LEISURE
The day we struck camp
ANDREW CAVE
Was it when we woke up at 6 am in Canton Thurgau and the dew had soaked through everything, socks included? Or that time at Schmelz in the Palatinate (the river schmelt too) when torrential rain set in just as we'd got the tent off the ground and never let up for thirteen hours? Or the sight of the three squat-down lavatories at Pont-sur-Quelque- chose after a couple of hours' brisk use by what seemed like four hundred people? Any- how, at some point the last straw dropped down: we are not camping any more.
The camel goes on for quite a while before he realises what's up. We didn't tumble until the time came to buy a new car. All along we'd assumed it would have to be something pretty big: two tents to carry, and the fold- ing table, and the chairs; stove, blankets, box of food, four air mattresses, four sleeping bags, paraphernalia and whatnot . . . We were in the midst of negotiating for a boat- like estate car when revelation struck. Why bother? Why buy a large car for the sake of a few days in the year? We now have a small car and plan to stay at hotels.
We were never dedicated campers, it's true. We never thought of speniling a fort- night in one camp among several hundred of one's transistorised fellows, as so many French do; or of wandering gently from camp to camp, like so many British. We just wanted to get from A to a—from this country to a particular spot in Italy—and to spend as little as possible on the way. Over several
years we worked just about every available route and gauged the heights and depths of the camping business along each.
There were many pleasures. The grassy bank of the Loire at night, even with a hint of drizzle, is a better place to watch the Fourteenth of July fireworks across the river than the sort of hotel room we can usually afford in France, up five flights of stairs with an oubliette-like loo in the turret round the fifth kink in the corridor. Townspeople feel disgustingly virtuous going to sleep to the scent of warm grass, and breakfasting with the rising sun in their faces. Even the egg- sized hailstones at Ivrea were stimulating— the tent held, just.
In fact I can see all the advantages. Free- dom from the timetable and the proprieties: eat when you like, what you like, go about all day long in a bathing suit if it's that sort of day. Rivers, lakes, gravel pits by the side of many camps where you can swim after the long drive. Our mistake was in using camps to get from A to n: each day knocking in and wrenching out tent pegs, stowing and unstowing the extraordinary number of bits and pieces civilised man needs when he goes rustic. Camps are for dawdling.
When we camp again on the Continent— and I think dawdlingly we shall—we'll have a backlog acquaintance with national camp- ing manners. It's odd how these vary; as well he forearmed.
Italy in summer, for instance, doesn't strike me as really camper's country, though plenty of people camp there. Italians themselves are much too taken up with their own comfort and elegance to camp. The many camps along the coast or near the tourist towns amount to Hamburg-on-Sea and Stockholm- super-Arno. Tent pegs fail to grip in the parched earth; mosquitoes zero in at dusk. Italian camp sites vary greatly because Italians have no idea of their own of what camps should be like—it's one of those things foreigners do, like visiting old churches and buying tooled leather purses. There are some large well-set-out camps like those at Piazzale Michelangelo above Florence, and at Marina di Massa among the pines between La Spezia and Viareggio. But there are others like the one we blundered into at Vercelli, a sort of car park in the middle of town, backed up against a blaring late-night cinema. Enough!
The French, on the other hand, have a very clear notion of what makes the best sort of camp. You can tell this both from the numbers who happily spend their family holiday there and from the rating system worked by the French national camping association. The ideal French camp (ideal for the French, that is) is large, next to a river or lake in a well-travelled part of the country, with plenty of amenities in the way of play- grounds, diving boards, shops. The only drawbacks are that the camp with its trim crowded tents set about with chrome-plated equipment is really a good deal like a town; and that the sanitation in this town might have seemed a bit inadequate in the eight- eenth century.
The best way to camp in France, I now think, is to ignore the ratings and the pub- lished guides; there's even a lot to be said for shunning any camp that appears to be large, with a high rating and lots of amen- ities, especially if it's run by the municipality. France is full of small private camps, often run on the side by innkeepers or farmers and unlisted in the guides or else rated low (no diving boards). It is also full of wasteland and forest where you can often camp with the farmer's leave and sometimes without needing anybody's. Except in a few highly cultivated and unfashionable regions like Lousy Champagne, camping sites of this kind are so many that one needn't bother to plan ahead. Our pleasantest memories of French sites are of meadows between the pond and the cow-pasture with only three or four other tents in sight. Taken in this way, rather than in the French way, France strikes me as the ideal camping ground of Western Europe.
The one or two Belgian camps we stayed at managed a flavour of instant Simenon- beer, rickety fittings, and something nasty be- hind the estaminet. The Swiss camps were well ordered and a trifle dear. One advantage of casual camping in Switzerland is that the sites by the cliche lakes or resorts tend to be full: you get driven off into the many curious or beautiful byways of that doughty country, now so often patronised by people who know little of it.
That was where the dew came down, though—in the time of apples, by an ancient Thurgau village where the only passers-by between the shingled houses seemed to be Turkish immigrant labourers, and the grass in the morning was so drenched and so cold for so long that in the car afterwards all we could do was turn on the heater and hug our feet. That must have been the beginning of the end of our quick camping trips. When we go back to the camp at Andelfingen well wear well-dubbined boots. Or the boys and I will. We can, my wife says, visit her at the local hotel.
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