The cricket field has been freshly mown and marked, but it doesn’t feel like summer. It feels like late March or early April, those cool just-spring days of greentops and low bounce. There are no cricketers out there now – just birds, turning over the cuttings in search of breakfast. Starlings at midwicket, crows at slip. A magpie on the long-leg boundary. A song thrush works for a worm on the cut strip, just short of a length.
Across the lane from the cricket field there’s a community nature reserve, Hirst Wood, and a shallow pond fringed with short reeds. The mood here is sullen. Adolescent tadpoles, each a heavy-bodied Cooper Black comma, sulk on the silt bed. The pond skaters move stiffly among the lily pads. A newt treads water in a lily shadow – and then there’s a sudden surge of motion, and a freshwater leech comes swimming across a shaft of daylight.
