Tony Quarrington

Tucked along a muddy track

Besides Marden’s Mile Bush Inn

Where swifts and swallows

Swirl around its open eaves,

Lies a small, square nettle-ridden

Recreation ground

That serves as a cricket amphitheatre

In the summer months.

“Two to Apps……..Twenty up”

Wheezes the wizened scorer in a flat cap

As he sucks on a soggy Woodbine

Wedged between his two remaining teeth.

His crew-cut sporting companion,

Sixty five years at least his junior,

Sat alongside him in the crumbling hut,

Leaps out to change the tin numbers

On the adjacent wooden scoreboard.

Little did the boy know then that,

The next time he would walk this field,

His former mentor and elderly friend

Will have departed the scene,

And he would be playing among men

For the first time,

Scoring a heroic nought not out

To save the game;

But incurring his mother’s wrath

For soiling his new cricket whites,

Slipping into a hidden boundary ditch

While fielding at third man.