Living In A Tent

After Jane's first few terms at University we moved back to our home town for the summer before returning to Bristol and renting a flat. In the meantime my parents wouldn't take me in and I found myself homeless so Jane and I spent the summer months living in a tent.

It was a very pleasant summer that was spent in that tent. We usually set it up on Port Holme, Britain's largest water meadow they say, which was a very pleasant location. Sometimes we chose to put our tent close by, in a field on the other side of the river in the village where Jane's parents lived, the village where our favourite pub was, just on the other side of the river.

This location was quite busy in the morning with people walking their dogs and the occasional tourist taking a look at the picturesque sights. We were never moved on by the police which surprised me.

A friend of Jane's used to visit in the morning now and again. He was very good natured but was troubled. And his troubles had been heightened by his joining the army, which he had loathed and from which he had run away I think. It had got him started on hard drugs. He said that everyone in his unit took hard drugs and he battled the urge to seek out heroin daily, an urge that he'd sadly give in to a few years later.

One night there was a thick, low lying fog in the field that you could see over if you jumped. I had taken LSD and began to communicate with people on the other side of the field when I realised that they too had taken the drug. We shouted to each other and tried to synchronise our jumping so that we might find each other. After spending an eternity trying. and failing, to make contact with them in that vast, never ending, misty field I lost interest.