The Campus disaster

Deadbeat is back from his Summer Holidays now - including a delightful weekend in France celebrating the marriage of a good friend of mine - which has sparked a couple of memories.
The first is the finest of all spoonerisms, in the best of all languages - French. This was broadcast to the whole of the French-speaking, and therefore Catholic, world. The commentator was supposed to say 'L'enorme population du cap' (the enormous population of the cape) but it came out as 'L'enorme copulation du Pape' (the enormous copulation of the Pope).

The other memory is of the time - at least a decade ago now - we spent having a working summer holiday at Campus, which was a very up-market holiday camp indeed. When I first heard of it Tony Hart himself was running the kids art workshops and the entertainment was second to none, featuring nightly acts of the calibre of Shooglenifty and John Otway. The site was beautifully decorated and organised into 'villages' of twenty camping plots, each with its own toilet/shower block (cleaned and emptied daily!) and a marquee (where breakfast and newspapers were to be found each morning!!). Each 'village' also had a well-provisioned firepit surrounded with coconut mats, where professional story-tellers would enthral the children as the sun set. There was even a couple of 'camp elders' to each 'village', who would keep an eye on kids while their parents were off listening to the bands of an evening. During the day there was a huge range of workshops, therapies and playgroups available.

The whole thing was aimed at the upper-middle-management stratum of the liberal middle classes and saw itself as an alternative to two weeks in a gite in France. The organisers were classic products of the hippy era, trying to make pots of money whilst (at least nominally) chasing the dream of Community and Creativity. The workforce were mostly lovely, gentle and largely ineffectual volunteers who had bought into the dream. The punters - heads of department of a good-sized comprehensive, NHS managers, that sort of thing - were well-behaved in an 'uptight desperately getting drunk to forget their stressful jobs and mortgage' sort of way and their children's rebellion maxxed out at toking, cheeking their parents and fumbling with each other. The closest thing to violence I saw was one bearded man hissing through gritted teeth 'Well I don't think that's very fair, actually'.

Altogether it was a wonderful place to go for a summer holiday - a safe and inspiring environment with lots for the adults and the kids to do and with just enough semi-supervision for the adolescents to allow them to play at being grown-ups without taking real risks. For single parents like Gabrielle and me, it was the answer to our prayers.
The only down-side of all this was the enormous cost - a family of four would have paid some £1300 (and this was ten years ago, remember, when that kind of money bought a very serviceable car) in plot fees for the full ten-day event, and festival prices for food.

Finding that kind of money was clearly impossible. We had therefore done a deal with the organisers, assembled an ad-hoc motley crew called The Impoverished Parents and were working our tickets. This was the third year we had done this, and our crew had grown to a sizeable posse - some eight adults and nine children - between us we had six musicians playing music all over the site and were also organising bridge, backgammon and astrology workshops. In all, we were having loads of fun earning tens of thousands of pounds worth of holidays for our various children.

The site itself was in a delightful valley with a little burbling brook running down a mini-ravine in the middle of it, small enough for toddlers to splash around in safety. The little rustic bridges over the brook were decorated with flags, and avenues of giant paper lanterns glowed with candlelight at night and caught the sun during the day. Except that this time there was no sun to be seen through the torrential rain. In fact, the weather was so bad that three days into the camp there was a meeting to discuss calling the whole thing off - but this, it was decided, smacked of defeatism and would have meant the bankruptcy and demise of Campus. So, in a hippy variety of the Dunkirk Spirit, we soldiered on through the ever-worsening rain.

By the fifth day, the site was looking like the Somme after a particularly messy battle. The burbling brook had swollen to fill the mini-ravine with a rushing torrent, which now had to be guarded by stewards to prevent toddlers (or indeed adults) from being swept to a foamy death. Quite a lot of the punters and even some of our intrepid band had called it quits and gone home (including my daughter - even as a young adolescent she was more sensible than I).

I remember saying to Gabrielle that the worst was definitely over, and things were about to get better. At that precise moment a panicky steward came running through the site shouting "The river's burst its bank upstream, everyone to high ground NOW!" Sure enough, within five minutes the river had flooded over the edge of the mini-ravine and began filling the valley, which was now clearly revealed to be a flood-plain. I watched the whole thing whilst hurriedly striking camp. As the last packages of sodden canvas went into the van the water reached its height, just a foot or so below the road. At this point I was soaked to the skin and having a desultory argument with a steward who wanted me to 'muster' in the barn. My point was that I couldn't get any wetter, wasn't going to fall in, fer chrissakes, but could swim if did, and anyway I was not going to let our tents get washed away or take orders from anyone except a policeman with the legal power of arrest or my mother. Who was dead.

We paused in our altercation to watch a procession of yurts (rented for an extra £400) and Teepees (£800) floating past on their way to the sea. Then we noticed the sewage bubbling up. Dozens of cess tanks (actually 1500 litre bulk juice containers with their tops lopped off), two to each village, were now under water and discharging their contents. Adolescent Steward and I suddenly forgot our argument and instead agreed that it was time to leave.

When I did finally get to the barn I was astonished at the scale of the problem. There were hundreds of people who had nothing but their wet clothes - tent, towels and clean togs all washed out to sea on a tide of shit. Funnily enough, the atmosphere was far from catastrophic. No-one had died, and the British blitz spirit had made a daft reappearance, complete with the indomitable cockney sparrow humour. The middle managers had stopped being so uptight and were agreeing with others how terrible it all was and how it should be better organised, while the women were soothing and drying out the children.

Then, a touch of the surreal - the Marines arrived (two squaddies in a seven-and-a-half ton truck). Apparently we had been declared a disaster area and this was our relief convoy. The truck had a cargo of blankets, sleeping bags, an urn and two Women's Institute stalwarts who immediately began dispensing an unbroken stream of HRT (Hot Revivifying Tea). The truck, despite being one of the army's finest four-wheel-drive, state-of-the-art, nuclear-hardened, battlefield logistic units, immediately got stuck in the mud. I engaged the squaddies in some good-natured banter, accusing them of bogging down the truck on purpose rather than heading back to barracks and demanding that they call out the Chinooks. They politely requested that I practise sexual reproduction somewhere else - and then called the AA. When the fourth emergency service arrived the very very nice man stopped at the gate to the site, said "I'm not going in there, I'd get my truck stuck" and drove away.

The next day dawned dry and bright. The flood water receded. The AA came back and towed the Marines out, and thanks to some championship off-roading yours truly extricated the trusty Transit from the toxic site.

Today on the news there was talk of 15,000 killed by floods in Bangladesh. Sometimes I think that we really do have it easy in Britain, you know.

Cheers,

Deadbeat