I wrote this 9 years ago and it remains one of my favourite recollections;
The other, and most important but not so philosophical lesson that I learnt the hard way, that same day, was please take personal responsibility for checking the facts.
Do not assume that what you thought you heard was what people were doing their utmost to ensure that you knew about.
My father had hesitantly turned off the main road into the forest track.
The single, unmade road was little more than two ruts through a wood and with a very high and grass covered central reservation. His own reservations were wholly justified as the car bumped along accompanied by the sickening sound of branches, rocks and possibly small mammals being churned over by the sump and driveshaft. Even at less than walking speed the rocking and rolling of the vehicle was quite upsetting to my constitution and my father's confidence in the assembly line workers of Wolfsburg, Germany.
After about half a mile of due south travelling we followed the forest ride as it turned through ninety degrees and opened out into the camping grounds of the Lincolnshire Scouting Association.
Ahead was a broad open clearing in the trees and a low, and sizeable wooden hut.
At the last cub scout meeting I had distinctly heard the Cub Master say that the day was to be dedicated to spring cleaning and re-creosoting the hut. Be there by 11am wearing old clothes, bring a packed lunch, plenty of drinks and arrange to be collected at 5pm.
My father and I had been at the inauguration of the facility. Indeed I seem to remember that my father, through his contacts in the Bank, had sourced the building, a second hand structure from an industrial customer. A working party of cubs scouts and parent volunteers had helped to dismantle and load the panels onto a truck for transport and re-assembly in the forest clearing. The clearing itself had been a donation by a large forestry estate.
We were a bit early, it was around 10.30am and no-one else had yet arrived.
This was not surprising as many of my fellow scouts would be car sharing so even the expected dozen or so workers could arrive in as few as three cars.
Father left me sat on the verandah of the hut. As his car left my sight to take on the tortuous track I had already started on my packed lunch. Four marmite sandwiches, two packets of crisps, a piece of homemade flapjack, a Milky Way and two cans of pop later, I kicked the empty tupperware container around the verandah in anticipation of not having time to do it when the working party really kicked off.
My resources were completely exhausted. I would have to cadge for the rest of the day, nothing different there then.
The eleventh hour passed. My Casio digital watch was difficult to read in even good light but I could make out the LED display. Not a sound could be heard in the clearing.
The busy main road was densely screened to the north and the newly opened M180 motorway was deep set in a cutting about a mile to the south. No crunch or crash of the underside of a vehicle on the track. I was certainly alone. In that first desolate hour I just sat on the balustrade of the verandah and kicked my legs on the spindles to a series of interesting rhythms with a hummed melody. No sign of any company.
I backtracked to the last meeting and it's key words...hut....spring clean....packed lunch....11am ....5pm collection. I
wondered if the whole thing had been cancelled and I had not been in the information loop. Nothing different there then.
By the second hour I had run around the hut about 30 times hoping to catch myself and engage in conversation. My dizziness and induced hunger knock convinced me that I was just around the next corner but we never met up. I had to rest for much of that hour and retreated to the verandah.
The third hour was my aggressive period. How dare no-one else turn up. I was sacrificing my saturday . Swap Shop, Football Focus, Grandstand, Play-Away, Final Score and Doctor Who at 6pm.
I resorted to scouring the clearing for stones or clumps of soil and then lob these over the roof of the hut in hand grenade or mortar firing style. I believe that the window pane to the lower left hand side of the hut was already smashed when I had got there.
I had to venture farther and farther away from the hut to satisfy my destructive lust for projectiles.
By the fourth hour of my internment I was amongst the treeline. I wandered about staring up at the branches and the pale sky above. My inattention to where I was stepping led to the philosophical sound experiment . My scream of pain startled me as I looked round for a small girl obviously in some distress.
I collected branches and more substantial boughs, including logs from that concealed pile and constructed a lean-to bivouac against the trunk of a very large Pine tree. Those ants are crafty aren't they I exclaimed. My endeavours and expectant occupation of my den was thwarted by red ants who had obviously watched me build the thing and then promptly moved in and squatted. I abandoned the bivouac.
The fifth hour was my desperate period. I was now very hungry, a bit cold and very thirsty. I had seen some survival programmes on TV but could not remember any of those plants which stored potable moisture or were both nourishing and anti-septic at the same time. I pulled up and chewed on thin, flat blades of grass and then found that they could make a raucous screeching sound if compressed between thumbs and blown through. The waling was both melancholy and frightening. I stopped doing it quite quickly.
The hope of salvation through the longest and sixth hour caused some elation and hallucination. I could hear a car somewhere distant. There were sounds of a group of cubs shouting my name. I swore I could hear the swish of sticks from a search party. The noise of slavvering bloodhounds was certainly audible. I rolled up my trousers to just below my knees, took off my socks and tied one around my head, fashioned a flag from a stout branch and the other sock and marched towards the direction of the imagined sounds. I panicked briefly having lost my bearings in the thick forest growth but I was after all a Cub Scout and followed a path towards the weak disc of the late afternoon sun which eventually led back to the clearing.
I still had to wait for another 20 minutes before my father arrived.
My relief and reassurance in coming across another living being was very evident.
On the way back through town my father took the longer way through the Market Place. I thought this strange. The reason soon became clear. The town troop Scout Hut glistened with a fresh coat of creosote and on the verge was a skip full to the brim with old equipment, tent poles and rubbish. Outside sat a group of a dozen or so wearing very grubby and grimy old clothes finishing off the contents of their lunch boxes.
My father grinned a bit as I sunk down in the passenger seat to well below the level of the nearside window pretending to remove bits of pinecone from my trouser turn-ups.
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