It was one of those adventure books that caught the imagination of an eleven or twelve year old boy. The heroes, teenage boys themselves, sought safety and refuge deep in the heart of an English forest. The story never suggested where the forest might be, but the boys are assisted by a charcoal maker who lives a self-sufficient life, his home a shack in a clearing.
The title had long gone from the memory and searches for the book on the Internet with such scant details had proved a futile exercise. Extraordinarily, the scant details were sufficient for a colleague to identify the book as Brendon Chase by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, which, it seems, was made into a television serial in the 1980s.
The plot was probably fairly thin, the attraction was not any storyline, but in the descriptions of the boys learning how to survive. It seemed possible that such a story might be so, that it was within the bounds of imagination that a pair of teenage boys might learn self-sufficiency.
Isolation and survival have remained matters of fascination since reading the pages of that book.
Is it possible to really hide anywhere, now?
Perhaps in remote, sparsely populated countries it might still be feasible to disappear, for a time at least, but a stranger would be conspicuous in communities with few visitors and food and shelter would be difficult to find in an unfamiliar environment. In most of Western Europe, it is hard to imagine it would be possible for someone to live somewhere for more than a few days before being noticed. Like hiding a pebble on a beach, it is much easier for a person to disappear among the crowds of a city than deep in rural areas. Perhaps the boys would have been better advised to have lurked in the streets of London than have gone into the depths of a forest.
Surviving by living off the land now seems a prospect even more remote than being able to disappear. Even a cut in the electricity supply leaves most of us adrift and not knowing how to cope; the suggestion that we might go deep into a forest, with nothing more than the clothes we wear and a pen knife in our pocket, and become self-sufficient for a prolonged period, would seem laughable. If you were like me, survival would probably depend upon seizing fruit from greengrocers’ stalls and pints of milk from doorsteps rather than snaring, skinning and cooking rabbits.
Yet, despite the improbability of isolation or survival, they remain intriguing prospects. Of course, in imagination, I am not a sedentary, unfit 60 year old, but someone much younger, someone much more athletic, someone much more resourceful.
You must take a shovel.
As a lad I used to wonder about the toilet habits of Robin Hood, Swiss Family Robinson, Bilbo Baggins, etc. Like with royalty, it never seemed to happen.
When we went on annual Scout camp, which was in real countryside, the first task after pitching tents was dig the latrine. All cut surface turf carefully put aside for later replacement, then a deep narrow trench dug, with plank suspended above it.
After that the fire pit with cooking shelter. Turf again put to one side.
When we left, apart from areas of rather pale grass, you would not know that we had been there.
The turf would have quickly greened up with all that fertiliser beneath it!