The Village Cricket Team, 1913

By Ben Macnair

Mr Brown remembered them well.
All the fine boys who played Cricket on the Village Green,
in the summer of 1913.
He remembers their youth and vitality,
and their innocence,
in knocking out sixes and sevens,
and winning against the older teams from the local villages.

Mr Brown is alone in holding those memories.
The Cricket Team of 1913 swapped the smack
of leather and willow,
for bullets and blood.
Only three of them came back,
one blind, one crippled,
and the other one is alone in the horrors
He hopes no-one else ever has to see.

The Village saw damage,
and the population decimated.
57 boys went away to defend
their green and pleasant land
from invasion,
and in doing so, broke the hearts
of parents who remembered
being proud that their boy
was a member of the Village Cricket Team
in the innocent summer of 1913. 

Ben Macnair is an award winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom.