If you haven’t come across the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme… well, let me explain.
What is the DofE?
A life-changing experience. A fun time with friends. An opportunity to discover new interests and talents. A tool to develop essential skills for life and work. A recognised mark of achievement; respected by employers.
It’s an award scheme for 14-24 year-olds, which features four sections. Volunteering, Physical, Skills and Expedition. There are three levels, Bronze, Silver and Gold and there’s a fifth section at Gold which is the Residential. I only did Bronze – I volunteered as a Young Leader with my old Brownies, I took up caving for my Physical and I made toys for my Skill. Timescales change with every level – at Bronze you do three months of two and six months of the other. At Silver you do six months of volunteering and then three and six months of the other two, although it’s your choice which way round. And the same for Gold, except it’s twelve months of volunteering and then twelve and six of the others.
And then there’s the dreaded expedition. For Bronze, the expedition is two days and one night, six hours of planned activity each day. We had a minimum distance of, I think 10km a day when I did it but I can’t see that now. Apparently it’s about time and activity. The expedition has to have a purpose. Our group’s purpose was “photography” because that was the minimum effort purpose. My previous group of Rangers made a kind of DofE 101 video as the purpose of theirs.
Anyway, on with the point. I kept a diary/scrapbook and depending on how much I wrote, I bring you either the diary or the edited highlights. (2020 comments in bold)
5th April 2003
We arrived at the start point at 10 o’clock. It had changed several times and Mr Lowe and Miss Chapman were late so we had no idea where to start. We stopped on the side of the road to phone and to distribute the food. When we eventually started, we didn’t know whether we were supposed to go into the trees or not because the path seemed to go alongside the road. (look at us and our finely developed mapreading skills!)
The paths had some muddy patches and Vicky acquired a stick called Bertie.We followed the path through the forest. It was a little bit muddy in places but mostly it was just yellow gravel. We had to stop to work out which way we were supposed to go, using the power lines, and to unattach Catherine’s hat from her bag. At about 11.30, we realised we were an hour early, so we stopped at the secret garden at Decoy House. We put the bags down and sat on the grass to eat Mars bars and sort out socks. Catherine and I went to explore the house and then Vicky and Chris came to join us and to climb the tree. Chris got up highest and Vicky got stuck, so it took all three of us to tell her where to put her hands and feet to get down. When we got back to the garden, Miss Chapman was on the phone, saying something about “Nightmare” and “Completely drained”. (I don’t think this was to do with us. We were good as gold, apart from our judgement of times per distance.)
We were supposed to eat lunch a mile from there, but it was far too early for that so we walked across Morden bog singing the Lion King songs while Mr Lowe and Miss Chapman staying far enough behind us so they couldn’t hear us.
We stopped to have lunch by a bench on a band in the road with a view over the heath. We start on the bench before moving down to the ground. Catherine started a conversation about chemistry with Mr Lowe, which lost me very quickly, so Chris wrote some jokes in my notebook and it got passed around in a circle.
After lunch, we walked on to the main Bere Regis road, but we accidentally managed to cross in the wrong place, which meant we were on the wrong path. We quickly figured out where we were and convinced Mr Lowe that he was the one who was lost and that we were just cutting a corner slightly, until we found ourselves by a quarry. We still know where we were, although we weren’t quite where we were supposed to be. We arrived at Carey Camp over an hour earlier than we were supposed to and from the wrong direction. We got the first choice of where to put our tents, so we put them right in the sun and started unpacking before deciding it would be better to put them on the other side of the field, in the shade of the trees. Steven (in the other group out that weekend) had the other part of Chris’s tent so he pegged down the inner and lay on it.
After we’d put the tents up, we sat on Chris’s tent and ate biscuits.
We’d had enough of just sitting around being lazy after a while so Chris went to climb the trees again, Catherine went to run around the field and Vicky collected daisies to make a daisy chain necklace.
After Vicky had made her daisy chain, Catherine decided she wanted one too. She couldn’t make them so she collected daisies and Vicky made the chain. She made it into a headband so when Catherine put it on, she looked like some kind of eco-warrior flower child (2020 comment: yes…). She wore the chain for most of the rest of the evening.
Eventually the other groups arrived, with the rest of Chris’s tent but they needed Stewart’s help to put it up. One of the groups had got lost for nearly two hours and they all put their tents across the field from us, in the sun.
We cooked pasta with tomato and basil sauce and then, because I’d forgotten the chocolate Swiss rolls, we had Mars bars. Chris disappeared for a while because he’d found a pheasant with two hens following it. Stewart took us to see his tent and how all his cooking equipment folded up into a small box and then had to give us a piggyback back to our tent because we had no shoes on and there were bark chips on the path.
Later, Stewart got out his knife (is this a thing unlikely to happen in 2020, kids carrying knives?) and sharpened some twigs so they had a point at one end, and after teaching Chris how to do it, they had a competition. They made ten or twelve pointed sticks between them and we stuck them into the ground in a ring outside our tent. After Stewart left, we zipped ourselves into the tent to eat sweets while the other groups made a circle and did handstands and cartwheels. When they start playing Stuck in the Mud, Catherine and Chris went to join in, after Chris had emptied his pockets into the tent. Somehow, the game turned into Block and I stood outside the tent watching. I talked to Katie for a while. When it was too dark to play Block anymore, Mr Adams taught them a very complicated Moose game. I took one of the sharpened sticks in case of vampires and sat in a silver birch tree to watch, although I had no idea what was going on. Someone came to tell Mr Adams that his takeaway had arrived (we had to cook over Trangias and he’s got takeaway?!) so he left and the game fell apart without him. Catherine and Chris came back and didn’t realise Vicky was in the tent. Catherine crawled in to get something out for Mr Adams, touched Vicky’s face and screamed.
We sat in the tent later, me in my sleeping bag, and we ate a big bar of chocolate between us and talked. At about 11.30, Chris got sent to his own tent and Vicky dragged her bed outside so she could look at the stars, until it got so cold that she was sent back inside again.
6th April 2003
In the morning, Vicky and I decided not to get up until six (until six?!), so to pass the time we went to the shop and bought an apple, banana, coconut, strawberry, piece of cheese, kilogram of lard, partridge in a pear tree, lots and lots and lots of hot pads, tree, fire bucket, pair of scissors and a pint of milk before we forgot it all and Catherine had had to help us get that far. When we got up, we found Chris cooking, sitting on a fire bucket. After he’d made some soup, Steven woke up and wanted to take the tent down so his group could leave early to make up time from yesterday. We had made some jelly and left it out overnight to set, so it was ready for breakfast. It was still a little runny but it made a nice noise when I stuck a spoon into it. For breakfast, as well as the soup, Chris had pasta, Lancashire hotpot, ration sweets, fruit dumpling in butterscotch sauce, beans & sausages and some jelly (that’s quite a breakfast, even for a busy expedition day).
At 8.30, when Catherine refused to get up, Chris offered to carry her out in her sleeping bag. She agreed, thinking he wouldn’t really do it… Chris got her head, Vicky got her feet and they dragged her out onto the grass.
We left a little bit late and followed the road until we reached the footpath through some trees, where we followed the yellow or green arrows, depending on how colourblind you are (this means Chris). We turned onto a grassy path where Chris stopped to put a plaster on his foot. As soon as he was ready, we decided to take jumpers off and when we’d put them away, Chris wanted to take his fleece off.
We went through a farm, across a bridge and stopped on the other side to talk to the dog, chickens and turkeys before we went on and emerged on the wrong side of Wareham Hospital. We went through the centre of the town and Catherine told us about the carnivals there. We went down the main road into Stoborough and followed a path onto the heath.
There was supposed to be a path there but it was impossible to follow because of all the heather and gorse. My feet hurt (if I remember rightly, my walking shoes were a size too small) and Miss Chapman was scared of the snakes that could be lurking in the grass. Vicky got out her sweets and we stopped to spread the map out and find out where we were.
At last we were going in the right direction and we found the Works we were meant to come out by, but there was no way to get through the gorse. We followed the path further up and went around. When we got out on the road, Miss Brown was waiting for her group, so we refilled our bottles from the big bottle in her car.
We went along the country lane, which had several bends in, past a mirror and a Heavy Plant Crossing sign, which wasn’t a giant sunflower (it’s 17 years later and I still think of that every time I see one of those signs). We got to the junction of the road and a bridleway and there was a horse in a field. Catherine fed it a piece of Kendal mint cake (don’t do this! We were ignorant but you don’t need to be! Don’t feed animals you don’t know!) because horses like mint and they like sugar, but this horse made a lot of disgusted faces at it and ran away when Catherine offered it a harmless handful of grass (best not to do this either).
We walked through a field, some woods and then we were back onto the heath. It was about time for something to eat, but there was nowhere to stop. At last we found the edge of the heath, hidden behind some bushes and there was an empty field on the other side. The grass was wet so we unrolled our mats and sat on them to eat the rest of the Kendal mint cake, more Mars bars and the rest of Vicky’s sweets.
After that, we had to walk up a hill and we were supposed to go back down into the valley and back up the other side, so to save effort, we walked along the top of the hill and round. There was a lane leading downwards and then we crossed a field, climbed over the gate at the bottom and we were at the finish, at the pub.
In 2020, it seems unimaginable to send a group of kids out to walk unsupervised for two days. We were seventeen because our school had only just discovered DofE when we were in Sixth Form but you can do Bronze at thirteen (officially it’s fourteen but you can start in the school year you turn 14 so the July and August birthdays – hello! from three of our group, actually – don’t end up a year behind their September-born best friends).
However, part of the purpose of DofE is to teach and encourage independence and grown-upness. Part of the point of going out walking for two days unsupervised is literally to go out walking for two days unsupervised. For our practice, we were tailed by two teachers but in the real thing, we’d merely meet them at a few checkpoints. Of course, they’d always be at the campsite in the evening.