and naïve police officer. It was equally unfortunate that Amelia Watkins had chosen the moment when Melanie was out of the room to ask to see PC Briggs’s handcuffs, claiming she was considering a career in the police force. No sooner had the poor young chap handed them over for Amelia’s inspection, than she swiftly handcuffed him to a chair, and the rest of the girls, sensing weakness as only the under-twelves can, descended mob-handed and relieved him of his baton and walkie-talkie too, before going full-on Lord of the Flies. They danced around him, mocking his pleas to be released, while Tabitha MacKenzie radioed menacing ransom messages back to base and Tilly Everett tried to break Milly Johnson’s arm with the baton and I made ineffectual pleas for them all to settle down.
This all happened within the three minutes that Melanie was absent from the hall. By the time she returned, PC Briggs was on the verge of tears, his radio was crackling ominously with threats of ‘back-up’ being dispatched and Milly had Tilly in a headlock trying to disarm her (Milly at least had been paying attention in the self-defence demonstration).
One shrill blast of Melanie’s whistle restored order, PC Briggs departed hastily, his radio now crackling with hysterical laughter about Girl Scouts, and I was sent to sort out the boxes of felt-tip pens, being deemed too irresponsible to even be allowed near the PVA glue.
Nonetheless, as no other parent was now willing to come forth, since a Volunteer had been found, Melanie was stuck with me.
‘Do you know much about camping, Ellen?’ she enquired, without much hope for my answer.
‘Oh, yes!’ I informed her brightly. ‘I went to Glastonbury Festival once. It was marvellous. I’m sure Scout Camp will be much the same. It’ll be fun!’ I assured her. Melanie looked unconvinced.
And now here I am. In a field. Quite a muddy field. There are many, many Girl Scouts here, for apparently it is a County Camp, and they have come from far and wide and Melanie wishes to make a good impression. I fear Melanie had not factored in my bright pink Hunter wellies when she was planning her Good Impression. I also fear that she may be slightly judging my jaunty ensemble of denim shorts and a Barbour, which was not dissimilar to my Glastonbury outfit twenty years earlier when I was hoping to channel Kate Moss, but too late I realised that in fact Kate Moss is the only woman in Britain over the age of twenty-five who can successfully pull off wearing shorts and I looked not so much festival chic as a scarecrow on acid chic. On the plus side, the fake tan I applied to my legs has gone such a lurid shade of orange that they probably glow in the dark, so I will be easy to find if I get lost in the field at night.
If Melanie was disappointed in me, I was equally disappointed to discover that instead of the proper white canvas bell tents I had envisaged, we were accommodated in nasty nylon monstrosities in a fetching shade of puce green. These were, Melanie informed me, far more practical and hi-tech that an old-fashioned tent, and I would be both warmer and more comfortable.
‘But the other ones are so beautiful!’ I sighed, as an increasingly exasperated Melanie tried to direct fifteen over-excited girls and me to put the tents up, and I gazed longingly across the field to a row of Proper Tents. ‘How could they be less comfortable than these horrors? Why, the beautiful tents are just crying out for bunting and cushions and strings of fairy lights!’
‘For Christ’s sake, Ellen!’ snapped Melanie. ‘You’re at County Camp, not an interior design convention. Where is your Scouting Spirit?’
Where was my Scouting Spirit indeed? It was becoming increasingly clear that I seemed to be sorely lacking Scouting Spirit, which was possibly the real reason I had been so ignominiously thrown out of the Girl Scouts all those years ago. I couldn’t help but think mutinous thoughts that if there were mysteries to be solved and criminal sorts to be thwarted, the thwarting would almost certainly fall to those lucky souls in the charmingly rustic, vintage tents.
Saturday, 6 August
I have decided I do not like camping. Camping is basically sleeping in a field. Sleeping in a field is fine when you are twenty-two and off your tits on fifteen pints of hard cider and some dubious illegal substances after dancing like a loon to splendid nineties rock and pop, but other than that, why would anyone want to go and sleep in a field for fun when they have a perfectly good house and bed? Moreover, why would they sleep in a field when they were stone cold sober? It is not right. There is nowhere to plug in my hair straighteners. But then again, there is nowhere to wash my hair either, so at least the grease is weighing down the frizz, so you know, swings and roundabouts. I think a beetle got in my hair last night too. I am sure I could feel something moving. Melanie wasn’t very impressed when I woke her up after I tried to get the beetle out of my hair. She asked me to go back to sleep as there are no poisonous beetles in Britain. She was unsympathetic when I whimpered that what if I was allergic to the beetle and didn’t know on account of having never had a beetle in my hair before. I think Melanie is regretting letting me come, which is fair enough, as I am very much regretting coming myself. It is not at all like Glastonbury, and nor is it anything like my Famous Five fantasies. I think we have the wrong kind of mud here.
There is no adorably smoky wood fire to cook sausages on. Instead there is a terrifying gas stove that could take my eyebrows off when I light it. It is even worse than lighting the Bunsen burners in the chemistry lab at school. I didn’t say this to Melanie, though, as between Beetlegate and her having to get up multiple times in the night to settle homesick girls/break up midnight feasts/minister to tummy aches brought on by excessive consumption of chocolate toffees at 3 a.m., she did not look like concern for my eyebrows was top of her list. Nonetheless, I am quite admiring of Melanie, even if a part of me suspects that she made me light the gas stove in the hope that I would manage to set myself on fire and she would be relieved of my ineptitude. She just gets on with it all, and even when the Scouts are being really annoying, she doesn’t lose her rag with them and tell them to just fuck off, like I probably would if I was in charge. Nor does she resort to mainlining gin, which would probably be my other coping strategy if I was her. I think it must take someone really quite special to do something like this – perhaps that is where the Scouting Spirit comes in.
I always thought that I would have been quite splendid in the German bombing of Britain during the war – that I was a trooper and would have been some sort of inspirational figure, leading rousing sing-songs and fashioning ingenious things out of clothespins, but it is becoming apparent that I would probably have spent the time being useless and flapping around while the Melanies of the 1940s built bomb shelters with their bare hands.
There are no signs of coiners or smugglers to thwart, which is probably just as well, as all the girls seem more interested in going to the toilet en masse and stuffing their faces with more contraband sweeties than they do in Solving Mysteries. There was an archery session, where Jane came over all William Tell and had to be restrained from trying to shoot a Granny Smith off Tilly Morrison’s head, and an orienteering activity during which the girls were unimpressed with maps and compasses and pointed out that Google Maps existed.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘But what if there was no Google Maps?’
‘Why would there be no Google Maps, though?’ said Amelia Benson.
‘Well, you could have no signal, or your battery could be dead,’ I pointed out, but the girls looked unconvinced.
‘Or you could have lost your phone,’ I added.
‘So, we’ve lost our phone, but we just happen to have a map and a compass?’ objected Olivia Brown. ‘It’s not very likely, is it, Ellen?’
‘Well,’ I said, starting to get irritated, ‘maybe there has been a nuclear apocalypse and Google Maps no longer exists because civilisation has been wiped out along with most of the human race, and you are one
