Last week we began by talking about your memories of camping and putting up a marquee in Magilligan. It seems from the outside looking in that you had a lot of fun, but you would not get away now with what you did back then with health and safety regulations as they now stand. Looking at the pictures in front of us you had tiny little fires, surrounded by stones and you used things like old metal dustbins to heat water...
Well, yes. No... most companies would have had their own cooking utensils and at Glendermott we had a big trunk and we used to keep it in the parish hall and it had all this stuff in it, but everything had to be cleaned scrupulously after every meal.
Girls were divided into Patrols and you would have had a wood patrol who had to gather wood for the fire, the water patrol had to carry all the water, the orderlies would have had to do cleaning up afterwards, like washing the pots and pans. All the Guides had to wash their won dishes and the cooks had to cook everything, and everything - everything - had to be cleaned scrupulously. everything had to be off the ground, so you made al these gadgets with wood and string, and when I think of it now, making these wash stands, like a tripod with sticks and string, and then putting a bowl of water on it and getting washed with that first thing every morning...You had to get everybody up, everybody cleaned, everybody dressed...
That sounded like it was hard work.
It was but it was fun. Quite often when you went to a campsite you quite often...Magilligan was great because it was the City and County site...but sometimes a farmer would have loaned you a field. Now, it was very good of him to let you have the use of it...
Heaven only knows what was lurking in the grass for you to sand or sit on ...
You didn’t think about things like that!
I do!
Not at all! it was good, healthy, country living...
I’d have died!
Wait til I tell you, before you left you had to leave that field spotless and you had to take down the tent, and when you were taking them down...putting the up was OK...but taking them down? You were hoping you would get a dry day to take them down, because if you had to bring them back and then had to get them dried out...oh!
Dear me yes!
If you pitched camp in the dry it was grand, but if you struck camp and it was wet, it was a nightmare, and getting all your tent pegs lifted - and sometimes they would have split and broke on you - you hammered them in with a mallet and they split and you had to get that out of the ground. If you dug it out and left a hole you had to fill it in again. So, there was a lot to do...having said that, that was half the fun.
You loved it!
The girls never had any time to get bored because they were always busy doing something.
No time to be bored. Did you love it?
I did. i thoroughly enjoyed it! I enjoyed it as a Guide and I enjoyed it as a Guider.
