It's Not DofE it's the Goddamn Army

Chapter 1: Tents

The playground was a hive of activity. Everywhere teenagers were unrolling neatly folded tents and trying to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do with them. In one corner two friends, Sophie and Imogen were already starting to push the poles into their tent’s outer, guided by a little previous knowledge and a hefty chunk of common sense. I.e. The pole with the black on it goes into the pole tube with the black tag on it.

“We might want to take it off the steps before we get much further you know,” Imogen pointed out.

“Ok, well if you sort of pick that side up and I take this side this way and we rotate it a bit...” The tent wasn’t heavy at all, just awkward and they soon had it on flat ground.

“I think that the ends of the poles are supposed to go in these,” Sophie said, showing Imogen a fabric tag with a metal ring in it attached to the tent near where the end of the pole appeared.

“I think you might be right.” Inserting the poles was easier said than done, for Imogen at least, as she wasn’t very strong and was afraid, irrational though it was, of breaking the poles, but Sophie managed to do it for her so it was all ok. The next job was to attach the inner tent, so they laid it out inside the tent and Sophie took off her shoes to crawl in to sort it, so she didn’t damage it. The bottom corners were the hardest to do, being stiff clips but the rest of it was easy and they managed it fairly quickly. Finally their tent was done, though they couldn’t practise with the guy ropes and pegs because of the tarmac, and they seemed to have a bit left over, a trapezoid piece of tent fabric with what looked like bright orange hair bobbles at the corners. They called to the supervisor.

“What’s this bit for?” they asked, almost in unison.

“It’s for the porch, to put your boots in,” he told them. Imogen looked at the tent. There didn’t seem to be any place to attach it, and no obvious porch but she didn’t say anything.

“Guess we’d better take it down now then,” she said instead. This time it was Imogen who removed her shoes and detached the inner, discovering that the stiff clips oddly were much easier to remove than to attach. She’d just finished that and put her shoes on when their friends at the tent next to them called over to them.

“Can you do the clips please, we can’t do them.”

“Imogen, you’re up,” Sophie told her.

“Just let me get my shoes off again,” Imogen said, sighing good-naturedly.

“I think they just failed Tent Training,” Sophie commented when they had gone back to the deconstruction of their own tent.

“Definitely,” Imogen agreed with a chuckle. The tent went down quickly and they folded the pieces into thirds together, one at each end. Sophie carefully rolled the outer around the poles and pegs, trying to get all the air out and then she rolled it around the inner.

“The inner should be inside the outer,” said the supervisor, who had wandered over to watch.

“This was how we found it,” Sophie told her, as Imogen said,

“We found it like that.”

“Best put the inner inside anyway, to protect it,” the supervisor told them then wandered off to watch the two girls near them struggle with folding.

“How do you do this?” they called to Imogen and Sophie.

“Fold it into thirds,” Sophie told them.

“What?” they asked, not understanding.

“Like this,” Sophie mimed it out.

“I don’t get it!” Imogen snorted softly at their incompetence and the supervisor stepped in to help them. Together Sophie and Imogen unrolled their tent roll and rolled it up again, again trying to get all the air out of it. Then they tried to get it back in the bag. The first bit went in easily but the rest was harder, as it seemed to be too big for the bag.

“Do you think this is what sex is like?” Sophie asked jokily.

“I hope not,” Imogen raised her eyebrows.

“It’s like giving birth in reverse.”

“I hope I never have to find out if you’re right. I don’t think that’s actually physically possible, your body simply isn’t designed for that. 

“Why would you even do that? Just like, it comes out and you’re like, I’ve changed my mind, I want to put it back, do pregnancy in reverse.” Imogen laughed, and they forced the tent the rest of the way into the bag and tightened the straps on it, compressing the tent into a rather small bundle. They slipped it back into the plastic bag from whence it came and Imogen carried it back to the tent storage.