Camping in Days Gone By

What is it that you think of when you remember camping as a child?
Were you scared of the dark and the sounds that you could hear, so different from those your familiar home made?
Do you remember being soaked to the skin, having no dignity as you stomp around in jeans, wellies and bright yellow plastic ponchos?
Or was camping one of the really good things you remember about your childhood, waking up to the sound of Green Woodpeckers in nearby trees and the smell of the traditional camp site breakfast wafting through the air?
As a child I went camping very regularly and it is one of the most incredible memories of my youth. I was one of a big family at the time as my parents fostered 5 other children and also had myself and two of my sisters.

We had a tent that was about the size of a house, the tents in Harry Potter held nothing compared to this camping monstrosity and it was a rare time of relaxation and fun in an otherwise hectic, busy family.

I remember getting into huge scrapes with my sister, the next one down after me, including getting scared to death by a close encounter with a large four legged creature mooing right in my ear and almost drowning while getting stuck in quicksand trying to cross a little stream-let. Creatures from the black lagoon is the only way I can describe how we looked when we were rescued!

I fondly remember the smell of breakfast cooking in the mornings, full English breakfast with black pudding, it was here that I developed my love of the controversial sausage. I remember meals cooked in billy cans, that consisted of tin after tin being opened and heated up, often in the same billy can. I recollect hot sweet tea, drunk from enamel cups and midnight trips to the communal toilet block with only my sister and a torch for company!

I also remember having the life frightened out of me in the gloaming of the dusk one evening. I was sat on the floor with my legs in front of my at that time of day when the sun is about to set and everything appears to be either jet black or brilliant white, the trees stark monsters across a gleaming horizon. So wrapped up in the spectacle was I that I had no idea I had picked up a tenant, until I glanced down and saw the huge black spider on my white denim clad leg. To say I screamed would be like saying the Pope is slightly religious, talk about understatement of the century! With hind site I doubt very much that the spider was actually all that big, but it seemed a huge pulsing mess of dark evil energy against the pure white of my leg. Poor spider was no doubt far more terrified than I was and is now no doubt famous amongst her people for writing about it on the SWW (spider world web!).

I have so many fond memories of camping as a child, that I am determined, now that I am in a position to do so (my new partner drives and we just bought a car), that my children experience the same freedom and fun as we did as kids. I hope that your memories of camping are as fond as mine and that your children also get to experience this very different style of living in an age where being without electricity and WiFi connection seems to most youngsters like a capital punishment. I have a feeling that for all they may moan about being dragged willy nilly into the back of beyond, years from now, they too will look back at these experiences with fondness and delight.