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.
Tony Quarrington 