Camping or Glamping?

Joyce Johnson of Heswall, Wirral remembers:

- Joyce Johnson

A television advert by a budget-brand hotel chain outlining the trials and tribulations of camping awakened a childhood memory of a family holiday during the mid-1960s. Money in our household was always in short supply as my parents struggled to keep their heads above water with only one principal income providing for a family of four. With annual holidays low on a list of priorities, we were usually limited to a few days out using public transport to northern seaside resorts.

However, one summer, my dad's brother and his fiancee were offered the free use of a six-berth tent by a neighbour, so proposed we should join them on an inexpensive camping expedition. The neighbour had suggested a site they frequented in Flintshire, north Wales which today would take little more than an hour from our Liverpool home.

I was about seven and having been badly stung by a bee several years earlier, resulting in hospital treatment, was now terrified of any tiny creature that crawled, slithered or buzzed. The thought of sharing a living space with creepy-crawlies filled me with trepidation whereas my brother, five years my junior, was too young to know what was going on around him.

All four adults, in their 20s, had been brought up in the city with not one of them ever having any experience of camping. Off we went, six of us squashed up in my uncle's Ford Anglia van laden with bags of various paraphernalia squeezed beneath our legs and the tent strapped to the roof rack.