While we're on the subject of ponds, here's Edward Thomas, recalling his childhood in the 1880s:
"The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibals' footprints."
[The different ponds — ]
The ponds were for paddling in. One of them, a shallow irregular one, weedy and rushy-margined, lying then in some broken ground between the Three Island and the railway, was full of effets [eft, newt] and frogs. Bigger boys would torture the frogs, by cuffing, skinning or crushing them alive. The sharp penknives sank through the skin and the soft bone into the wood of the seat which was the operating table. The seat and the earth under and about it would be strewn with fragments, pale bellies slit up, and complete frogs seeming to be munching their own insides. At that time I could [40] not have done it myself, but my horror lacked pity and turned into a kind of half-shrinking, half-gloating curiosity.
I fished for sticklebacks and gudgeon in the long pond on the far side of the railway, which owed its name of "Backaruffs" or "Pack of Roughs", so I always thought, to the poor ill-dressed boys who used to swarm to it from Battersea on Saturdays and bank holidays. I fished with a worm either tied on the cotton line or impaled on a bent pin, and put my stickleback or my rare lovely spotted gudgeon in a glass jam-jar.
Once at least I did as I had seen others do, hauling a heavy fruit basket out into the pond and dragging it in full of weed and mud and the little "blood worms" that breed in mud, and sticklebacks, even a red-throated one, but never a gudgeon.
[I'm sure I've read another account of dragging for fish on the Common - who was it?]
The gudgeon was so attractive, partly for its looks, perhaps chiefly for its comparative size, that many times I willingly paid a halfpenny for one and let it be believed that I had caught it. Even when dead it was hard to part with, so smooth and pure was it. I liked even its smell, yet never dreamed of eating it. There were carp, too, in this pond and in the roundish Box Pond that lay half-way between the top of our street and the railway.
By the longer pond I once saw a carp many times as big as a gudgeon in the possession of a rough: he had torn its head off to make it fit his jar. Much larger ones were talked about, caught in the Box Pond by the elder brothers of one boy. I saw them fishing there once or twice without a motion of the float in [41] the motionless water. Once I tried there myself all alone. My expectations were huge: that I failed completely only increased my respect for the sacred pond.
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