Page 31 of The Secrets of Dragonfly Lodge
‘It’s all right for you boys. You’ve all been scouts or cadets and you’re used to it. I’ve never camped in my life.’
‘Honestly, Di, you’re like the princess and the pea. We all know about your chilly blue blood.’
Diana shrieked with laughter, which made the others laugh, too. They weren’t bothered by her background because she never put on airs.
‘I’ve not camped, either,’ Nancy put in. ‘Have you, Anne?’ Anne Durban was coming out of herself more.
‘With my brothers, yes. Daddy used to take us to Scotland and we’d camp in the mountains. Four o’clock in the morning was worst. I’d wake up freezing and everything was soaked with dew, and when it rained hard it was awful because the tent leaked. And the midges… I was covered in bites.’
‘I hope it’ll be all right in Hampshire,’ Nancy said, thinking that three weeks of that sounded very long.
‘At least we’ve got Dr Hillman and Dr Mills.’
‘Yes, they’re the nicest of the lecturers.’ Everyone agreed.
‘It’s a pity Dr Bauer isn’t coming,’ Anne Durban sighed.Trudi Bauer was the only female lecturer, young, reserved and spoke with a heavy accent. ‘I suppose she’s going back to see her family in Germany.’
Nancy needn’t have worried. The field trip turned out to be magical, one of the most marvellous times of her young life.
The weather was dull at first, but it didn’t actually rain and felt pleasantly warm. It wasn’t simply beds they had to make from heather gathered from the heath. They had to do everything, from putting up tents and a communal shelter to building a fire with logs round it to sit on. Thankfully, it was the boys who were made to dig latrines and to rig up stalls round them for privacy. Under Dr Hillman’s instruction, though, the girls fashioned tripods of sticks to stand tin bowls on for washing up.
‘Where do we wash ourselves?’ Peggy asked him. His expression was bemused and the girls looked at one another in dismay, realizing that he wasn’t used to the needs of the fairer sex.
‘Girls do need to wash, Dr Hillman,’ Anne Southgate said boldly. He thought for a moment, then quickly issued some more bowls.
There was a mains water tap at the far end of the field and the students made a human chain with buckets to get water for cooking and washing. The slopping of water caused screeches of laughter and by the end of the first day even the shyest among them unbent and started to feel among friends.
The announcement that everyone would take a turn tocook dinner, though, caused some joshing about girls’ roles and boys’ kitchen skills, but the first culinary team, which included Nancy, set to with enthusiasm. There was much to learn – how to keep milk cool in a nearby stream, the best way to open meat cans without cutting their fingers, the importance of good hygiene to avoid food poisoning.
When the first dinner was served, the potatoes were still hard and the tinned stew a bit salty, but there was more than enough for everyone, and afterwards they fetched their thick jerseys and sat round the fire to sing. The boys knew all the songs, especially the vulgar ones. And then they went to bed, the girls giggling as they snuggled into their sleeping bags and tried to get comfortable on the springy, sweet-smelling palliasses of heather. The others fell asleep quickly, but Nancy lay awake for a while listening to the soft hoots of an owl and thinking over the day, then she, too, fell asleep. She woke briefly as early sunshine filtered through the canvas of the tent and the world was bursting with birdsong but, still tired, she rolled over and only woke again when a whistle blew a harsh reveille.
The next day, they unpacked their butterfly nets and were sent off in pairs down to the stream to search for dragonflies and damselflies. ‘I know we’re supposed to have done this in class, but what is the difference again?’ Diana whispered to Nancy.
‘It helps to think of them as dragons and damsels,’ Nancy replied with a smile.
‘Oh, dragonflies are thicker and bulkier, like that one,’ she pointed, ‘and the fragile ones are damselflies.’
‘They’re bothOdonata, though.’
‘They’re what?’
‘Odonatais the name of the dragonfly Order.’
‘Well, whatever, it seems a shame to catch the poor things. They’re heavenly!’
And indeed they were. The sunlight dazzled off the water and, there being no wind, the insects hovered above the reeds like bright, gauzy jewels. They each netted a couple and transferred them carefully to jars containing cotton wool soaked in ethyl acetate. Later, when the life had gone out of them, the students were expected to examine them before pinning them to the cork bases of their specimen cases. Nancy squatted to peer through the clear water of the rippling stream, watched tiny speckled fish swim against the flow and watersnails the size of babies’ fingernails curled up on the gravel bed.
The days floated by like shimmering bubbles. One morning, she found herself paired with Edmund Buckland, one of the two older students. Although he and Michael Carlton were friendly to the younger freshers and occasionally sat with them at college, on the whole they still kept themselves apart. There was a certain inevitability about this. Michael was married and he generally left promptly at the end of each day. Edmund never spoke about his private life. He’d made some friends in the year above, other men who’d come out of the forces, and he would occasionally be seen with them in the bar, playing billiards or simply chatting. Nancy liked his tall, lean, scholarly appearance, while being shy of his age and experience.
He and Nancy had been assigned to visit one of the various ponds that studded the heath to collect specimens and make notes about their habitat. Peggy was supposed to accompany them, but the poor girl had woken feeling sick. She sat palely aloof while everyone else tucked into breakfast, so Dr Hillman ordered her to stay on base to tidy the site if she felt up to it or to nap in the shade if she didn’t.
‘I’ll share my notes with you, Pegs,’ Nancy said as she filled her shoulder bag with lidded jars and selected a pond net. Peggy, her freckles more obvious in her ashen complexion, managed a weak smile of thanks.
The air smelled sweetly of heather and gorse as they trudged the sandy paths in rubber boots, following one of Dr Hillman’s duplicated maps, to reach a large pond fringed with grass and shaded by trees. Here, they laid their kitbags on a lichened rock and waded into the water, nets at the ready. There was no breeze and the water was clear and still. Nancy wriggled her toes, enjoying its coolness seeping through the rubber.
‘Glad of them now, are you?’ Edmund said with a smile in his voice, and she laughed, for she’d questioned the need for the uncomfortable wellingtons in warm weather. ‘Right,’ he sighed, ‘what are we looking for?’
‘There!’ She pointed at a water boatman darting across the surface, but Edmund’s attention had been drawn downwards.
