Episode Two
Episode Two
Well we managed it… Sort of.
The middle of February and nearly five whole hours in our relocated caravan. It’s in storage on a Caravan Club site an hours drive from our north London home. The plan, during the week, was to head out Saturday and attempt our first ‘overnighter’ in England. We were looking forward to waking up in a toasty warm caravan in a freezing cold field; it really was going to be a first. But not this time – teenagers, don’t you just love’em?
I can honestly say, back in the ‘70’s, I went to no more than half a dozen parties during the whole of my teenage years, my sixteen year old daughter, Ella, attends two or three a week! So the best she could do was promised to try and put a Saturday aside sometime in May/June for the inaugural family weekend in the wilds of Cambridgeshire.
We set off early on Sunday morning to get as much daylight hours as we could with the caravan. I say, ‘we’ – sadly we weren’t quite the full compliment of family members. We left Ella, dead to the world, in bed and Dan, sensing a day humping stuff around in the cold, very magnanimously offered to stay at home with the new puppy, Sidney. Sid’s a cross breed (at times a very cross breed), I’m fairly sure the breeds involved are Tigger and Mountain Goat – not a good caravan combination. Unlike Bear, the five-year-old Yorkshire Terrier who, thanks to his size and temperament, has taken to caravanning likes a duck to water.
So, it was just myself, Mon, Ned and Bear who, on a blissfully sunny Sunday morning, made the journey to the village of Ashwell in Cambridgeshire to reacquaint ourselves with our ‘holiday home.’ When we last visited the heavens had opened the minute we drove into the storage compound, so no attempt was made to do anything constructive like tow it out onto a pitch and asses how it had faired, coping with it’s first British winter. Our second visit, in perfect weather conditions, was going to be a different kettle of fish; we were going to make camp!
The camp warden, when told we weren’t off to deepest Cornwall or the bracing Northumberland coast, quickly picked up on my hair of naive enthusiasm and assigned us pitch number one. That’ll be the one nearest the storage compound then? So it was to be, our fist outing with the caravan and a journey all of twenty-five yards - but that didn’t matter, it’s not the distance you travel with a caravan, it’s what you do when you get there that sets caravanning apart from any other holiday, and on pitch number one, for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, we were going to holiday hard.
It was a strange sensation, unfurling the roll out, Omnistor awning onto the perfectly manicured, spacious and flat pitch. Our regular, rather rustic, spot on the south west coast of France is a parched, cramped strip of land on a rakish angle amongst contorted trees and bordered by dusty bushes – having spent six summers on the same pitch I’d got it into my head they were all something of a challenge, not so the sublime Ashridge Farm Club Site. Inside the caravan everything seemed in order, Monica’s meticulous packing back in August had paid off and the new ‘Whale’ under floor space heater kicked in with a simple flick of a switch.
While the place warmed up it was time to put the surrounding countryside through its paces. No more than two hundred yards from the entrance to the caravan site we came across a huge field (what fields aren’t huge the countryside thinking about it…) that seemed to be given over to a bunch of tennis courts and, by Ned’s standards, a pretty full on dirt bike circuit. Add this to the small skate park we spotted adjacent to the cricket pitch in the village, and we’ve got the makings of a thoroughly distracting day for any vaguely active teenager with an aversion to five mile yomps. Wandering through the village at three fifteen on a Sunday afternoon, the gaggle of pubs we’d spotted on our first visit were remaining steadfastly closed adding, a tad frustratingly, to their intrigue and character.
The weather had closed in on us during the walk and the temperature had dropped a few degrees. What a truly welcoming site, that of the warm glow of the caravan as we turned the last corner - no it wasn’t on fire, but then again I have to admit, I’m not fully up to speed with the lighting and heating etiquette in relation to a vacated caravan.
Mon rustled up a delicious meal, Ned and I beat each other handsomely at cards and Bear curled up and savoured the quality ‘me’ time he was having with us. It was while we were all sat reflecting on a successful first ‘outing’ and reacquainting ourselves with our surrounds that Mon had an idea. It’s not a secret, but I hate it when Mon has an idea because, try as I might, there’s no stopping her. She’s going through a collage phase at the moment – the ‘art’ of cutting pictures up and sticking them all on top of each other – I think it was big in the 60’s with people who couldn’t paint. She’d got it into her head that a bunch of family summer holiday snaps cut to ribbons and pasted up one side of the wardrobe would look fantastic and be very emotive.
Maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word, it’s just that the last time Mon had a caravan related idea I was wallpapering bits of it in 85 degree heat. She used the term, ‘a splash of colour’ in her initial description of what she wanted. During the short journey to Mr Bricolage, the local ironmonger, I explained some of the pit falls of wallpapering in France and on a campsite, and I was still coming up with some blinding reasons not to give it a go as we pulled up to our pitch with a roll of turquoise paper and some paste.
Having chosen the wallpaper and pointed out which bits of the interior could do with, ‘a splash of colour’ she packed a bag and disappeared down to the beach – well it was a wonderfully sunny day. Before she left she rooted out a pair of sewing kit scissors she felt sure I could make use of. After an hour or so I became aware of more and more people walking and re walking past our pitch, it transpired that Mon had mentioned, in passing, to a friend what I was up to and in no time word had, obviously, gotten round that there was a nuttier attempting to wallpaper his caravan and on possibly the hottest day of the year. The combination of the onlookers, the sweat and the frustration was reminiscent of my first attempts erecting a two hundred poll second hand awning, with no instructions, in the searing mid day heat. But it’s funny how the beers always taste better in those strained circumstances.