Page 65 of Autumn in Sycamore Park
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Baking and Wildlife Spotting
The wind was getting up,sending leaves scattering across the duck pond. Behind his caretaker’s shack, Tom squatted down beside one of the hedgehog boxes. With a smile, he turned to the gathered kids, some with hands in their pockets, other hopping from foot to foot against the chilly wind, a few with Disney-themed ear muffs pressing their hair to their heads.
‘Okay, get as close as you can, and don’t make too much noise. I don’t want to startle him.’
‘Can I pick it up?’ Gavin said.
‘Not unless you want a handful of needles,’ Tom said. ‘They’re prickly little things.’
The kids keened forward. Jennifer, standing at the back, caught Tom’s eye and gave him a smile. He smiled back, then lifted the wooden lid. The kids oohed and aahhed at something Jennifer couldn’t quite see.
‘Looks like he’s asleep,’ Tom said, lowering the box lid. ‘Did you know, hedgehogs were originally called urchins, which is where the word sea urchin comes from?’
‘Gavin’s an urchin,’ Paul Lemon quipped with a grunted laugh.
‘Shut up, Lemons,’ Gavin said.
‘Yeah, shut up Lemons,’ Matthew Bridges repeated.
‘Boys!’ Jennifer said, as a grinning Paul Lemon grabbed Gavin and Matthew around the shoulders and tried to launch himself into the air.
‘My dad says you can keep them as pets,’ Gavin said.
‘My dad says they’ve all got rabies,’ Paul said. ‘He said you’ve got rabies, too.’
‘Shut up, you turkey. My dad says your mum—’
‘Okay!’ Tom clapped his hands together. ‘Who wants to see some pretty little squirrels?’ As cheers and cries of ‘Me! Me! Me!’ drowned out Paul and Gavin’s bickering, Tom said, ‘We have a few living in a big sycamore just over there. If we put some nuts down, they might just come and have a look.’
As the kids charged off towards the tree, almost certainly scaring off any squirrels, Jennifer caught up with Tom.
‘You’d make a good teacher,’ she said, resisting the urge to pat him on the arm, aware of the interrogation she’d get from the kids if any of them spotted it.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I’d teach,’ he said. ‘Weeding classes?’
‘How about acting?’ she said. ‘You could do acting classes. After all, you were inEastEnders.’
‘Three episodes,’ Tom said. ‘Funny how I spent six months as Hamlet in the Queens Theatre in Norwich yet when I die they’ll write “Once told Phil Mitchell to pay up” on my headstone.’
‘I bet you’d get loads of takers,’ Jennifer said.
Tom shrugged. ‘I’ll think about it. By the way, I don’t recall ever getting an answer to my question from Sunday. The one about dinner—’
‘Miss! Miss, quick! Paul fell in the pond!’
Jennifer frowned. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said. Then, turning to the kids, she shouted, ‘How did Paul end up in the pond? It’s behind us?’
‘He was chasing a rat,’ Gavin said, as Paul, sodden and draped with dark green weed like some monstrous water creature, climbed out of the pond, shaking droplets of water in the general direction of several screaming girls.
‘It’s not a rat, it’s a water vole,’ Tom said. ‘There’s a family living in the riverbank. ‘I call that one Monty. Please try not to scare him.’
‘I’m coming to get you!’ Paul roared at the girls, then broke into a sludgy run, throwing lumps of weed around while simultaneously howling with laughter.
‘Would you like me to go and fetch some chains?’ Tom asked, giving Jennifer a sideways smile.
Later,with Paul Lemon now dressed in some overfitting clothes Tom had found lying around in the shack, the kids crowded around Angela’s worktop. Angela, wearing an apron with a maple-leaf design in the middle, held up a bowl of sugar.
