We bought you at a village fete, over ten years ago now I think. You lay there with several others on a trestle table, each of you handmade from a slightly different material, all filled with beans – red lentils we found out when one of your seams split - about the size of an adult hand.
Maybe Jack liked the soft feel of you in his fingers or your patchwork of deep pinks and blue, or your eyes, two white beads which did seem to look at us.
I don’t know why, one day, he decided you were a journalist. That’s how you got your name – Reporter Frog. And that summer he made you all the equipment you needed to do your job: a notepad and pencil, a tape machine and microphone, a computer and a printer, a mobile phone, all carefully and lovingly constructed out of cardboard. So it was obvious you would come on holiday with us to Scotland, looking out of the aeroplane window so you could describe the unfolding landscape below us: the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and then down into busy Glasgow, towards lego houses and snaking roads. He kept you safe, in your own little bag, but we grown-ups checked up on you too. At the holiday cottage he made a space for your belongings on a table beside his bed.
It was hot, for Scotland, and that first day the beach was a welcome relief. We peeled off clothes, relaxed our guard. He must have put you on the rock quite soon while he paddled and played. None of us missed you for hours. And of course by the time we did the sea had long since washed over your stone. The next few hours and days were torture: the times we scoured that beach at both low and high tide, reaching under seaweed, scanning the damp brown sand. I even wondered if you had been dragged out to sea and swept back onto a neighbouring beach so we went there too and looked. It was at night that Jack cried the most and to listen to it nearly broke our hearts.
The “Lost” poster on the toilet block beside the beach was one last desperate shot, more something to do than anything. To have left no stone unturned, so to speak. I drew your shape and tried to recall your exact colours. The days passed, bringing our holiday close to its end. I confess that we bought a beanie baby tortoise in a shop but it was not the same, no substitute for you.
My husband took the phone call in the early evening. I heard his excited voice, our address being spelled out. We could hardly believe it. The woman described how you had been saved by another little boy just as the waves were about to swamp you, an innocent rescue. You were in Leeds now. She’d put you through the washing machine so you were cleaner. Back home we waited anxiously until the envelope bearing you at last tumbled through the letter box.
I am looking at you now on the desk, faded and tattered with the beans spilling out in places. Jack is at University and you are only a faint memory of his, a childhood legend. But for a reporter – which is what you were – wow did you have a good story to write . . . . .
