Summer dresses and poems about frogspawn might seem odd in November but it’s all with good reason. Melinda Lovell’s poem Rituals published in the current edition of the 
Resurgence and Ecologist magazine (Nov/Dec, P52) mentions Chorleywood Pond so we just had to publish it too. Melinda, known to her friends as Lindy, was born Clare Chesterman and lived in Shire Lane.
We are fans of her River Chess blog
https://lovellmelinda.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/by-the-river-chess/
Here’s the poem…
R I T U A L S
Even more amazing than the golden kingcups
was the frogspawn in spring
oozing generously in Chorleywood Pond,
plump jelly freckled with black dots,
clogging the water ponderously
We knew, from last year and the year before,
when we two weren’t yet seven and eight,
that these frog-eggs would calmly metamorphose –
grow from dots to commas to tadpoles
to jumping frogs with limbs and bulbous eyes
Wading in to capture a glob of the magic stuff,
a bucket for her, a bucket for me, and some weed,
we’d bear it solemnly back over the common.
Week by week, we liked to compare
when tadpoles hatched, got their tails, gills, legs,
till by late June, they were so nearly frogs
we’d take them back to the same pond.
We were satisfied. Without trying,
they would become their frog-selves – some of them that is –
if no enemy from water or air loomed
Melinda Lovell