Tales Of Rebellion

Weekend in The Wilderness part 3

Jorrick and I are now officially the Brew Crew. We rock up with some late night fun, Captain Morgan’s Ol’ Spiced Rum. We wake up in a makeshift yurt and are soon making ourselves known to the entire camp with loud, raucous behaviour. I see someone I know and embrace, then another, then another. In these circles it’s usual to see the same people all the time, we are like a big family and camps such as these have the feel of a reunion.

What’s more I’m surprised to see Bori, Dharma and Csaba from back home in Shoreditch. When my things were steamrollered at the school of ideas it was Bori that invited me to stay at their squat. It’s a fine place, a free-for-all with the fridge constantly full of sandwiches courtesy of the Marks and Spencer’s bins. They are Hungarian and the whole house has a riotous Eastern European vibe.

The Wilderness Centre comprises a few old buildings surrounded by windswept fields, with the tiny town of Mitcheldean on the other and thin strips of forest on the other. Ramble further and you get into the Forest of Dean itself, where hermits lodge, gloriously solitary to this day. There is an allotment round the back of the main building and a few grand old houses further up the road with a constant patrol of security guards.

 By day we attend workshops, take part in meetings, and make endless cups of tea and coffee around the open fire. As night descends Ulrich and I sing louder and louder, drink more heavily and terrorise the hippies. Ulrich gets in trouble with a feminist over his choice of language and I’m forced to rescue him, yelling “Leave my Jorrick alone! Stop bullying him.” We entertain but we are not entirely in harmony with these hippies. They are typical academic lefties with their heads all in books and theories, their hands on their bongo drums, their mouths sounding out their Kum-Bai-Yahs and Om-Mani-Padme-Hums. Not that I’m dead against these things, but come on, life can be a lot wilder and more outrageous than that.

On the third night Csaba is renamed Simba after the lion of the same name; many renditions of ‘I Just Can’t Wait to Be King’ and ‘Can you feel the Love Tonight’ follow. Jorrick, Simba and I commit to a dangerous and daring mission to explore an abandoned mine down the hill. Having prepared a reconnaissance the previous night they concluded that boots of some kind were vital to traverse the treacherous pools of the mine. So we decided to break into something.

The little building just past the barricades had been boarded up but Ulrich insisted that by chipping away at the plaster around the window we could slide the glass down and I might be just skinny enough to get in and scavenge the precious boots inside. We are having little luck with the plaster when Simba spies a flashlight in the field to our left. We crouch down and in single-file sneak across the field. 

“Friendlys?” I whisper.

“No its Charlie.” Says Jorrick.

“Do you mean, Charlie from back at camp?”

“No, no, the enemy. A security guard. I heard him talking on his radio.”

“What did he say?”

“He said something about a lot of freaks and crazy people.”

We trail across the field, the boots forgotten. There are some plastic milk crates lying around so we hatch an ingenious plan to traverse the cavern without getting our feet wet.

When we finally make it to the mine we put the plan into action. It’s a tubular brick walled affair with a good 5 inches of water pooling at the bottom and an abundance of debris. We place the cartons in the water and stand on them, then we relay the last box to the first person and all step forward onto the next box. Of course, Jorrick falls into the water, negating his previous display of Ninja-Skills in the field. We traverse the water and venture deep into the mine by the light of wind-up torches. About 50 metres down it narrows severely and we need to crouch to get through. Another 100 metres of this uncomfortable travel and we come to a some wooden struts and beyond is the rock face. We had come as far as it was possible to go.