CHICKS Diary 2: Crealy Adventure Park
Saturday
Crealy is one of those small lame theme parks you’ve never heard of and are never as good as they proclaim. Inevitably, though, kids will love it and declare it their favourite place in the world. It wasn’t Michael’s, though.
Though only nine, Michael was easily the largest child on camp. Despite his claims that he’s always being taken out of lessons at school for playing up, he seemed like one of the most mild-mannered polite boys, but I guess it’s all relative.
I found myself at the top of the Red Devil, a particularly steep “death slide”, sitting next to him. He’d been sat there himself for a while already and I could tell he was desperately wanting to let go, but was something was holding him back from making the final push and surrendering to gravity. I in turn was resisting the urge to push him, or to bribe another child to do the dirty work for me. I admitted defeat when I realised I’d spent 40 minutes trying to coerce a fat kid into jumping.
It was raining again so we stayed inside after dinner to play party games. A couple of games of Wink Murder in, Michael quietly confided to me that he hadn’t liked being the Detective; he didn’t think he’d done too well. I attempted to offer some reassurance, “Well, Michael, in real life you really just don’t know who the murderers are.”
During a game of table-tennis with Brandon, an eleven-year-old from Somerset who fancied himself a bit of a gangsta, I was struck by the one-upmanship, the excessive “my cat’s blacker than your cat” mentality that existed between the children and which extended sometimes to the adults. I don’t think this was unique to these kids, but they’d take it to absurd extremes.
Enquiring if he had played table-tennis previously, Brandon first replied with “Yeah, once.” And slowly over the course of our match it turned out that he’d played in the National Table-Tennis Championships, and had reached the final before being beaten by the best player in Taunton. I accidentally backhanded the ball into his face.
Our game was interrupted by Kieran, a 10-year-old attempting to bring the dressing gown into fashion as regular daytime wear, entering the barn to inform Brandon that Tanika wanted to see him. He pulled his tracksuit bottoms halfway down his arse, winked at me and swaggered off.
Tanika had swiftly become something of an infatuation with a lot of the boys at camp and she knew it. She’d spend one mealtime with Kieran, and then cuddle up to Brandon after dinner. Only Adam had so far professed his undying love for her via a letter written by Michael, who had neater handwriting, and being subsequently turned down and described as “creepy” hadn’t dampened his enthusiasm or spirit. At bedtime Adam attempted to hump his flannel and a Fanta bottle.
That evening over our debrief we had to write a message for each child which they’d be presented with at the end of their holiday. We were encouraged to write something positive rather than carry out a character assassination or just impart to them general life advice, “Don’t do drugs,” or “Join the Army.”