The Crickets

I don’t think I’ve ever heard crickets the way I heard them as a child.

I remember being in Devon with my mum and dad, my brother, cousins, grandparents and all the extended family.

In the evenings we would walk to the pub for food, all of us together, and then walk back again afterwards.

We’d get a cherryade and a packet of crisps that somehow felt like the biggest bag of crisps in the world.

And the whole way there and the whole way home, the crickets would be singing.

You could never see them.

That was part of the magic.

They were just somewhere in the hedges and the long grass, completely hidden, making this enormous sound.

A whole orchestra of tiny creatures you couldn’t find.

It was such a fabulous noise.

Almost like a wind instrument made by nature.

The warm evening, everyone walking together, voices drifting up and down the group, the fizz of cherryade, the salt from the crisps, and underneath all of it that constant chirping from the dark.

I don’t remember exactly what we ate.

I don’t remember which roads we walked down.

I probably couldn’t tell you what anybody was wearing.

But I remember those crickets.

And I remember that packet of crisps feeling enormous in my hands.

I realised recently that I never really hear crickets now.

Not like that anyway.

Maybe they’re there and I simply don’t notice them.

Maybe there were more in Devon.

Maybe childhood just made everything louder.

But whenever I think of those evenings, the first thing that comes back isn’t really a picture.

It’s a sound.

My whole family walking through the dark while hundreds of invisible little creatures played us home.