dancingthroughchaos

‘Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.’ – George RR Martin (fantasy author) 

Earlier this week, I was ensconced in the window seat of a Sunday train travelling from Plymouth to Bath.  As the Devon countryside zipped past me in a blur of verdant green, I allowed my gaze to focus to the farthest hedges catching glimpses of grazing cows, leafless trees and idle machinery while a few wisps of cloud clung to a pleasingly blue autumnal sky.  Beautiful.

The movement of a train is always soothing and soporific and, while I didn’t fall asleep, it wasn’t long after we’d collected more passengers at Exeter St David’s that other images began to play out in my mind.  Seeing the name of the station jogged memories of the last time I had travelled this route in reverse, and the unnerving realisation that said trip was taken over forty years ago.  

A bunch of giggling teenagers, we had bundled onto the brand new, shiny and much admired Intercity 125 high-speed train at Paddington, along with lumpy luggage, sleeping bags, a bunch of other girls and a sprinkling of unsuspecting adults, on our way to an adventure of camping in a field near Tavistock for an entire and blissful week.  I’m not sure what I expected, my previous camping experience consisted of a Cotswold trip after my dad had won a stack of camping equipment in a well-known cereal maker’s back-of-the-packet competition (https://dancingthroughchaos.wordpress.com/2020/07/22/moving-on/), and occasional summer nights under canvas in the back garden.  This summer treat involved ‘proper’ ridge tents sleeping six girls apiece, cooking over fires, a fairly basic toilet arrangement – planks of wood with (thankfully) sanded holes of appropriate size – and the intriguingly named, ‘camp craft’.  This latter turned out to be the thrill of making a tripod of sticks bound together a third of the way down which, when the legs were splayed out correctly, could support a plastic bowl ready for ablutions or washing up.

As someone who had nurtured woefully romantic ideas about living a simple life in the woods in the manner of our ancient ancestors, and the idyll I ignorantly perceived that Iron Age Britain has been, I was entranced, if completely unrealistic.  My wobbly wash stand was not one of which Bear Grylls would have been proud, but no-one had heard of him then (indeed, he was probably just mastering the challenge of a bicycle with stabilisers at the time), so it didn’t matter.  We baked potatoes in ashes and wrapped chocolate-stuffed banana in the fire, burning our fingers and singeing our hair.  We barely washed for a week and didn’t care.  We thrived in the sunshine of our own laughter and created in-jokes that kept us energised with simple, infectious glee.

Our first instruction by the unlikely named leaders ‘Dicky’ and ‘Gonk’ (it was all very Girl Guide-esque), on arrival had been to adjust our watches by an hour to ‘camp time’ (BST+1), so we bedded down for the night far earlier than usual and woke with the dawn.  Talk of midnight feasts and Enid Blyton-type escapades filled our imaginations and our talk, but – to the relief of the adults I’m sure – we were overcome with sleep (creepy-crawlies allowing) from the combination of fresh air, hearty meals and all day activities.  We explored the caves of Morwhellham: a terrifying experience for those of us who were in any way claustrophobic and exacerbated by their insistence on extinguishing every light for an entire harrowing minute.  I have avoided caves ever since.  We trudged across Dartmoor with backpacks that only lightened as we munched through the taste-tingling contents; we discovered the gruesome remains of a dead sheep, it’s neck broken and lying in a stream where the crows had already made light work of the eyes and face.  We ventured to Totnes, where I purchased pretty items – matching pocket-sized tins of Liberty design – which I still use in my nomadic adult life for the safe-keeping of jewellery.

We must have enjoyed it, because two of us did it all again the next year.

As the Sunday train took me through Taunton, Bridgwater and Bristol I remembered how, at that at the end of that exuberant week, I had slept for a record 15 hours; flaked out with happy exhaustion.  Oh to be able to do that again!

I wondered about what may have happened to those other girls who shared my tent and, as the now uncomfortably crowded train pulled into Bath Spa and I gathered my current ‘lumpy luggage’, I felt grateful that two of them not only remain my friends, but stay in touch.  We’ve gone our separate ways and had our own adventures, but the summer we took the train together was a magical one.