The healing power of nails

This afternoon a small volunteer working party tackled the task of carrying out essential maintenance work on our village cricket pavilion. It's a long, low wooden slatted structure that once saw service as barracks on a World War Two military base in Shropshire. Forty years after the war had ended, and the base was finally being dismantled, a previous cricket club working party rescued the old hut, transported it to our village ground and re-erected it on the spot where it has stood as changing rooms, scorebox, pub, community dance hall and winter cricket kit storeroom for twenty-five seasons. It is a building of little architectural note yet boundless symbolism and timeless charm.

Today's issue was the rotting timber joists where rain had got in through cracks in the creosoted slats. As we began to tear open the work of our predecessors of twenty-five years ago, it became apparent that the whole structure was held together through the liberal and imaginative use of every type of nail imaginable. I counted fifteen in one three foot piece of 2x4.

Nails. Twisted and rusted, bent and arthritic, straight as a sweet cover drive, crooked as a dropped catch. Tiny rows of thumb tacks and great, stonking pile drivers; headless slim ones fissured into a beam or fat flat headers ribbed and rasping against the grain. Between them they formed and held the very fabric of the building. You could hear the thumb bashing curses of cricketers past echoing off the rafters. I imagined the sigh of intense satisfaction as a final, clean hammer blow drove home that last match-winning shot.

Painfully we clawed at each metal splinter and eased them out one by one, tossed them aside in a tinkling heap and swept them up in a pile of pre-season debris. Except for one - which I have kept on my desk with my odd collection of rescued detritus. Six inches of smooth, cool, gently browned nail, perfectly balanced in my palm and secure in its twenty-five years of impeccable service upholding a village treasure.

A sacred relic; a carpenter's tool; a reminder of the healing power of nails.