RECREATION: YVONNE NOLANreviews The Art Of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the StarsBy Matthew De Abaitua Hamish Hamilton, 293pp. £14.99
NO ONE I KNOW would think of me and camping without sniggering. I am a legendary hater of the guy rope and the tensile rod, of taking an hour to boil water and of spending summer nights lying frozen in a sleeping bag fully dressed. But I know people who love camping; indeed I have spectated on and applauded their efforts before retiring to my own orange-nylon misery to cry.
I was somewhat surprised to discover that Matthew De Abaitua is of a similar mind to me given that he is an ardent camper descended from a long line of people who mistook hardship for holiday. In this delightful mongrel of a book – a mix of history, instruction and pensee – the novelist and journalist makes a passionate argument for camping’s many bucolic joys but does not number a holiday among them. “I do not subscribe to the simple life, to any camping manifesto, movement, or order. I just want space and unallocated time. I want disorganised activity for my children. I want the timetable to be torn up. I want them to push through the boredom barrier, and discover their own way.” Later he adds, “Camping is not easy; it is not leisure. Providing the basic human needs – food, warmth, shelter, a working trolley – may be menial work, but it is satisfying.”
It is such a relief to discover in the early pages of this book that one is about to be entertained and informed but not lectured to by a zealot, which frankly is what I was expecting. Instead, De Abaitua presents the first of many comic vignettes of his own family in camping mode: his wife’s backpack is so large she looks like “a woman backing into a wardrobe”; when his anoraky leadership skills desert him he is “a swan. An upside-down swan. On the surface, furious peddling, and underneath, gracefully drowning.”
But if De Abaitua’s contemporary adventures in camping are interesting, so is camping’s history. Tracing humanity’s progress from nomadic herdsman to house dweller to the flight from the land and on into industrialisation, it’s clear how alienated we’ve become from something we’re ideally adapted to; living next to the soil and fending for ourselves. In fact, since the late 19th century, camping has been the choice for non-conformists, dreamers, anarchists, cranks, trade unionists and writers; its visionaries coming overwhelmingly from Quaker or Methodist backgrounds. As in our own recessionary times, the camping urge has often been inspired not only by financial necessity but also by feelings of disconnect and dissatisfaction with the prevailing societal or political mood.
Thomas Hiram Holding's The Camper's Handbook, greeted in 1908 as the "camper's Koran", advised on everything from the ideal camping companions to cooking and tent construction. Holding was driven by his belief in muscular Christianity, "which perceived nature as the countenance of God; to camp was to investigate His Divine Works". Camping movements that followed Holding's variously explored utopianism, alternative religion, gypsy/Native American lifestyles and the occult; many attempted to address social issues, such as unemployment and educational reform.
The advent of the bicycle and, later, the car saw camping’s popularity increase, but even at the turn of the century 600 men a week were staying at the Cunningham Camp on the Isle of Man; it was a sort of forerunner of Butlin’s, with eight-berth tents and a dining marquee. Later, when sock and sandal wearers took to sporting uniforms and espousing medieval chivalric notions, there were shameful ties to the rise of National Socialism. The German Wandervogel camping movement had its greeting “Heil” wholly adopted by the Nazis, although it was it was the hippyish Wandervogel’s successor, the Bünde, that was the darker organisation.
Camping's hall of fame is also littered with the great and the good; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were all ardent campers, albeit with the addition of servants in the case of Ford and Edison. It also features in iconic writings such as Jerome K Jerome's Three Men and a Boatand Aldous Huxley's short story The Claxtons, and George Orwell savages it for its political wishy-washyness in The Road to Wigan Pier.
In more recent times, there is a direct line of descent from the hippy dreamers of the late 1960s Whole Earth movement in the US to the rise of Silicon Valley. As De Abaitua puts it: “The utopian vision of the dome-dwelling communards became the intellectual and philosophical underlay of the internet.”
This beautifully written and charming book made clear to me something I’d never stopped to consider before: despite the extreme morris dancing, back-to-the-land and camping movements have made a huge positive contribution to modern philosophical and political thought. De Abaitua’s self-deprecatingly hilarious stories of his camping misadventures made me laugh, too; a lot. But, still, I will never camp again. I’ll respect it in the morning, though.
Yvonne Nolan is a television producer/director and critic
