Rebel Summer Camp is always such a big thing that it deserves two posts – you just can’t get the whole thing in one. So this is Friday and Saturday. I dithered over going to camp this year, since it’s three or four hours away up the M5 and M6 but eventually I decided I’m a grown-up, I can do that. And when I got back from Iceland, where I’d routinely driven three or four hours a day, I definitely knew I could get all the way to Kibblestone.
A quick overview of what Rebel Summer Camp actually is: nearly four years ago, a very clever person published a book called the Rebel Badge Book full of merit badges designed for adults, the kind of thing you used to get at Brownies or Scouts when you were a child, in response to all the people saying things like “I used to get badges for making a cup of tea for old people, why aren’t there any badges for adults?”. Over the last four years, that’s expanded to three books of badges, an entire club, regular meet ups around the UK, twice-yearly online meet ups, a whole extra set of badges and awards that aren’t in the book, large-scale games, an annual adventure and yes, a camp. This was the third one and I think there were about 150 of us in 13 groups of 11 or 12 called Patrols because this is all, ultimately, inspired by Scouting and Guiding.
For camp, because we’re quite a large group and we’re all adults, Chief Rebel Charly books out an entire campsite. A lot of us camp but there’s indoor accommodation, glamping tents and the possibility to stay in a nearby hotel if you really want to. This year we were at a Scout campsite called Kibblestone, about halfway between Stafford and Stoke-on-Trent – a slightly odd campsite, because half of it is on the other side of the road, so the campers were on the main site but anyone indoors or glamping was over the other side.
I arrived just before 4pm, was able to drop off my luggage on the side of the track before taking my car to the car park and then set up my tent without having to carry anything across the campsite, which was lovely – it took four trips to do it last year. I’d spent the weekend before repairing my tent, since two of the poles had snapped and I will never do something until I actually need to. It’s a nice big four-man tent with porch as big as sleeping compartment and it’s an absolute palace for one person. I’d recommended it to someone else on the Facebook group and when I went and walked around the campsite, I found six of that same tent, in three different colours.
First thing on Friday, once everyone (almost everyone!) had arrived and got settled in was Patrol games. My Patrol was Nelson 1 and our Patrol colour was purple, which is why you’ll see a lot of us wearing purple in the pictures. We sat in circles on the grass on the main field and played things like “2 truths and a lie” and “what’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?” and just chatted and got to know each other. There were twelve of us but one was running late because she hadn’t been able to get the afternoon off work and another was having trouble getting up from the nearest station so there were only 10 for the icebreaker.
Then there was a campfire. I love a campfire. I drifted over as soon as I saw the Pyromaniacs heading there and watched and was not particularly helpful as the fire was lit. It’s a great firepit, a big deep iron circle with cut-outs of the Guide and Scout logos, the county logo and the name of the international event it was built for back in 2022. Gradually, other Rebels began to drift over and we sang. We didn’t have any songbooks (I had three songbooks but it’s not enough for however many people turned up) but there were several of us who are used to leading campfire singing with Guides and we have plenty of songs that are either repeat-after-me (call and response, as normal people call it) or where the words are so repetitive that you’ll soon pick it up, so there was very little difficulty with people not knowing the songs. After that, there was a pub quiz over in the building on the other half of the campsite but I find it very difficult to drag myself away from a campfire, so I sat and poked it until it was time to pour water on it and go to bed.
Saturday morning! First activities! Nelson 1 started with gladiator duel, which was hidden away in a bit of the campsite we had trouble finding, so we met on the main field and went down together. Down some massive stairs, follow a cliff down the hill and when you get to the mill, it’s just behind there, in a building that used to be used for caving, which is what the sign is pointing to. Gladiator duel involved standing on a foam platform on a bouncy castle and attempting to knock your opponent over. It may be fun for children – and it was fun for us – but it’s exhausting for adults. Nelson 1 is not one of the more active patrols.
Catapults, back on the other side of the camping field, turned out to be actual Just William-style catapults, trying to hit a target with paintballs. I enjoyed it, although I have no idea how to aim a catapult but it didn’t really hold our entire patrol’s attention for the entire session. I’d been wondering, having had just “Catapults” on our timetable, whether it was actually pioneering and we were going to have to build a catapult out of string and broom handles, which I think would actually have gone down pretty well. Knowing my Patrol as I do, I suspect there are one or two people who know exactly how best to build a catapult. But I like a bit of target sport, and we were going to get target sports a-plenty!
Last activity before lunch was bean bag golf. Kibblestone used to do kayaking out on the lake but now the kayaks are cut in half and stuck in the ground, like a kayak graveyard, with circular holes drilled in them and you throw beanbags into the holes. We had a couple of people who were absolutely determined to score 999 in the kayak that was at an awkward angle but again, it mostly wasn’t terribly inspiring.
After lunch, our timetabled activity was dodgeball but we decided to skip it. Several people had already decided they didn’t want to do it – we’re not a running around patrol, have I mentioned that? – and then someone had the bright idea to do screenprinting instead. Screenprinting was actually timetabled for Monday afternoon but it’s a self-led activity where you can just drop in. If we did it on Saturday afternoon, it would have plenty of time to dry before we went home on Monday evening and we’d free up an hour on Monday to pack up camp and get ready to go. That seemed like a good idea.
So off we went to the dining hall to screenprint. Some people had come with ideas or designs; I sat and metaphorically chewed my pencil for a while before deciding, most unoriginally, to do a polar bear. I copied a picture very carefully from Pinterest and then transferred it from my paper to my card by holding the two together and attempting to cut it out of the card with a craft knife. The results was that I at least scored it, which meant I had to cut it out twice. When I cut out a leg, I realised I’d made a mistake in not making “bridges” but it got worse when I realised I’d cut out the entire body. Well, if I put the pieces back in place and held the screen really tight, they might stay in place. And they did! The instructions were a little bit muddling but basically, put your bag down on the table with a piece of cardboard inside to stop the paint going through to the other side, put your template down, put any cut-out pieces back in, put the screen on top, splodge some paint onto the screen and pull it across with a squeegee. Peel it carefully off while holding your breath and rejoice when it works! I filled in a couple of gaps with a tiny paintbrush and added in mouth, eye and ear, then I went outside to wash my screen and peel the cardboard off it, since it had somehow got completely stuck.
The last activity of the day was rifle shooting, in a tiny shed where there wasn’t room for all 12 of us to sit. Last time I did this, the instructor had to walk down to the end of the range to retrieve used targets and put in new ones but Kibblestone has an ingenious system of wires, whereby you press a button and the paper target is whizzed up to you. Take it out, put a blank one in and send it back down. I think I did ok at rifles. Patrol Leader Heather retrieved an absolutely blank target but when Louise brought back her target, it had seven holes in it despite each of us being given five shots, so it looks very much like Heather shot the wrong target. We had a few minutes left at the end so I had a second go, this time with a different target, which had five tiny targets on it. Aim: hit each of them. I hit two of them but if we’d been doing it with a proper group, I suspect we’d have practiced our aiming for a little while like I do with archery and we’d all have been much better on the final attempt.
We had about half an hour free after that before the Share Fair began, which is a Rebel tradition whereby people bring a craft that they can teach to a dozen people and everyone else just comes and has a go at whatever they fancy. It’s two hours long, so people can run an activity for an hour and also have an hour to try things out themselves, so I didn’t hurry. I cooked some pasta and then I strolled over and opted to have a go at felting. I’ve done it before, using a pre-made kit with a foam body but I’ve never done it from scratch. Freddy was teaching people to make little snowmen so I decided – unoriginal! – to make a polar bear. I was nearly finished by the time we ran out of time and Freddy is an angel so I borrowed a pad, a needle and a handful of wool and finished it up when I got back to my tent. Freddy was camping a few tents down and so I returned the stuff in the morning.
But straight after the Share Fair came the presentations and the group photo. One of the things the Rebel Badge Club has added is the Maverick Awards, which is the Rebel equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. I finished my Bronze maybe a year and half ago – maybe two and a half year ago – and we presented two Bronze Awards in front of the entire camp. We also had a Silver to present and our first ever Gold, which went to my Patrol Leader Heather, who was also the first person to complete Bronze and Silver. Gold Maverick isn’t quite as big as Gold DofE but there’s a lot of work in it and you don’t even have the motivation that “employers love people with Gold!” because no one outside of Rebel Badge Club has ever heard of the Maverick Awards. At the time, I felt inspired to get back to working on my Silver but I’m currently working on my Gold Voyage Award which is the Trefoil Guild’s version of this sort of staged personal improvement award system so I’ll get the worst of that out of the way before I pick up Silver Maverick again.
We had a group photo – better organised than last year; official photographer Trina made sure every single person was visible, although instructions like “Can the person in the Rebel jumper move over just a bit to the left?” was useless when at least half of us were wearing Rebel “uniforms” of some kind. I arrived in my green Greta 2 t-shirt from last year’s camp and spent the entire weekend in my purple Nelson 1 t-shirt, a few people had generic Rebel t-shirts and hoodies in grey or burgundy, there were Adventure t-shirts and Traitors t-shirts from the games weekends, t-shirts from the sub-groups like the Rainbow Rebels and the Spoonies group. I didn’t see any Rebel Readers t-shirts, though.
We had an hour or so of spare time after the photo. Most people went off for dinner – it turned out about three-quarters of the camp had opted for the meal pass rather than worry about self-catering and the rest of us got out our camp stoves. I’d eaten before the Share Fair so I sat in the fading darkness and finished off my felt polar bear.
Saturday ended with singalong Grease out on the main field. Several Rebels had dressed up for occasion and some had made their own costumes (Charlotte of Nelson 1 was delighted on Sunday morning to realise it meant she’d finished her Costume Designer badge) but it was too dark to see anyone. Most of us sat out in camp chairs with a few people on blankets on the ground. It felt like comparatively few of us, though, and although we all sang along, it wasn’t nearly as loud or enthusiastic as the campfire had been the night before.
It was only when I was getting ready for bed that I discovered there had been a small campfire going on just a few metres away for the non-Grease fans. Not advertised, so as to not actually compete with the singalong, and now down to glowing red embers but I can never resist a campfire, even when it’s out, so I lost half an hour’s sleep to standing around staring at it.
And then I went to bed! That was all already quite a lot for one evening and the first day and we still had two more very full days to go!
I Am A Polar Bear 