Matthew De Abaitua - The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars

HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

HAMISH HAMILTON

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2011

Copyright Matthew De Abaitua, 2011

Illustrations copyright Paul Blow, 2011

Extract from The Manchester Rambler, written by Ewan MacColl, included by kind permission of Ewan MacColl Ltd

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

ISBN: 978-0-14-196895-7

For Cathy

Discomfort, after all, is what the camper-out is unconsciously seeking. We grow weary of our luxuries and conveniences. We react against our complex civilization and long to get back for a time to first principles. We cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more.

John Burroughs, Under the Maples

We flee away from cities, but we bring
The best of cities with us

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Adirondacs

Matthew De Abaitua is editor-at-large of the Idler and a committed camper. His Twitter feed and popular website, cathandmathcamping.com, provide amusing and useful information on where and how to camp in Britain. He is also the author of the novel The Red Men, which was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and is currently being made into a film by Shynola. Matthew lives with his wife Cath and young family in Sussex.

The other passengers stared at us with appalled fascination and, in one case, contempt. I bowed my head with shame. What a sight we made, a broad-shouldered, big-bellied, six-foot-two man, face reddening under the strain of an eighty-litre rucksack, and his wife, petite and five foot nothing, whose rucksack made her look like a woman backing into a wardrobe. And we had a child too, a blonde toddler kicking away in a large three-wheel buggy. London transport etiquette, slim volume that it is, was breached. The passengers hadnt witnessed a bus etiquette calamity like this since a Vietnamese man transported polystyrene crates of tilapia on the 277, spilling icy fish water over the trouser suits of commuters at eight in the morning, an etiquette breach of such severity it required a new warning sign to be pinned up next to the driver: Please do not bring your fish on to this bus.

Caths rucksack contained two weeks worth of clothes, enough footwear to cover every eventuality of weather and fashion, three sections of plastic origami that unfolded into seats, a bag of tea lights and flame-retardant paper lanterns, various soft toys, thin and flat works of childrens literature, warm jumpers, waterproofs, sunglasses and a Tupperware box of ground spices. Balanced on top of the buggy, there was a blue cool bag containing frozen litres of milk, baby bottles, fruit, snacks and sausages. The bus juddered to a halt and as one overladen four-legged, three-wheeled beast we stumbled back and forth.

The Campers Handbook of 1908, written by Thomas Hiram Holding, the father of modern camping, has this to say on the matter of packing: In camping, DETAIL is everything. I carefully consider the question of clothes, strains, weights, sizes, the bulk, and the packing to an almost extreme point. Holding was a pioneer of cycle camping and devised lightweight, easy-to-transport kit for a weekend in the country. Prior to his advocacy of packing light, the British embarked upon a camping trip as if colonizing another part of Africa: on a trip to the Lakes, one nineteenth-century camping party took two tons of kit packed upon horse-drawn carts, including a harmonium, a separate pantry tent, a crate of biscuits and a telescope. (To be fair, some of their really heavy items, such as the cast-iron fireplace, were then buried in the earth with the intention of digging them up the following year.)

My system of packing followed the spirit of Thomas Hiram Holding, being so detailed and so highly strung that an item as small as a spatula could throw it off whack. It surprised me how much pride and enjoyment I took in packing. During the long period of stupefied indolence otherwise known as our twenties, Cath and I never took a single significant holiday. We neither planned nor prepared for anything. Preparation is the opposite of cool. It smacks of the military, and Scouts. Making it up as you go along, improvisation, youthful spontaneity, these are the values of the hip. Nature demands preparation. The city hates it. The city rewards improvisation. Plans made and dropped. If you are bored, hail a cab and move on. You cant hail a cab in a field, you cant pull that ripcord and wake up in your own bed, although Lord knows enough angry people have thrown a sodden, torn tent into the boot of a car at three in the morning and then driven home.

The camping gear was laid out in my bedroom, the converted coal cellar of a Victorian terraced house on the A1207, otherwise known as Graham Road. The sound of urban surf echoed in the light well: the backwash of buses sluicing through rainy gutters, strangers arguing, walls vibrating with the rhythmic compressions dropped from the bass bins of a passing BMW. I pulled out some Ordnance Survey maps of the west coast of Ireland. A map of the countryside is a promise of exotic territory to a man who sleeps under a busy street in Hackney.

There is pleasure in packing for a camping trip. Horace Kephart, an American woodsman of the early twentieth century and author of a large volume on camping and woodcraft, wrote a fond account of the campers fossicking around with his gear: It is great fun, in the long winter evenings, to sort over your beloved duffel, to make and fit up the little boxes and hold-alls in which everything has its proper place, to contrive new wrinkles that nobody but yourself has the gigantic brain to conceive. Kephart, a librarian by trade, turned his back on domestic life. To many a city man there comes a time when the great town wearies him. He hates its sights and smells and clangour. Every duty is a task and every caller is a bore. There come visions of green fields and far-rolling hills, of tall forests and cool, swift-flowing streams. Living in the city is exhausting, especially the narrow, high-sided streets of East London. We worked in the half-a-yard of space between nose and computer screen, then came home to Hackney, a labyrinth without a roof. We were sick for want of a horizon.