The Switch

by Eve Balfour, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The badger had been again in the night. Reg Cattermole saw it from the pavilion step before he had the padlock off the mower shed: a run of turned turf along the long-leg boundary, each piece flipped over clean as a page, roots to the sky, and the bare earth underneath already grey with the dew.

He fetched the barrow and the half-moon iron and went down to it. It was ten past seven on the twentieth of September, and cold for the time of year. The rooks were on the outfield already, thirty or forty of them, walking between the turned pieces with their heads down and their trousers flapping, and they lifted off in a body as he came and settled again twenty yards on.

The turf came up in his hand like a mat off a floor. That was the thing he could not get used to. Grass that he had cut to twelve millimetres all summer, green as a billiard cloth from the road, and there was nothing under it. He held a piece the size of a tea tray and shook it, and the soil fell away from the bottom, and what was left was an inch of brown thatch and a few white threads of root, broken off short. Behind it, where it had lain, the grubs lay curled in the earth. He counted eleven in that one patch before he stopped counting. Fat as the top joint of his little finger, the colour of tallow, each with a brown head and three pairs of legs tucked up under it like a sleeping dog.

He rolled the pieces back, one after another, and trod them down, and swept the loose earth into the cracks with the back of the iron. It took him an hour and twenty minutes. When he looked back from the sightscreen the rooks were walking over the patch he had mended, and one of them had a piece up already, tugging at the edge of it the way a man tugs at a stuck drawer.

He wrote it in the book that evening: 20 Sept. Rain nil. Badger, long leg, approx 30 sq yds. Rooks all day. Grubs. The book was the fourth of its kind. He had kept the rain in it since 1983, the year he took the ground over from his father.

---

The committee met on the Thursday in the pavilion, under the honours boards. There were five of them round the tea table: Martin Thurlow in the chair, because he had built the new changing rooms at cost; Pam Mayhew with the accounts; the two Gooderham brothers, who had opened the batting for the second eleven between them for the best part of thirty years; and Reg, who was not a member of the committee but came when he was asked, and had been asked.

"I've had Dean out," said Martin. "Turfcare East. He walked the whole ground with me Tuesday."

"I saw his van," said Reg.

"He says it's chafer. Garden chafer. He says every club in the county has got it this year, the ones that haven't got leatherjackets." Martin had a sheet of paper, and he slid it across the table to Pam, who put her glasses on. "There used to be a spray. You'd know the one, Reg."

"They took it off the shelves," said Reg. "Nine, ten years back."

"Well, there isn't anything now. Not for us. Dean says he can put down nematodes. Worms, they are, little worms that get inside the grub." Martin made a small movement with his fingers, as of something going in. "Nine hundred and sixty for the outfield. Plus the VAT."

Pam took her glasses off again. "We've one thousand eight hundred and forty pounds in the current account," she said. "And the roller to be serviced. And the insurance in January."

"And it might not take," said Martin. "Dean was honest about that. Has to be warm enough in the ground, has to be wet. If it doesn't take, that's the money gone." He sat back. "What I want to know is where they're coming from. We never had it like this before."

Nobody said anything. The elder Gooderham, Keith, looked at the window. You could see, from where they sat, the line of the hedge on the far side of the ground, and the big ash trees above it where the rooks went up at night, and beyond them the roof of the barn at Hill Farm.

"It's the meadow," said Martin. "That's what Dean thinks. You've got a hay meadow right up against the boundary that's never been sprayed in twenty years. It's a reservoir, he says. And the badger's in her bank, we all know that, and the rooks are in her ash trees. Everything that's wrong with this ground is coming over that hedge."

"You can't touch a badger," said Reg.

"I'm not saying touch the badger. I know the law on badgers as well as you do." Martin laid his hand flat on the table. "But the rooks are another matter. There's a man at Rattlesden who'll do it properly, with the licence and all. Only he'd want to stand in her wood. And she'd want asking."

"Then ask her," said Pam.

"I've asked her about the car park," said Martin. "I'm not asking her about anything again." He looked across the table. "Reg. You've known her longest."

Reg had known Ruth Kerridge for eleven years, which was as long as she had been at Hill Farm, and in that time they had spoken perhaps a dozen times, mostly about the hedge. He said he would go round on Saturday.

---

She was in the yard when he came up the track, forking straw out of the back of a trailer into the calf pen, and she did not stop until the trailer was empty. She was a big woman, past seventy, in a man's jacket and a pair of rigger boots, and she had a way of looking at a person as though she was waiting for the rest of the sentence.

He gave her the rest of it. The badger, the rooks, the grubs, the nine hundred and sixty pounds. The man from Rattlesden. He said it badly, he knew, and he said it twice over in places, and at the end of it he said that it was the committee's idea and not his.

She leaned the fork against the trailer.

"Let me get a spade," she said.

He thought she meant to dig him out of the yard with it, the way she looked. But she went into the cart shed and came out with a long-handled Suffolk spade, worn bright at the blade, and went off across the yard and through the field gate without waiting for him, and he followed.

The meadow ran down to the cricket ground in a long slope, perhaps six acres, and it had been cut for hay in July and had come again since, thick and uneven, with the seed heads gone brown. There were rooks on it too. He saw them walking among the grass at the bottom, near the hedge, a dozen of them, and as he and Ruth Kerridge came down the slope they went up and over into the ash trees and made a noise about it.

She stopped about thirty yards above the hedge and put the spade in. She made four cuts, driving the blade each time with her heel all the way to the tread, until she had a square marked out a foot on each side; then she levered, and lifted the whole of it out, and turned it over onto the ground at his feet. Then she knelt down, which took her a moment, and broke it open with her hands.

The roots went all the way down. That was the first thing he saw. White and brown and thick as string, some of them, going through the whole depth of the spade and out of the bottom of it, so that the square held together when she pulled it apart and had to be torn. The soil was dark, and it smelled of something, of cellars, of the inside of a wood. There were worms in it. He counted six, and two of them big, and she pulled one out of the earth and laid it on the grass and it lay there and did nothing in particular. There was a black beetle that ran out of the crumbs and went under a leaf. There was a centipede.

There were two grubs. She found them both and held them up, one on each palm, the same tallow colour, the same brown heads.

"Two," she said, and put them back in the hole.

She stood up and wiped her hands down her jacket and looked at him.

"Now yours," she said.

They went through the gap at the bottom of the hedge, where the boys went through for the lost balls, and came out by the sightscreen. Reg walked her to a place in front of the scorebox that the badger had not yet found and the rooks had only begun on. She handed him the spade.

"You do it," she said. "It's your ground."

He cut his square the way she had cut hers, a foot each way. The blade went down easily, too easily; there was nothing to hold it. And when he levered the square up, the turf came off the top of it in a single piece and slid off the blade onto the grass, and the soil underneath fell back into the hole in a loose heap.

She got down again and went through it with her fingers, and she counted aloud, not loudly, the way his mother used to count stitches. When she got to twenty she glanced up at him. When she got to thirty she stopped, and sat back on her heels, and there was one more under her knee, and she held that one up as well.

"Thirty-one," she said.

There were no worms. He looked for them himself; he took the spade back and went down the side of the hole another two inches, and there were none. There was a grey layer about four inches down that the spade rang on, and the soil above it came away in flat cakes like pastry.

"What have you put on it?" she said.

He told her. He told her the truth, because there seemed no point in anything else, kneeling on the outfield with thirty-one chafer grubs between them. Feed four times in the year, the spring feed and the summer and the two autumn ones. The worm-killer on the square every October, as his father had done before him, and on the outfield too in the bad years when the casts came up and the ball picked up mud and the fielders complained. That had stopped when they took the stuff off the market; but he had a drum of it in the shed still, and had used it till it was gone. The grub-killer, the same, till they stopped that. The roller, every week from March, the heavy one, and the light one on the outfield before every home match. Cut short, cut often. Water from the bowser through every dry spell, so that the ground would look right from the road.

She heard him to the end. Then she put the thirty-one grubs back into the hole, all of them, and pushed the loose soil in over them with the side of her hand, and laid the turf back on top, and patted it.

"And the rooks," she said.

"What about them?"

She looked at the rooks. They were back on the outfield, behind the bowler's run-up at the pavilion end, walking.

"They are the only things on this ground that are working for you," she said. "They're untidy about it. That's all."

She got up, slowly, with a hand on his shoulder, and took her spade back. Then she went back through the gap in the hedge, and he heard her boots on the slope, and that was all she said about it, then or afterwards. She did not say yes or no to the man from Rattlesden, and he did not ask her again.

---

His father had kept the ground from 1951 to 1983, and in all that time, so far as Reg knew, had bought nothing for it but seed and lime and the occasional bag of sulphate of ammonia when the committee was in funds. Reg remembered the worm casts. In the autumn they came up all over the square overnight, little coiled heaps of grey earth like toothpaste, hundreds of them, and every morning before school he had gone out with his father to switch them. That was the word. You took a long whippy cane, or a birch, and swept it across the grass so that the casts burst and spread and went back in. It took an hour. Then in the late seventies a rep had come round from one of the firms, in a Cortina, and left a drum and a leaflet, and his father had read the leaflet twice at the kitchen table with his finger, and the next October there were no casts.

He found the switch at the back of the mower shed, behind the line marker, where it had been for forty years. It was a length of hazel with a bit of string at one end to hang it by. It was dry as a bone and some of the bark had come off. He hung it back up on its nail.

That night it rained, the first proper rain for three weeks, and he sat up and listened to it on the shed roof and wrote it in the book in the morning: 27 Sept. 19 mm. Ground soft.

He put the soil thermometer in at eight o'clock in the shade by the scorebox, at the depth Dean had said on the phone, and waited the ten minutes, and it read thirteen and a half degrees.

---

The committee did not meet again until October, and by then it was done, and Martin was not pleased.

"Six hundred and forty pounds," said Pam, reading it out. "Turfcare East. Nematodes, Heterorhabditis, outfield and square margins, supplied only. Signed for by R. Cattermole." She turned the page over to see if there was anything on the back. "Applied by?"

"Me," said Reg. "And the two lads off the second eleven. Through the bowser, Tuesday night, while the ground was still wet. Dean lent me the nozzles."

"You hadn't the authority," said Martin.

"No."

"And the man from Rattlesden?"

"I didn't ask her," said Reg.

Martin looked at him for a good while. Then he looked at Pam, and Pam looked at the paper, and the younger Gooderham, Colin, said that if it had come to six hundred and forty and not nine hundred and sixty plus VAT then by his reckoning Reg had saved them better than five hundred pounds, and asked whether there was any more tea in the pot. There was not. Pam put the invoice in the file. It went through under any other business, and nobody voted on it.

He did not put the autumn feed on that year. He took the light roller off the outfield and put it at the back of the shed, in front of the switch. He did not go out and buy any more of anything. In the second week of October he went down onto the square at seven in the morning, in a fog, and there in front of the pavilion end, a yard short of a length, there was a worm cast. Just the one. A small grey coil, still wet, about the size of a thumbnail. He stood and looked at it for some time. Then he went and got the switch.

---

The gas gun was on the boundary by the scorebox, where the committee had put it in August. It was a green metal thing on three legs, with a propane bottle chained beside it, and every twenty minutes from dawn to dusk it went off with a bang like a twelve-bore that you could hear in the church. It had kept the rooks away for about a fortnight. After that they had learned it, and they lifted when it went off and came down again before the echo was out of the trees.

The last Saturday of October he walked down to it at a quarter past seven. The fog was coming off the outfield in rags. There were forty or fifty rooks on the grass, between the scorebox and the hedge, walking with their heads down. They watched him come. A few went up.

He crouched by the bottle and turned the valve, a quarter turn, then another, until it was hard against the stop. He heard the hiss in the pipe die away. Then he stood up, and put his hands in his jacket pockets, and stayed where he was.

The rooks that had gone up came down again, one by one, and walked. One came within ten yards of him, a big old bird with a grey face, and put its beak into the turf and levered, and pulled out a grub, and swallowed it, and put its beak in again.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Evā Balfour per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Eve Balfour, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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