Go ahead, jump!

True crickets once basked in the warmth of the kitchen or sang their cheerful summer song in the fields. Now, after years of decline, some species are making a welcome comeback,

- Jack Watkins

THE usually mild-mannered 18th-century curate Gilbert White suggested that house crickets ‘may be blasted and destroyed by gunpowder discharged into their crevices and crannies’ when they became ‘noisome pests’ in houses. If that sounds drastic, the author of The Natural History of Selborne had other remedies. ‘Cats catch hearth-crickets, and playing with them as they do with mice, devour them,’ he wrote. He also recommended setting down phials half-filled with beer or other liquids in their haunts ‘for, being always eager to drink, they will crowd in till the bottles are full’.

These days, however, the critters have a much more positive, albeit somewhat low, public profile. Although the Talking Cricket (renamed Jiminy in Walt Disney’s sanitised Hollywood cartoon) is killed by Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi’s original story of 1883, another specimen is the hero of Charles Dickens’s popular Christmas story, A Cricket on the Hearth. Drawing on the old tradition that, as Mrs Peerybingle declares, ‘to have a cricket on the hearth is the luckiest thing in the world!’, it brings comfort and reassurance to her humble dwelling ‘where its shrill, sharp, piercing voice resounds’ and seems ‘to twinkle though the outer darkness like a star’.

A few decades earlier, John Keats used the cricket as a symbol of ‘the poetry of the earth’ in his sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket (1817), its song ‘in warmth increasing ever’—a reminder that, in past times, when crickets were more numerous, their chirpings were regarded as a soundtrack of a long, hot English summer.