window. Flanked is a generous way of describing the matted tangle that had occurred when two bushes decided to grow towards each other and were left uncut for three years. But there was a tunnel into which I could crawl and place the plate against the cool of the kitchen wall, near to the dripping overflow pipe.

I phoned up the local vets and explained what I had done. I am sure I heard muffled laughter while I waited for the lady who had answered the phone to come back with an answer from those who knew more about amphibious reptiles, but her reply was not good news for the frogs. It would be kindest to just kill them.

I baulked at that, I had already slaughtered nine, and felt that the only way to ease my conscience would be to keep the survivors alive. But over the next two days, despite my leaving handfulls of slugs, flies, spiders and dandelion leaves on the plate, the two who had suffered amputations died. I was left with one toad, warty, bruised, but with slowly healing cuts, and I made it my mission in life to ensure it survived.

I came back from work one evening, and crawled into the tunnel to check on how he was faring, and my heart leapt when I saw the plate was empty. He had recovered enough to move away, possibly to a spot that was more suitable to a recuperating toad. Excited and eager, I backed out of the tunnel to start looking for him, and felt an ominous crunching squelch beneath my knee. Oh God no, I thought, hurriedly shifting my weight, but it was too late. He hadn't moved very far, and I had just made sure that he would never again have to fear the heat of the sun or the chill of the night.

I buried him beneath the bushes that had been his hospital for the last few days of his life, completed the sale, and swore that I would never again mow grass, no matter what the inducement might be.