Open Writing

We called them hairy nuts when I was a lad.

A very nice little nibble they were, too. Once you had mastered the technique of digging them out of the ground.

It was quite a tricky business. Somebody once likened it to an egg and spoon race and I reckon they weren’t far out.

We unearthed them like potatoes, using a penknife to cut away the soil down to the roots. And there were the sweet little nuts, just ready for eating, raw and unwashed.

The whole operation hinged on picking the right wild plant, of course. My best source of nuts grew near a field path which I used on my way to school.

It wasn’t just the taste of the nuts that appealed to me. Finding them was exciting for kids of our tender years. Rather like coming across a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Recently I found out that the proper name for my nutty snack is pig or earth nuts. So now I know, 50 years or more since I dug up my first.

Grubbing around for nuts in a wood or a meadow was all part of my childhood make-believe world of living off the land in the great outdoors.

Sometimes I was a cowboy riding the range. But when I was scoffing the nuts I was a Redskin eking out a bare existence.

Camping was a natural part of this youthful yearning for adventure. Unfortunately my camping expeditions seemed doomed from the first.

You wouldn’t think anything could possibly go wrong only a stone’s throw from the house, would you? In my case you’d be wrong.

After pestering my dad into buying me a tent, I was allowed to pitch it in the field next to my garden. My parents reckoned that no harm could befall me there.

But nobody gave a thought to a herd of cows grazing in the same field. The grass must have been pretty poor because I woke up in the morning to find gentle rain falling on my face. A hungry beast had chewed a whacking big chunk out of the canvas roof.

Daylight showed the true extent of the damage. Heartbreaking.

My mother tried hard to console me and did her best to patch up the hole, but my grief lasted for weeks. The brand new tent was ruined.

From that moment on my boyhood years were spent desperately trying to break the camping hoodoo. All to no avail. Every camp I went on finished up like something out of a “Carry On’’ film.

Camp number two, I remember, was further away from home than the first. But not much. About 400 yards to be exact.

And it was memorable for a dawn invasion by flying black beetles. They swarmed all over me and my brothers.

We killed dozens with the tent-pole mallets before giving up in despair and leaving the tent to the winged monsters.

I even joined Slaithwaite Scouts in the hope that my luck might change. But it didn’t.

Instead, my accident-prone presence afflicted others. So that when we went camping in Wood Clough, between Marsden and Slaithwaite, we found at bedtime that our tent was on top of a nest of ants. Another nightmare.

Still nursing our ant-bites, we hastily re-sited the tent. But disaster struck again next day when the most accomplished member of our troop fell victim to my camping gremlins.

He knew everything about Scouting that I didn’t. But that counted for nothing when he slipped off a wet rock in the stream and had to be carted off to hospital.

I’m not sure whether or not it turned out to be a broken ankle. What I do recall is that he was eventually made a King’s Scout. I think he probably deserved it.

While he went on to glory, I never made it past the Tenderfoot stage. That’s the same as staying in the first form at school while everybody else moves up.

I remember we used to meet once a week at Slaithwaite in a wooden hut in the vicarage grounds. The games were good fun but I found the tests demoralising. Instead of learning how to tie ropes together properly it was always me who finished up in knots.

So eventually I came to the conclusion that I was not cut out for Scouting and handed in my woggle. For which I’m sure the rest of the troops were immensely grateful.

Since then I’ve never longed to try camping again.

But those hairy nuts, now that’s a different thing altogether. I must pop up the valley again this summer and see if I’ve still got the knack.