There is a frisson of excitement, giggles and whispers, as the seven-year-olds file out of the school building, clutching bamboo canes and tiles, bits of corrugated cardboard and roofing felt, along with broken terracotta crocks.
Today Year 2 are making a bug hotel. A great way of recycling and giving homes to all kinds of creepy crawlies, their teacher had explained earlier in the week before sending them home to raid garages and sheds.
The land is waking up. The sky is enormous, a glorious, shocking blue, a golden sun is scattering bits of itself, and there is treasure all over the grass: celandines and primroses, shaggy-headed dandelions, buttercups, daisies and coltsfoot, its stems bent double like umbrella handles.
Trailing past the bird table and pond full of polka-dot jelly frog spawn, the children and their parents cluster on the wide school field. Light filters through trees, some bursting spearmint-green buds, other branches are still bare-black, and there are lambs’ tails on the hazels. All around, birdsong drips like runny honey from the hawthorn hedge.
A female blackbird with straw in her beak watches as coats are shed and the children set to work. Sorting through the bits and bobs, dashing around, gathering leaf litter and twigs, they work in harmony like ants. They are shrieking and laughing, stamping the ground, flattening it for a solid base.
The adults stack wooden planks between two rows of red bricks, with roof tiles on top. Stuffed with cardboard, leaves, small logs, pine cones and tree bark and left to rot, these will create damp, dark corners, homes for spiders and beetles, woodlice and bumble bees.
My grandson is distracted. He leads me to the fence and points: daffodils growing high up in a tree. Other children follow, I smile at their earnest eager faces lifting like flowers spreading their petals in the sunlight. “How did they get there, Nana?” He thinks for a moment. “A squirrel hid the bulbs?” I think he’s right.
Then we race back to put the finishing touches to the bug hotel, before the bell rings.
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