Saturday, April 03, 2010

Camping holidays (2)


Sometime over the winter after our first foray into camping the jeep type vehicle was converted into an ‘estate car’ or ‘shooting brake.’ The work was done mainly by a young man who ran his own garage in Bakewell – my father had met him during the war. The frame was wood – varnished light oak - & the metal panels were painted cream. I don’t suppose it would be legal these days.

We now had two tents – the full-size dark green coloured one for my parents & their camp beds, & a smaller pale green one – not large enough to stand up in – in which my sister & I slept side by side in our sleeping bags on a ground sheet. I still love the memory of the smell of rubberised backing, & the pervading smell of damp which we so often got even in summer.

Both those tents were bought from somewhere, but my parents were practical & resourceful people, & we acquired ingenious pieces of equipment to make the camp a home from home, & aided the military precision of packing it all into the estate car.

A flat piece of wood with flanges served as the lid for the orange box in which our kitchen equipment was packed; when the orange box was stood on its end after unpacking, the piece of wood fitted over the top to make a handy bedside table. The kitchen range consisted of two primus stoves inside biscuit tins (painted a cheerful red) with flaps cut in the side for ease of access to the pumping mechanism. We had canvas water buckets with rope handles, folding stools for the children & canvas armchairs for the grown ups.

And we had our own latrine tent. Made by my mother out of a double layer of heavy duty calico, water proofed with some kind of chemical which had to be renewed over the winter, it was a tall square column so you could stand up inside. It had an nifty double flap with ties, which could be secured from either inside or out – it had to be closed if unoccupied so the wind could not enter & blow it over or away.

It even had a seat – a standard loo seat which fitted over a folding wooden frame; my father had used his engineering ingenuity to meet the needs of his family of females.

The basic facility was simply a deep hole dug in to the ground, which we gradually refilled & covered over with a trowel from the pile of excavated earth.


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Camping holidays