NB Although all of the great houses and historical figures are real, current period characters are purely from my imagination and have no link with anyone living or dead.

Chapter 1 - The Fish-kisser of Coggeshall

I really had to blame a strange sportsman / angler from Australia for my nick-name. He was called Rex Hunt and had his own show on the TV in Australia about fishing. He became known for kissing the fish that he threw back. I had seen a clip on YouTube and started doing it myself as a joke. Unfortunately I showed a couple of friends the clip and the name stuck.

I suppose that this is where I give you some background information so that you can see how I got into the situation I am now in. I was born Brian Francis Fulton, in Colchester Hospital on the tenth January, 2008. My parents, William and June, were both teachers at the time. My father taught history at the University of Essex and my mother was teaching maths in the Girls Grammar School. She retired after I was born and my father got another job. He became the Manager of the Paycockes House and Gardens in Coggeshall and my mother became the Manager of the souvenir stall and catering, both working for the National Trust. My father had written a few books on Tudor and Elizabethan history which brought in a modest, but steady, income.

I do not remember anything about where they lived in Colchester as my earliest memories were all in Coggeshall. We did not live in the Trust property but had a semi-detached house just across the road and a little to the west, on the appropriately named West Street. I went to school in the town right up until I was sixteen, firstly at the Saint Peters’ ‘C of E’ Primary and then the Honywood Community Science School. This meant that trips out of the small town were a rarity and somewhat special. Most of those trips included fishing as my father was a keen angler. He said that it used to help him relax after trying to keep a bunch of children interested in medieval history.

Of course, those trips were curtailed during the lockdowns but it certainly helped being home-schooled by two teachers and I did well enough in my studies to get an entry into the University of Essex, in Colchester, in a four year course leading to a BA in History. I was following in my fathers’ footsteps and growing up helping him look after a genuine Tudor merchant’s house was a big push towards my aims. I was, however, going to help out at a few other Trust houses before starting my next studying. My father had arranged for me to get involved in an Elizabethan place for a few weeks and then a friend was going to let me help with the tourists in York for a while.

In the meantime, I had a few days to rest after finishing secondary school in 2025 so did what I usually did to relax, go fishing, of course. Although I had, with my father, gone down to the mouth of the Blackwater as well as the lower reaches of the Colne below Colchester, I did not mind the comparative lack of fish that inhabited the upper reaches of the Blackwater and such a spot was only about three hundred yards from my home, through the Paycockes Gardens and then through a grove of trees to the banks of the river. I sometimes caught rudd and roach and even snagged a carp at times. Very occasionally there was brown trout.

Today I had companions on my fishing expedition, three life-time friends who had been with me throughout my primary and secondary school. We had played together as toddlers, cycled the area as early teens and taken the bus together to see the pictures in Colchester or Braintree. They were, amazingly enough, going to be with me at the University of Essex having been helped by my parents during the lockdowns as well.

Alec was as tall and rangy as me, with brown hair to my black and an impish smile that would captivate the heart of anyone he used it on, male or female. He would be studying Financial Economics as he was very good with his maths. Sarah and Stella were non-identical twin sisters and we seemed to have paired off some years before. I used to partner Sarah, a willowy blonde with a now-well developed figure that I was very happy to cuddle. She would be studying Film and Drama and would, I thought, make a very good leading lady. Her sister, Stella, had long hair as black as mine and an equally curvaceous figure that she used brazenly to get Alec to do her bidding. She was going to study Economics, like him, but her course would include psychology. She had an unerring way of seeing through people and was our group BS meter.

Alec also had a line in the water next to my rod as we lazed on the river bank on blankets, having a cuddle with the girls but mainly discussing our future at the University. I was lucky that my father still had plenty of contacts and he had taken the four of us there in his car to show us around before we had finished our final exams. We had been introduced to his old friends as ‘the four Musketeers’ which not only gave us a help with our possible future tutors but would also put a target on our backs if we were doing badly.

It was still early in the summer and clouds rolled in around eleven. The girls were getting cold so we sat them with the blankets around them while we packed up our rods. I did what I usually did when I fished here; I had a jar in which I kept the tiny sprats for bait next time and would use my fine-net to have a rummage among the reeds near the bank to see what I could find. This time, however, it felt as if I had snagged a boot because the net was very heavy as I pulled it towards me.

When I managed to pull it out of the water; there sat the biggest and ugliest frog I had ever seen. It looked at me and went ‘Ribbett’a few times. I pulled it up on the bank and was able to extricate it from the netting and, instead of bouncing away, just sat there and did its ‘Ribbett’ piece again. I picked it up with both hands and was about to toss it back in the water when my friends all cried out “Kiss the Frog, Kiss the Frog; you have to kiss the frog or else your reputation will be shot!”

They stood around me and chanted “Frog kiss” and the frog looked back at me and just went ‘Ribbett’. There was no way I could not do the deed. Stella was filming me on her phone so my reputation and my standing with my friends was at stake. I took a deep breath, puckered up and kissed the damn frog as asked. The moment my lips touched its slimy snout I was thrown through the air as if a bomb had gone off. My body felt as if it was on fire and when I hit the ground I blacked out.

Next time I opened my eyes Sarah was cradling my head and crying. I made a sound and she only cried harder. I said “It’s all right, my love, I was only knocked out” and was surprised at my voice. I must have been badly winded because it sounded like a girls’ voice. Sarah kissed my forehead and said “Oh, Biff (her name for me when we were alone) you were more than knocked out. Somehow you became a knock-out” She helped me sit up and that’s when I felt weights on my chest that were not there before and my black hair, usually only down to the nape, now fell down in front of my face. “What happened to me?” I squeaked “I’ve got breasts and long hair.”

It was then I felt something around my groin that was unusual. Actually, it was a lack of something that was unusual. My brain was having a hard time processing all of the information but it did not take long for me to come to a conclusion. I had kissed a frog and had been turned into a girl. “Frog” I asked “What happened to the frog?”

Sarah moved aside and I could see Stella and Alec crouched next to another body. Sarah helped me stand and I went over to look at it. The body was a young man, about our age, dressed in a tunic and leggings that were almost exactly like the ones I sometimes wore when I played the part of a Tudor lad on special days at the House. He was breathing but seemed unconscious so I said “Call my father to come down with a stretcher from the house” and the other two looked up at me and gasped. Alec said “What happened to you, Brian, you look a lot different and you sound like Stella?”

Sarah said “We will worry about that later, call Mister Fulton and let us get this lad looked after. He looks as if he has been through the wars.” The lad certainly did look battle-worn, his clothes were grubby, he had no shoes and his hair looked like it was alive with nits. Alec made the call and, while we waited, Stella showed me the video she had taken. It looked like that the moment I kissed the frog, it became the lad on the ground and the obvious increase in mass must have been the cause of the blast of air that threw me from him. The aura of lightning around him may have been why I felt like I was on fire.

When my parents arrived, obviously worried that one of us was badly injured, we assured them that we were all uninjured but it was easy to see that I was not quite the person who had left the house this morning. Stella showed my father the video and he nodded sagely and said “It is the old ‘boy into frog’ spell, again. Never seen it done but there are lots of stories told. There is a lot this lad can tell us when he wakes up.” We managed to get the lad onto the stretcher without touching his hair and then my mother fussed over me to make sure I was still her son, even though, as I stood there, my breasts were showing under my tee-shirt and my shorts needed the belt snitched to stay on me. When we went back up to the house I had a lot of trouble keeping my feet in the sneakers as my feet seemed to have shrunk.

My father and Alec took the stretcher, Stella grabbed our blankets, my mother picked up the fishing gear and Sarah put an arm around my waist to help me walk the few hundred yards back to our house where, in the driveway, an ambulance was waiting; there being no parking space at Paycockes. The attendants took a look at the lad, quickly putting his hair in a plastic bag, then checking his vitals. They said that he just seemed to be out of it but was otherwise uninjured. My mother asked them to look at me and one guy said “She looks perfect to me, what do you think is wrong with her?” My mother said “It’s just that this morning she was my son that left the house, I think it would be wise to find out just how much change has been made.”

Marianne Gregory © 2022