Land of Hop & Glory

Martin Townsend, © You Magazine

Lily pads? Forget 'em. Sheila Crown's pad is where all the finest frogs are squatting these days. Four thousand of them, to be exact - leaping in the living room, bouncing round the bathroom, courting in the croakroom and (this being Hampstead) sunbathing smugly by the swimming pool in the basement. Four thousand frogs in al shapes and sizes... and not one of them real.

'Oh no, I couldn't have real frogs,' squeals Sheila. 'I don't like their skin, I don't like their wiggliness - and I don't like the way they jump and suddenly frighten you.'

This seems a bit odd considering that, today, as every day, Sheila is not only completely surrounded by the little critters - there's even a tin of Dutch 'Frog'-brand beer in her fridge - but also a large group of frog-lovers who have come from as far afield as Frankfurt to view her collection.

But, as she patiently explains, her motives are more than pond-deep. 'It's not necessarily the frogs,' she says. 'It's the pride and the compulsion. I started off buying a green ornament to go in a green study in one of my previous homes, and it just snowballed from there.'

Sheila may have a large collection, but she's only a beginner compared to Ineke Bons-Moody, a formidable Dutch lady who arrives in Sheila's hallway, duty-free bag a-swinging, the Arthur Negus of the artificial amphibian-collecting world.

Ineke started collecting frogs - and toads - two decades ago, and it was a visit to her third frog open day, in 1985, which set Sheila on her way.

Unlike Sheila, Ineke will not have frogs all over her home - 'I don't want them upstairs, only downstairs in our little museum' - and she is quite keen on the real thing. She even kept some tropical tree frogs. 'They are so human-like,' she says.

In Sheila's huge living room, two frogophiles - power-dressed ladies from Woodford Green - are admiring glass cases crammed with frog ornamentsa nd memorabilia. A bride and groom frog dressed in blue satin clutch claws on the back of an armchair, while on the coffee table, next to a bowl of crisps, a large silver and gold toad smokes a wooden cigar. In the fireplace two stuffed urchins hug limp frogs that are the dead colour of gherkins.

Wendy Richard from EastEnders bustles in, wearing an oversize striped shirt and an enormous pair of spectacles, and peers into one of the cases. 'Ooh, I love the froggy watches,' she says. 'Oh look - a froggy butter-dish!' Wendy started collecting in 1976, when she was doing a summer season of Are You Being Served? in Blackpool. 'I bought a bullfrog cream jug and that was it,' she says. 'I was on the downward slide. I have slowed down lately, though. It's the dusting, you see. You don't get fingernails like mine doing dusting.'

As she leaves, Wendy turns to Sheila: 'Now don't forget what I told you, dear - the froggy toilet-brush holders are in the Sue Ryder shop.' Sheila makes anote of it, and the actress is gone.

'By the way,' she says, 'have you seen my Picasso?' Sheila leads the way into the downstairs bathroom - all glossy black tiles and gold fittings - and points out the master's scrawled pencil drawing of a frog hanging on the wall of the loo. She's got a Graham Sutherland frog upstairs too, but she's blase about the value of her collection.

'You'll find something worth £2,500 next to something worth 40p. I mix them,' she says. 'At the moment I'm desperate for some frog wallpaper.' An impertinent question suddenly occurs - would Sheila have preferred to live in Frognal?

She doesn't bat an eyelid. 'I was desperate to buy a house in Frognal,' she says. 'Desperate. But we'd already built this, so...' She sighs and adjusts the position of a frog Hamlet, complete with Yoric's skull, which declaims from the edge of her washbasin. A voice calls through the bathroom door. 'Is the mad woman there?'

'Coming' says Sheila.

When Sheila is not adding to her frog collection, she teaches swimming and aqua-aerobics at a leisure centre in Barnet. She had been a gifted water-skier, taking third place in the British championships when she was 21. But deep down she knew that her potential had been spotted too late. After suffering a series of injuries, 'trying to cram ten years of training into one year', she quit and went back to work as a secretary/PA. She met her husband Stephen in 1976, and has two sons and a daughter.

Friends refer to her husband as Saint Stephen because he never complains about the frogs. 'Actually I don't notice them anymore,' he murmurs. But there are one or two subversive voices in the family. Ask Sheila's seven-year-old daughter, Katie, if she likes frogs and she shakes her waist-length brown hair and wrinkles her nose. 'You've only seen them for one day,' she says. 'I've been looking at them all my life.'

Then again, children can scarcely be expected to understand the subtle attractions of the family Ranidae. 'They are the most versatile of animals,' enthuses 45-year-old Tony Nevett, a Birmingham-born postmaster who has trekked up from Christchurch with his wife Jenny. 'There are so many things you can do with them, expression- and position-wise.'

His most treasured froggy item is an 1887 Queen Victoria solid silver jubilee cake knife with two crabs and a frog carved in ivory on the handle. 'A lot of antique dealers have got my name, so they write to me and send me things on approval,' he says. 'Trouble is, you can't buy everything willy-nilly. Money's got to come into it somewhere.'

Apart from some 'Help a toad cross the road' stickers being handed out at the door by two of her friends dressed in frog-suits, any mention of the ecological threat faced by frogs and toads is no more than a background murmur at Sheila's house. But it's there all the same - particularly among hte Dutch contingent.

Ineke Bons-Moody started her ground-breaking collection because she missed the frogs which were being wiped out by pollution, and Resi and Leo Groeningen, from Krommenie in Holland, started theirs because they pined for the mass hiccuping that used to echo across the flats.

It's nearly four o'clock now and the last of Sheila's guests are standing around her 'froggy went a-wooing' scatter-rug in the hallway and bidding their goodbyes. Charlotte Smallman, manager of the Frog Hollow toy shop in London where Sheila bought many of her earliest items, is packing away her little table full of frogs for sale.

'Sadly, the most popular line we had is no longer available,' says Charlotte. 'It was a frog prince bean-bag with a zipper mouth. Still, this musical frog sponge is a bit of a line...' She holds the sponge up and it squawks tortuously through 'When The Saints Come Marching In'.

'It's good for 60,000 plays,' she explains. 'After that, you're really quite glad it's broken.'