Frog and Toad are Friends

Just before Susanna grows entirely out of them, I want to record my love of Frog and Toad. I remember them from my childhood. John Hamblin on Play School shouting ‘Now seeds — start growing!’ with just the right mix of innocence and petulance. I rediscovered them in a handsome new hardback collection a few years ago, and haven’t tired of them yet.

There are twenty Frog and Toad stories, written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel in the early 1970s. The pictures, all in shades of green and brown, are simple but expressive, with grinning Frog and frowning Toad in tight jackets and flared trousers, surrounded by outsize foliage befitting their stature. Frog is taller and leaner than Toad. His garden flourishes. His home’s striped walls and clean lines contrast with Toad’s busy floral wallpaper and diamond-paned windows.

The sentences are short and spare, but the ideas a big. Like Rat and Mole, or Pooh and Piglet, Frog and Toad are both archetypal and idiosyncratic. They are perfectly fleshed, rounded characters but they perfectly represent some classic symmetries of human character. Frog is mature, equable, amiable, and balanced. Toad is a mess of neuroses and flaws, who relies on Frog to calm his fears and curb his excesses. Frog encourages Toad to enjoy things, to choose the bigger life, to wake up and to get out and to try again. Toad inclines to anxiety and inertia, and learns from Frog to trust life, to laugh at himself, to expand his notions of happiness. One telling moment comes when he’s enjoying a wild ride, assuming Frog is behind him on the sledge. A passing crow tells him Frog’s not there. ‘“I AM ALL ALONE!” screamed Toad.’ His ride ends in a snowy crash.

You might wonder why Frog bothers, but he seems to enjoy Toad’s company, and not to mind their psychological inequities. In spite of Toad’s neediness, this is true friendship, pure and deep and entirely sufficient. Sometimes they’re like brothers or lovers, sometimes like a father and a child. Shades of all of these, but still something separate. There’s no hint of compensation or consolation in their togetherness. Nothing is wanting.

In the very last story, Toad’s worst fears are realised. He finds a note on Frog’s door saying Frog is not at home. He wants to be alone. To Toad’s despair, Frog has chosen loneliness over his friend’s trying company. But Toad is wrong. When he tracks Frog down to a little island in the river, it turns out Frog sought solitude because he was happy. ‘I am very happy. This morning when I woke up I felt good because the sun was shining. I felt good because I was a frog. And I felt good because I have you for a friend. I wanted to be alone. I wanted to think about how wonderful everything is.’ Toad concedes there might be good reasons to want to be alone.

‘Frog and Toad stayed on the island all afternoon … They were two close friends sitting alone together.’