We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Over 50 Cubs and hopefuls appeared at our first Cub meeting and organising a camp for more than 30 was a challenge in logistics… we only have so many tents, plastic plates, mugs and mini bus seats!

We did have an ace, a really great group of parents, and an amazingly competent group of small boy campers. The amazing weather was a bonus.

A small boy keen to join Cubs is called a Tenderpad, which makes perfect sense if you remember B.-P. ‘s original concept was wrapped around Kipling’s  Jungle Book and the wolves of the Seonee wolf pack, and the boys are called Wolf Cubs.

There was a very keen Tenderpad waiting at Brook Farm for the explosion of boys and kits and food, it was ‘Our Harry’ a 10 month old Labrador (ablely assisted by Old Brandy a sensible 9 years old).

We set up camp which was  a major exercise especially as some of the dads had brought huge palaces… We played Micro Dot, a fiendish wide game with Miss Lord ( our new Rikki) as Mother despatching agents
from behind enemy lines.

Two seductive rope swings were enjoyed (sadly one has already been surgically removed).

Dinner was fire warmed sausages in a bun and some practice singing before darkness fell and the amazing job of getting 33 small boys tucked up began. There were alarums and excursions in the night… various groups being spooked by the movements of unspecified groups of animals.

Dawn came early and it was a welly walk and then breakfast before loading and departure for Brenscombe slightly late arriving in deepest Purbeck by 1045 for archery, fire-lighting and rifle shooting. The main event was at Europe’s highest rope course where we launched and then in three groups, the cubs donned safety gear to spend the next three hours climbing, dangling, falling, jumping and generally doing alarming things in a very jolly manner (for example playing last man standing 30’ off the ground on a balancing beam, or dancing!).

We are now members of Sporks United! No more cutlery to heft! We discovered on  the canoe trip last summer that if you can design a menu that is Spork Friendly, the rest is easy! So we had chicken fajitas…. And a very fine camp fire and sing song.

Sunday was lazy as some Cubs slept in, and we had the full cooked breakfast with all the hot chocolate, eggs, bacon, toast, jam and juice a Cub could want and then we were off on a ramble across the Forest to Hyde for ice cream. Our redoubtable team lead by Mr. Fairfield and Mrs. C struck camp right down to the portaloo and we were able to deliver a pretty jolly crew back to the school by midday!

p.s. all clear confirmed by G.P.  last Monday. No more worries over scary scary illness. CC

My second nanny, was a redoubtable young German girl, Jutta. She was sensible, reliable and I loved her utterly. We could talk! And often did, quite companionably, sometimes in the bath, being washed with my little sister Toni. It was a warm secure world. Parents were wonderful, but they were so busy and always somewhere glamourous like Acapulco, or Gstaad. Morna and Louis thought nothing of going to New York, staying at the Pierre, cavorting at Jack and Charlie’s 21 Club, dining at Henry Guiget’s ‘Le Veau d’Or” and then whiling away the daylight hours at the New York Motor Show to pick out a car. One year my father came back with a Fiat Monza Spider! Wonderful in the summer… another year it was an even racier Mercedes 190 SL with a hard top for the winters (still useless in the snow).

Morna was committed to the huge station wagons that could take all the children and the dogs… somewhere, anywhere! But maybe like our friends who felt they had to send off tiny children to board, they
just weren’t cut out for the pastoral care end? I can certainly remember, in the days before seat belts; that on long journeys, the back seat would be folded flat and we’d all loll on a large cotton covered foam mattress and if there were disputes and caterwauling, an arm wielding a tennis racket would come back and swat indiscriminately until there was silence.

Another memorable occasion was the time Toni and I were taken to the local general store, and tiny toddler Toni was hoisted onto an apple barrel (that long ago!) and then when we were  finished shopping,
Morna and I carried the bag out and left. I couldn’t help noticing that Toni looked a little distressed as we drove off, but it was perhaps all for the best. Imagine my astonishment, when less than half an hour later, when I was playing quietly and happily on my own, Morna asked where Toni was. When I explained that we’d left her behind, there was a swat to the head before I was bundled back in the car. Toni was in tears, still on the barrel. Parents can be so mysterious!

And of course, the boys, our boys; had ‘nannies’. They may not have been supplied by the Norland Agency, and certainly none of them had crisp uniforms, many barely spoke English and one (Algerian) was
certainly more interested in drugs. It must have been tough for them. Our tiny house in Battersea was a far cry from the roomy splendour of my mother’s home. We were nowhere near the sylvan surrounds of Hyde Park where stiff linen cosseted real nannies proudly pushed huge prams from ‘Rods.

Some were devoted, like the wonderful Swiss girl who loved and cherished our children, and presented us with a cast bronze cow bell, our names and hers around the rim. There was an equally talented
French girl and even a seductive Belgian girl who broke hearts all around us at de Grassi and a lovely English girl. We even had a boy, Boris, who was willing but no match for Matt and had to be
repatriated to Bruxelles in tears before his time was up.

I have to say, at best they provided respite care, and meant Jude and I could go to work or even steal away for a naughty week-end in Richmond (all of five miles down the road). I look at the three huge
young men who casually wander into our home, fry up enormous meals, drink all my beer, leave the toilet seat up, abandon books, single socks, old rasor blades and the like; and disappear with my carefully
matched socks, and wonder how we did it. They tease me when I ask them to do their own dishes: “It was all right for you Dad, you had servants!” they cry disdainfully.

Servants! Servants! These three boys have had devoted retainers for over TWENTY YEARS! We’ve cleaned their bottoms, dumped their nappies, wiped their tears, examined their homework, combed their hair, mended their bikes, changed their sheets, bought their clothes, cleaned their loos, loved their friends, humped their empty beer bottles, posted their shoes, welcomed their girlfriends, taught them to drive and waved them good-bye, while all the time funding their very existence with our meagre taxed incomes.

Oh smug joy!