MY extravagant plans for seeing everything from the Cape to the Kruger Park were quite impracticable for a four-week holiday. I have no doubt that we could have covered the distance, but we would have been on the move the entire time. It would have been exhausting.
Regretfully, I whittled down the itinerary until I had a programme which would give us an average of four days’ relaxation after each day of travelling. This met with parental approval.
Not that my parents were difficult to please. I was blessed with extraordinarily young parents. The actual age difference between the generations was 22 years, but it often seemed far less. This was partly because they both looked 10 years younger than they really were. Margaret had had one silver streak in her hair since her late 20s and time had not added to it and David had that sort of springy, curly hair that never wears thin.
But the main factor was our shared enthusiasm for open-air life and our acceptance of the tribulations which go hand in hand with living near nature. There are times on a camping trip when a sense of humour is even more vital than a can opener!
Most people can laugh about things after the event, but it takes a real sense of the absurd to appreciate at the time an experience such as Margaret’s, one windy day in Cornwall.
A passing seagull felt the need to relieve itself in mid-air and added a new white streak to Margaret’s hair.
The camp site was not equipped with showers, so I was dispatched to the tap with a bucket, while Margaret took the stove into the tent and tried to start it to heat the water.
This was in the days before portable gas equipment and there was quite an art in getting a paraffin pressure stove started.
First you primed it with methylated spirits and got that alight to warm the jets; then you pumped like mad and hoped that the pressure would build up before the meths burnt down. You couldn’t do it at all in a high wind and you nearly asphyxiated yourself in the narrow confines of a tent.
Margaret had just succeeded in firing it when I returned from the tap, tripped over a tent peg and emptied a whole bucket of icy water all over it and her!
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