The Cottage Smallholder

When I first met George he was the largest and most regal specimen in Colin’s pond. An old English carp – the sort that live in castle moats for years, often outliving their owners. Colin reckoned that he was at least ten years old. George was special.

When Colin handed me the keys to the cottage he was handing me the keys to a dream. Seclusion and privacy in a cottage set well back from the road with a large garden and small twelve foot pond. George was a key player. He got under my skin. I had planned to get rid of the pond. Within a year I was designing a 22 foot pond. If the pond was bigger, how large would George grow?

At times he was a gentle creature taking fish treats from my hand with giant lips and jaws. Like any large being, his size could be quite alarming. Watching new baby goldfish suddenly discover this moving rock was always entertaining, they would rush for the shallows in a trice and George glided slowly by. Unsuspecting visitors would gasp when he leapt from the pond to catch a fly.

He was always the last to hibernate and the first to wake up in the spring. There was something steady about George. A sort of aquatic old retainer, inherited with the cottage. He gave me a sense of just being a small dot on the vast time line. His life would probably be a longer dot. Sometimes, I’d fret about what would happen to him when I died.

In the early years of the new pond, he nearly died.

Fiddling with the input of water from the pump, I accidentally knocked a pipe loose. I woke the next morning to a pond liner and a scramble of peaky fish. George was flapping weakly in the mud with glazed, cloudy eyes. I played the hose over him for a minute or so, his eyes cleared and he flipped into the six inches of water that were left.

George didn’t hibernate this winter. It was too mild.

I realised this afternoon that I hadn’t seen him for a week or so. I began to clear the leaves and pond weed expecting him to swim up. There was a yellowish leaf on the other side of the pond. When I touched it with the net, I realised that it was one of George’s fins.

It was quite a struggle to heave the body out of the pond. My old friend measured twenty five inches long. An inch for each year of his life.