erithacus' saga: a shed called Hurricane Hattie

I should have known before rummaging for an hour and a half that I would never get the lamp to work. Fortunately, there was enough light coming from the upstairs window of a nearby house to turn pitch black darkness into ordinary blackness. A Boer War standard army issue camp bed lay under some musty, rotten damp things that included a pick axe, fork handles a manual lawn mower, a pile of hose pipe and an old oil painting (mmmm, Rubens perhaps?), some rusty tools and a few geraniums with cobwebs on them. I threw everything out and strained to unstick the canvas of the camp bed from the floor.

The bed had obviously not been put up since Rorke's Drift. Even in those days the time taken to set up standard army issue camp beds had probably decided the outcome of many a campaign, if not wars themselves. Luckily, there were enough crowbars and pickaxe tops for me to devise quite an efficient lever system to open up the rusty metal hinges. It was one of those occasions when I considered that not being a chimpanzee was a great stroke of luck. I prised the legs open. Unfortunately, the system of purchase was too efficient and one of the bed’s woodworm-eaten slats crumbled. Vorsprung durch Technik. However, the slat could be fixed with some of the hose pipe I had just thrown out.