“Can you take a baby camping?” my friend asked, one morning over breakfast, while we waited ten minutes for the kettle to boil on the stove. Neither of us is expecting, but our minds had turned to the future, and the sustainability of our annual August bank holiday camping trip, should that future involve children.
The answer is: yes, you can take a baby camping. I know this because at the time of my own first camping trip I was seven months old. It was to the Dordogne, and my mother remembers giving me cold melon skins to chew on because I was teething. There are photographs of me, still young enough to have those Michelin-Man rolls, being bathed in a paddling pool in the middle of a dusty campsite somewhere in southern Europe.
Growing up, almost all my holidays were spent under canvas. My brother and I formed little gangs with other children and went on (in hindsight very tame) adventures across woodland, played make-believe on beaches, competed in elaborate races. We built campfires and played guitar (badly) and toasted chocolate-stuffed bananas amid the embers. When rain called off play we passed hours dealing cards in the tent, or decamped to the nearest pub for Cokes, chips and games of pool.
There was a peculiar intensity to the friendships formed on such trips. Like holiday romances, they caught fire and burned out quickly. There were alliances to form, crushes to develop, games to devise – the stuff of the playground, only condensed into 14 hours a day, over the course of a week. On one trip, camping in Yorkshire, my brother and I fell in with the three children of another family, the Hydes (motivated on my part by the crush I had on the eldest boy). Later, we lost their address, and my dad took me to the local library to try to find it in the records held there. At a campsite in Dumfries, Scotland, which we visited every summer for at least a decade, we made friends with another set of siblings. Each year our parents would work out the dates they’d book for the following summer, so we could be there together once more.
I think of such relationships often now when I’m camping, observing children playing together. On our recent trip, I smiled to myself when I overheard one girl say to another: “I swear on my hamster’s life…” There was a flash of recognition when I saw that an enterprising group of girls had set up a stall selling trinkets and friendship bracelets they’d made; this was exactly the sort of thing I would have done.
We spent the bank holiday weekend on a campsite in Sussex – one of my father’s favourite spots. It has large pitches, circles carved out of tall grass, which offer a degree of space and privacy he loved. It also, crucially, does not have composting toilets, which he hated. M— and I went, as we usually do, with my schoolfriend and her husband. We were joined by my stepmother and my little brother, who find themselves in need of company and distraction, for obvious reason.
It was my first time camping since Dad died, and I thought of him often – somehow more often than I usually do, which is all the time. And not just because I was filling the water tank where he had once filled the water tank, driving pegs into ground he had walked. I love to camp because he loved to camp. This, along with so much else, he passed on – and now I sit with one of my oldest friends and talk about how we might pass it on to our children. In this, and so many other things, he is part of me, or perhaps I am part of him – a truth that is as painful as it is comforting.
Dad took camping and its associated kit very seriously, as he did everything he considered worthy of his time. Ever the aesthete, he bought his tents (of which there are three) from the Dutch company De Waard, twice driving across the continent to view them. Elegant and architectural, rising out of the long grass, they seemed suddenly a monument to him, his passions and his principles. I wished he could see them.
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This article appears in the 03 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Age of Deportation
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