I Am A Polar Bear

There are some camps that go down in legend, to be talked over ten or twenty years later. The one with the storm that knocked the Ranger tent over so that they were scared to go and alert the leaders and everyone ended up getting sent home for two days so we could clean up and start again. The one where the field flooded to knee-height during the course of breakfast and had to be abandoned for a full week before the tents could be rescued. The one where the Rangers arrived on the Saturday morning because they’d been to the midnight launch of the last Harry Potter book and the entire camp managed to read the two copies of that book by the end of Sunday (this being before the wizard lady became utterly consumed with hatred, obviously).

This weekend’s camp is going to become one of those camps: the one where it rained so much, we had to get takeaway.

Bear has been a Guide leader for forty years now (I can’t remember where I wrote this phrase recently so sorry if you’ve seen it but I swear she’s drunk from the fountain of eternal youth because she was my Guide leader and the way she bounds around makes me feel like a creaky old lady) and she has never had to resort to getting fish & chips, so this isn’t us being soft or lazy. But let’s start at the beginning.

I was a member of this Guide unit. I graduated to becoming a Young Leader with this Guide unit and I was going to become an adult leader when I got back from university, except that they’d opened Rangers while I’d been away and they needed a leader. But I was Ranger leader directly alongside these Guides for 15 years, we went away on camps together and they were quite as enmeshed with my Rangers as any Guide & Ranger unit pair can be. All that changed three years ago and I now do Rangers eleven miles away and Brownies twenty-three miles away. A few months back, a week or so before the first REN form was due, they invited me to come and do some campfire singing on the Friday night and to stay as long as I liked, so I asked if I could stay the whole time. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a proper Guide camp and while I’m trying to say no to Girlguiding more this year, there are so many things that sound too fun to say no to and camp was one of them. It was all a bit chaotic – I got sent a link to add myself to the REN several weeks ago, which I did, but then didn’t reply to the email and then, hearing nothing, it got to the point where replying was going to look weird so maybe I should just turn up to Guides and ask the questions in person but the evening before that, I got an email requesting my emergency contact details for the paperwork and two or three days before camp, I finally found out where it actually was – not where I expected and not where I was planning to turn up if no one told me this minor detail. This is the problem with adding an “outsider” to your camp when neither side is especially brilliant at communication.

Anyway, it all worked out! I turned up with my own tent, an Aladdin’s cave of a car full of useful things and a lot of camp skills I’d used more recently than anyone else. Let’s introduce our cast of characters: Bear is the Guide leader. Butterfly is her second. She’s four years younger than me and has some medical issues. This unit can deal with medical issues – in my day, we had a Guide with only half a working lung who required oxygen, and Butterfly’s needs pale in comparison with that but there was a risk she wouldn’t end up staying the whole weekend, which is the only reason I mention details the internet doesn’t need to know. Then there’s Squirrel – I don’t actually know her leader name so I’m sticking in one of my own – who’s another year younger, daughter of a now-retired Rainbow leader and older sister of my first Rangers. Badger is retired, a leader from my time and mum of my junior school best friend, who comes back to help out on camps but doesn’t stay overnight. And then we have two Young Leaders and nine Guides, none of whom have ever been to Guide camp before.

The equipment had been delivered in a van by a friend of Squirrel’s and Bear had unloaded it into the shelter – they usually take a massive mess tent but given how long it’s been since anyone has camped, how heavy the thing is and how long it takes to dry (not to mention finding a place to dry it!), they opted to use the campsite’s solid if basic shelter instead. We got the leader tent up, which is a massive six-man tent shaped a little bit like a Cybertruck, we set up the kitchen under the tree outside the shelter, I put my little two-man tent up (my four-man seemed excessive and anyway, I was too lazy to repair the poles after my disaster a few weeks ago) and we were sitting around eating packed lunches and drinking coffee when the Guides arrived.

Some of these Guides have camped with their families but none of them have been on a Girlguiding residential before. In fact, because they’re the pandemic generations, most of them have never spent a night away from home before. They’ve practiced putting up the tents in the garden behind the hall but not enough to be 100% comfortable with it and probably not well enough for tents that are going to stand for 48 hours rather than ten minutes. Bear and Squirrel helped them with it while I caught up with Badger and then I ran off with the tent repair kit from my car for the Young Leaders, who’d brought their own tent. First it was missing two of its four guylines, so I lent them some cord to make temporary lines. Then their big comfy double airbed had a leak so I patched it with the repair tape from my kit. Unfortunately, there was nothing in my kit fit to replace the missing silver cuff from the end of one of the Guides’ tent poles. Without it, you can’t slot the pole into the peg that holds it upright which means you can’t stand the tent up. There was no other choice: Bear had to go home and bring another tent. These were the tents signed off as missing nothing after their practice so they knew the cuff had been knocked off right there and then but we couldn’t fit it. We’d need to take a pole out of another tent rather than trust that a tent that hasn’t been opened for six years is in a fit state to be used. Spoiler: that cuff turned up at the end of Sunday, caught inside the sleeve with one of the other poles. No idea how that happened but at least we got it back. And the spare tent might have been a better option, given how that particular tent leaked.

Once everything was set up, we collected wood, had hot chocolate and then pretty much went off to bed. There was nothing planned for Friday other than get there and get set up. Despite promising to be quiet, the girls talked and laughed and sang Pink Pony Club until about 3.30am. Not loud enough to disturb anyone else on site but enough that if you were in a tent ten or twenty feet away, you weren’t getting any sleep. Agnes’ tent (the patrols were named after the three main Baden-Powells) leaked enough that four of the five girls moved into Olave Patrol’s tent in the middle of the night, leaving the poor fifth girl under the impression they were going off to the toilet until none of them came back. The sleeping compartments were reasonably dry but the way Guides abuse tents – leaning on walls, leaving their luggage in the porch and piled up against internal walls – means that water comes through in places.

The leaders were mostly up between 6.30 and 7 the next day. We had the luxury of a fridge but it was over behind the big house where there were Brownies sleeping, next to the outdoor toilets, so it was a trek to fetch the milk and then put it back every time someone wanted a cup of coffee and it would have been easier to do it the old way, with cool boxes and everything frozen ahead of time to act as ice packs. We got the Guides up at 7.30 and breakfast was cereal. The theme was Back to Basics, which meant they were cooking everything over fires. I appreciate the idea but for first-time Guide campers, I might personally have let them get used to tents and outdoor life on this camp and used gas stoves and Trangias and then moved on to wood fire cookery next year. We’d collected a lot of wood in spare minutes on Friday evening so we had the morning free for fun before setting up little fires in the cooking area to cook kebabs for lunch.

Much to the Guides’ bewilderment, one of the jobs for Saturday morning was building camp gadgets – tripods for hanging their plate bags (not that most of them had proper plate bags) and washing-up stands. We had a washing-up room with hot water and sinks but it’s a traditional camp craft and they make useful tables, so they reluctantly learned the fine art of snake lashing.

While they did that, I went into the county archery store behind our shelter and pulled out the curtain. It’s an arrow-proof net held up by two poles to catch arrows that miss the target and it lives in a bag clearly made 30-odd years ago out of someone’s old flowery curtains. These days, after being kept in a damp shed and dragged along the ground (too heavy to lift nicely), it’s more hole than bag and that’s been frustrating me for at least a year. So I sat with my heavy duty needles and thread and sewed a heavy-duty polycotton patch into it while the girls lashed, and then I sewed some badges onto my blanket and when the girls came back from their trip to the campsite shop with new badges, I sat with them while they sewed their badges onto their own blankets – with varying degrees of skill but no lack of enthusiasm.

Lunch was kebabs. The girls had talked all morning about chicken kebabs, which made me nervous – I do not do well around food poisoning and I know how well Guides are likely to cook raw meat on open fires when they’ve never camped before, but fortunately, Squirrel, in charge of catering, had exactly the same thoughts and assured them that there was no chicken and she’d never had any intention of cooking chicken because… well, food poisoning. They had chunks of vegetables and tinned hot dogs and they made little fires with astonishing success, although the actual cooking didn’t go so well. The grids were raised above the fires on two bricks but we lowered them later to just one to get them nearer the heat, and while the girls were great at making the little fires, they were less great at thinking to keep feeding them, which meant they either went out or cooled off. It’s a fine balance between enough fire to keep them going and enough embers to cook over the heat. The girls ate theirs while the veg was still pretty crunchy and the leaders eventually resorted to putting the stuff into billies and cooking them over the gas stove just so no one was still sitting three hours later waiting for lunch.

It was at this point that a Brownie leader from my division suddenly showed up, evidently very surprised to find me here with a Guide unit that isn’t mine. Her daughter is the county outdoors advisor and they’d come to tidy out the archery store and were just letting us know that they were around, in case we were suspicious of strangers appearing right next to our camp. It was very handy because neither of them are very familiar with the contents of the cupboard, so I pointed various things out, explained various things and catalogued our collection of bows – turns out there are eleven more of them than anyone realised, disassembled either in little zipped bags or packed into a suitcase, plus three bright-coloured bow stringers I didn’t know existed. The daughter had replaced a crumbly old shoebox with a nice plastic box so now the armguards are safe from ceiling fungus, they binned a lot of random old junk, they replaced the miles of tangled and tied and retied plastic boundary tape with three bags of red and white plastic chain and while I returned to the Guides, they built a set of shelves in the cupboard and gave us a load of leftover wood. I’d seen it while fetching the curtain bag and lamented to the other leaders “There’s loads of fresh dried wood in the archery cupboard and we can’t have it!” in the morning, right up to “Are you doing a real campfire tonight? Do you want this wood?” in the afternoon. Oh, that wood! Plus there’s a load of old signs from ancient county events and they just need to be burned to get them out. If they hadn’t been six feet of solid fence pole, we would have loved to burn them on our campfire.

While all this was going on, the heavens opened. Girls who’d been miserable in the on-off drizzle throughout the afternoon became downright wretched as the site began to flood somewhere around 4pm. There was a puddle two inches deep and almost too wide to jump right outside the shelter door. We dragged all the chairs inside, we got all the girls inside, laid out foursies, Bear closed up the site and rescued anything that couldn’t get soaked and we sat in the half-darkness. It’s not a luxury building, that shed, despite my camping fairylights strung about the place, but at least it was inside and dry and too dark for anyone to see the spiders. All plans got abandoned – no wide games, no skills builders, no whatever else they were planning, just four hours of solid rain. Both patrol tents were soaked by now – well, the sleeping compartments weren’t so bad but the porches were pretty much underwater and to get into the sleeping compartment you’d have to pass through a waterfall. This was not selling camp as a fun thing to new girls. So we changed the plan.

The leader tent was dry, whether by luck or judgement and had three compartments. Butterfly and Squirrel would remain in the middle one which they’d been sharing on Friday night and Bear would move out, either into the shelter or into her car. We’d pack the four Agnes Patrol girls into the other two compartments and the four Olave Patrol girls could sleep in the porch. The Young Leaders were fine in their little tent and Badger was going home, since she doesn’t camp these days. There was also no question of cooking. Dinner was only going to be pasta but even if there was a big enough pot to cook pasta for everyone over the gas stove rather than each patrol in a small pot over an open fire, it just wasn’t possible to stand outside and cook in that weather. Executive decision made: we’re going to use the contingency to get fish & chips. Making plans to keep everyone warm and dry overnight and getting warm takeaway into everyone cheered the atmosphere right up. We had hot food, watched our weather apps and when the rain stopped, we fled outside. The other leaders and the Guides got on with the job of moving Guides into other tents and I went to light the campfire.

I’ve mastered the art of lighting a woodburner to heat a hot tub. I can do that on the first try now. But take away the firelighters and the sealed box and I’m useless. I had a bag of scraps from the archery cupboard which weren’t as dry as they could have been, a handful of pine cones from Bear’s firelighting stores and the bag of kiln-dried logs and to my amazement, once I managed to get a pinecone to catch, I got a roaring little fire going. But the sky was getting blacker, we’d received word of pouring rain over our hometown – turns out Squirrel lives just down the road from me – and ten minutes later, we had to abandon ship and take to the shelter again. This time the rain promised to stop within half an hour or so and everyone was fed and there were plans, so I taught them to sing and clap Edelweiss (we only did Change! once but you’d have thought we did it three times in each line!) and when the sun came out again, we burst forth.

Olave were going to sleep in their own tent after all. The porch was a bit wet but the sleeping compartments were dry and Bear let them on condition they didn’t disturb anyone in the night. No talking, no giggling, no singing and no deciding they wanted to be in the big tent after all at 3am. So they moved and while I brought some more bits down to the fire, Bear employed her dragon breath to awaken my little fire after its shower and we had a lovely campfire after all. They’ve not done a lot of singing, so I taught them some classics, some old ones, some new ones, some action songs, some rounds and we finished with Thunderation and Go Well & Safely and then we did smores, which was the only reason the girls wanted to be at the campfire in the first place. Of course, you can’t convince them that the best way to toast a marshmallow is to hold it over the embers; they want flames and they want to set it on fire, so I had to put in a couple of bits of kindling to spark up some flames for them.

We went straight to bed. We’d all been up all night the night before and we’d had a terrible afternoon, with everyone wet and miserable and everything cancelled.

It stayed dry overnight. All the girls were silent. I didn’t even hear the telltale zzzziipppp as they went to the toilet thirty times. I was up about quarter to seven, wondering why it was so quiet and when I went into the shelter and turned the programme over to see what we were doing on Sunday, that turned out to be because we were giving them a lie-in until 8am. Well, I got my apple juice and biscuits, my book and blanket and sewing kit and I sat out and enjoyed the early morning sunshine. Gradually the other leaders joined me – Bear first, getting the kettle on, then Squirrel and Butterfly. We had to lose Butterfly first thing on Sunday morning but they had me so they had enough leaders to keep going and they didn’t even need Badger to come back over. After sitting with us through the pouring rain on Saturday afternoon, she went home in the sunshine on Saturday evening saying repeatedly “I feel a like a louse going home leaving you all to this”, but it was fine. She’d been in the trenches with us for the worst bit and we certainly weren’t going to resent her missing out on the best bit. She doesn’t even do Guides – the fact that she’d come along at all, let alone stayed when the rain came down, was more than enough.

Sunday was lovely. The girls built their little fires and cooked eggy bread over them and lit the buddy burners they’d made yesterday – that bit I’d missed while cataloguing bows – and cooked beans over them. We also had the cereal out to supplement that and we had all the leftover apple & orange juice to finish up. We finished off the cake for elevensies which felt like only five minutes later. They rinsed out their tie-dyed t-shirts – something else I’d missed yesterday – which turned out really pretty and then they played a wide game, where I hid in the woods about fifty yards from the shelter and they never found me because it didn’t occur to them to play across the entire site, and then we cooked lunch. Sandwiches had been planned but for the sake of their Backwoods Cooking interest badge, they did last night’s pasta instead, in billies on the grids over the little fires. By now they were more or less getting the hang of feeding the fires, although Agnes’ water refused to boil until I stuck half a dozen bits of kindling under there, which had it bubbling enthusiastically in seconds.

We were supposed to play the wide game again in the afternoon but we needed to get packed up. The Young Leaders did all the washing up, including all the billies, while I took Agnes and Bear took Olave and we got the tents down, rolled up and, by some miracle, into their bags on the first attempt. Guides are very keen on undoing guy ropes but they’re not very keen on tying them up or making sure the tent is properly zipped up before they let them collapse onto the poor leader still inside. Then we gathered up some girls to help take down and roll up the big leader tent while others packed up the kitchen and the craft stuff and moved it all to Bear’s car ready for the van. By some miracle, by 3pm almost everything was done and the girls were doing their logbook pages, with regular calls for “Can I have two volunteers?” to carry boxes or clean toilets or do whatever needed doing. By 4pm, the parents were walking across the field to collect their darlings and we got in a horseshoe and presented badges – My First Guide Camp for everyone and the Backwoods Cooking interest badge for the Guides.

And that was it! We were done! It’s going down in unit history as probably the third worst camp we’ve ever endured and the first where we’ve had to resort to takeaway but at least Sunday was dry so we could get everything packed up and the girls could go home smiling after a fun day instead of miserable and dripping wet. I suspect at least two of them will never camp again but in ten or twenty years, some of them might be at Guide camp as leaders, telling all the girls about “remember that camp where it rained so much we had to get fish & chips?”.