My ordinary church hall Brownies seem to have become Forest Brownies. I’m in an outdoorsy bushcraft wild state of mind and the plague is still ravaging, so Monday Evenings Indoors Brownies are (maybe temporarily) Forest Brownies now.
Being a Brownie leader is stressful sometimes, especially when you only took on the Brown Owl job right before the plague and your Tawny has vanished. Add in a stubborn refusal to return to the hall yet (the case and death numbers are two to three times what they were this time last year; you know, when we spent all of November in lockdown?) and it all becomes an absolute screaming nightmare. You can’t meet on the playing field on Monday evenings because it’s now too cold and dark so you go to the other leaders for help and they suggest weekend daytime Brownies outdoors.
So that’s what we’re doing at the moment. It was a glorious idea. Obviously no one wants to sacrifice every weekend to Brownies, especially not the parents and especially not the leaders, so we’re doing a half-day once a month for the time being. I was fresh from my spoon-carving course and very much in the mood for backwoods Brownies, bushcraft Brownies, camping Brownies – all that good outdoors stuff you don’t really get to do in a church hall. We have Forest Schools, why not Forest Brownies? I booked a local campsite and their availability being what it was, I had a week to get forms out to the parents and the risk assessments in and out of my local commissioner and then off we went last Saturday.
I only had five or six girls on the register and only two turned up. If we do it on Sundays in future, I should get a third and if I wave this across the division, we might end up with a dedicated group who knew it was weekends going in and who turn up every time. We did that with Division Rainbows once (admittedly inside) and they thrived. The sort of kids who go to Brownies these days are also the sort of kids who do after-school activities every day – ballet, gymnastics, horseriding, football, swimming. You know. Then they want to do Brownies but it doesn’t fit their schedule. Having a half-day once a month at the weekend works well for that sort of Brownie and it also gives the unit breathing room to find a leader who can come every week. Did I mention that Tawny has vanished? Yep, it’s just me. And my Unit Helper but she deliberately stepped down from being Brown Owl two Christmases ago and refuses to do her qualification so while she’s invaluable (she was a far better leader while being a UH than Tawny was as a leader-in-training, bless her), she doesn’t really count. And she’s often busy at weekends so at the moment I’m borrowing other leaders from around the district.
Anyway, my plan for archery and shelter-building turned into a plan for shelter-building and firelighting turned into a plan for Camp Stage 2 Skills Builder badge. Might as well follow the programme while teaching them outdoors skills! I brought along a big food bag to do dampers, smores, campfire pizzas and hot chocolate. I had a small tent for them to pitch. I brought a fire bucket with some wood in it in case the supply at the campsite was insufficient. I had my camp kitchen bag because it contains my gas stove which is always a useful backup. I had my plate bag because it contains at least three cups. And I had my big Brownie bag of tricks, from the first aid kit to the COVID cleaning kit to my axe to spare warm clothes. And my uniform hoodie and softshell in case the weather did anything fun.
This lot took a trolley, two adults and at least twenty minutes to convey 400m from the car park to the campfire circle, which is where we found that “there’s plenty of wood, we’ve been clearing out our woodpile, you can burn as much as you like and move it if it’s in your way” was actually a scrapyard six or eight feet high occupying the entire campfire circle. Several pallets, several fence poles with bits of fence and nails still attached, lots of mouldy chipboard wall panels, a bird table – in short, all the wood the place had used in the last five years. Yes, we turfed it out. I’d planned to arrive half an hour early to set up but between the trolley and the woodpile, I had to leave Pixie-Koala to fetch the water and catch her breath while I returned to the car park for the kids. Pixie-Koala, by the way, is an ex-Ranger of mine. I used to run Guides with her in the next village before I left for Brownies and she’s now at Guides in the same village. She was Pixie when she did the old Guides and now at the new Guides she’s Koala. I haven’t got used to that yet. I had to borrow her because Tawny has left and my Unit Helper isn’t available.
We had quite a nice chilled day! For anonymity, the kids are Annie and Betty. Betty successfully lit a match but Annie didn’t. They both eventually got sparks off a firesteel and eventually set fire to bits of cotton wool. Annie found this harder and my previous experience with her is that she’s likely to burst into tears if she can’t do something within thirty seconds so her persistence and refusal to give up is something new and quite exciting.
We did the skills builder activities – we’d done the packing card over Zoom on Monday, we did the fire safety card as a game and the third card was to investigate and then put up a tent. Guides often get bored or decide the adults should do all the work for them but these two got on ok. True, Annie did keep returning to the firesteels and we had to keep calling her back but they did it quite amiably, especially once they discovered it’s a nice Brownie-sized tent. It’s the two-man tunnel tent Pixie-Koala and I used at Sparkle & Ice 2020, with weird pole connectors that make the arches just slightly Gothic. It’s cosy but that’s not a bad thing for a winter camp and it’s a nice size for an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old to put up together.
Then it seemed time to get the main fire going if we wanted to do campfire pizzas before going home. So I dealt with that while Pixie-Koala did the last card – gathering wood and making a miniature fire in a teepee shape. Unfortunately, I’m appalling at lighting fires and Pixie-Koala’s not a lot better. I’d taken firelighters – those little twisted bundles of fibres that light easily and stay lit forever but in this case they weren’t doing their job properly. I scorched the kindling – actually, I had one piece that was well alight inside, which is how I came to be stupid enough to pick it up while it was burning and burn my finger. But all I got was a tiny fire. The kindling didn’t finish burning and it certainly didn’t set fire to anything larger. I found a birch branch in the scrap pile and took the bark off it. Birch bark usually burns really well but not today. Turning some of the smaller pieces into feathersticks and even having a go at the logs with my axe couldn’t make the thing catch. The massive scrap pile was all damp and once I’d thoroughly disgraced myself in front of my Brownies, we cooked the pizzas on my stove.
Some leaders like to appear omniscient in front of the Brownies. I’m not among them. I’m quite content to say “here’s a thing I can’t do” or “here’s a thing I don’t know about” or “I’m going to learn how to do this at the same time as you”. I don’t lie or make something up if I can’t answer a question and although I did say “don’t tell anyone I failed to make a fire!”, I’ve already pretty much told everyone. And I know I’m bad at fires and that’s why the stove was there as a backup, although for the record, a pitta bread doesn’t fit terribly well into a camp-sized frying pan and it’s not the ideal receptacle for baking them in.
I don’t think they’re entirely accustomed to “here are ingredients, help yourself”. I think it’s definitely a novelty to be allowed to finish off the tin of sweetcorn once they’ve put enough on the pizza. Or the olives. Or the pepperoni. No, really. That food is here for you and you can use what you like on the pizza and you can eat what you like to save it from the bin and yes, you can take it home if you haven’t finished it by then and the other girl doesn’t want it. The cheese did end up on the bird table. Annie took it out of the packet and grated it along its main face, leaving black ash-and-mud handprints all over it. Yes, of course I’d have stopped her if I’d caught it in time.
Despite the fire failure, they had a good time. They had food, they earned a badge and we all had a nice chilled morning sitting around in the sun making tiny fires. A small group like that I can treat like Rangers – that is, we can chat, I can be more honest than perhaps I would be with a big group (“Why did you once yell at the Guides? What happened? How loud did you yell? Can you show us?”), I don’t have to give orders to make the entire group get through the badge in the time, I don’t have to break up arguments. We can just chill together.
It was a stress to organise. Getting the paperwork done, finding an adult, convincing the parents, doing the shopping, packing the stuff, planning the activities, all for two girls – but when we were there and it was just hanging out by the woods doing fun stuff, it was nice. Betty’s always an easygoing child, if a bit new and shy, and Annie’s always been… a handful. But on the whole, I don’t think I could have asked for two better Brownies for this particular event. At the moment, my plan is to do this sort of thing until Christmas and then re-assess the plague before deciding whether to return to the hall. But if it’s going to be chilled and particularly if there’s a possibility it can become Division Weekend Forest Brownies, it might be something I make permanent – but I’m borrowing Bear, who’s good at lighting fires, if we’re ever going to do firelighting again.