“Paul then got a bug about tadpoles. “Is it possible to make a pond, Dad?” he asked one day.
“What for, son?” asked Dad.
“To raise tadpoles,” replied Paul.
Dad was always very good at trying to supply anything we wanted – particularly if he thought it would be of an informative or educative nature. A few days later he dug a big hole in the back garden and sank a beer barrel in the space. Then he left us to fill it with water.
Paul got a lot of frog-spawn from somewhere and dumped all this into the barrel. For weeks he lived for nothing else but that spawn. The moment he came home from school, he’d be out into the garden, stuffing his face down into that spawn to see how it was getting on.
“They’re getting tails!” he’d yell at me and then I’d go and look at the messy stuff. I couldn’t understand what was exciting him.
“Look, there’s one with a body!” he’d point. All I could see was stuff that looked like a whole lot of dirty marmalade.
Then one day he ran into the house yelling blue murder.
“They’re getting away!” he was shouting. “They’re running off into the fields!”
Mum and I ran out and there was a horde of frogs jumping and leaping about all over the place. We managed to grab one or two and hold on to them for a moment or so but the minute we set them down again, off they went, into the bushes and hedges. In a very short time, Paul’s pond was completely empty! You should have seen his face! It would have made you laugh and cry at the same time. He had never counted on his spawn turning into real live frogs – neither had the frogs!”
Mike McCartney for Woman Magazine, Saturday, August 21, 1965.
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"The Small Blue Flower" by Mary Stewart
Woman Magazine, 1957
Illustration by John Heseltine
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Oulimata Gallet wearing Balmain for Woman Magazine October 2022, photographed by Thiemo Sander
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Another month passes and we’ve been spying out all the things we we’d love to treat ourselves too.
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“Everybody was quite confident that Paul would pass the eleven-plus – for Mum and Dad thought of him as the brains of the family. And of course, he didn’t let us down, because he was a natural at exams. When I passed in my turn, it was so unexpected, apparently, that Mum burst out crying – I think the idea that she had two “intelligent” sons was too much for her! They say sensitivity often goes with intelligence and certainly I’d say this was true of Paul. Although on the surface he tried to give the impression that he was a fairly tough, swashbuckling, mildly-tearaway character, underneath there was a great deal of thoughtfulness and real tenderness.”
- Mike McCartney, Woman Magazine, Saturday, August 21, 1965.
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kitchen wares in May 1978 Woman's Day magazine
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''Woman's Home Companion'', Oct. 1944
Source
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