Free The Bower Bird by Ann Kelley Page A

the grass. They leap about to escape me when I try to catch them. I like the long-legged garden spiders best. They walk slowly as if balancing on stilts, blown off balance by the slightest breeze. Their legs are like fine human hair.
    We don’t have a spider book. I miss all the old books on wildlife there were at Peregrine Cottage. I think I’ll start spending pocket money on second-hand books. There’s always a good selection at the car boot sales and there’s a big second-hand bookshop in town.
    I find a good spider book – The Spiders and Allied Orders of the British Isles by Theodore H Savory.
    Pholcidae – very long-legged spider – lives in southeast counties of England, but we are in the far southwest, so maybe this isn’t my long-legged spider. I’m pretty sure it isn’t because ours has a round body and this has a long body. Bet there aren’t any books on Cornish spiders. I’ve found it. It’s Leiobnum rotundum . ‘Only the male’s body is round. It is rusty brown with no obvious markings apart from the black eye-turret. The female’s body is oval and paler with a dark, more or less rectangular saddle. Both sexes have long, hair-like black legs.’
    I have liberated the lizard with SED – Sadistic Eating Disorder. Now I have an empty terrarium. I remember when I was little we had a silk worm farm at school. I wonder where we got the leaves for it? Silk worms only eat mulberry leaves. And I had an ant farm once in a large jam jar, and a worm farm in between two sheets of glass that Grandpop made for me.
    Our little pond is already swarming with life, mosquito larvae mostly, Culex pipiens probably as they are the most common. They wriggle under water, jerkily, but when I get close to the pond they dive backwards together and disappear, like formation swimmers in a Busby Berkeley movie. We bought two water snails, Limniaea stagnalis I think they are, but they seem to have mated and produced lots of babies. Jumping Jiminy Cricket, that was quick work. There’s loads of Daphnia, or water fleas.
    I have an Observer’s Book of Pond Life . There are some wonderful water bugs I’ve never heard of: Water Cricket, Water Measurer, Long Water Scorpion and Pond Skater. The only one I have heard of is the Water Boatman.
    Bugs possess a sucking beak called a rostrum with which most of them pierce their prey and suck out their juices. Yuk, even life in our little pond is fraught with danger.
    Then there are the water beetles: Mud Dweller, Great Silver Beetle, Screech Beetle, Great Diving Beetle, and there’s even a Whirligig Beetle. Fly and moth larvae and pupae lurk in the vegetation near the surface. Water mites and water spiders live in ponds too. It’s going to be crowded. With luck we’ll have Damsel Flies and Dragon Flies.
    Perhaps we should turn the whole garden into a pond with little bridges for the cats to walk over.
    Mr Toad hunkers in his John Innes compost bag. I wonder if he thinks he is John Innes, with his name on the door of his home, like Winnie the Pooh’s friend, Piglet, who lived in a house with a notice that said TRESPASSERS W . Piglet said it had been in his family for generations and his Grandfather’s name was William and that is what the W stood for.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    I AM FEELING rather miserable today. Daddy phoned. He’s off to some film festival in France. I don’t know why I did it, maybe to escape from the wrath of Mum and the library authorities, but I suddenly blurted out ‘Can I come too?’ He says he can’t be looking after me while he’s in conference with directors and producers etc. Sure. Yeah, I understand. I’ll be in the way. He’ll be looking for a replacement for The Lovely Eloise. Some new young starlet with fake tits and legs up to her armpits. What if my donor heart and lungs are suddenly available and we have to go to London straight away? He won’t be there. Where will Mummy stay? He won’t be at my bedside. I don’t want him to leave the country. I