The Boy Who Grew Dragons

Luckily for us, dragon fruit grow surprisingly quickly and by the start of the following week the fruits had reached the size of mangoes and started to turn red. The plan was this: we would ask my grandad if we could camp in his garden overnight. Then it would be simple enough to sneak down to the vegetable patch and look for the hatching dragons. My grandparents wouldn’t even know we weren’t fast asleep! And surely there’d be no chance of running into Grim in the dead of night.

Even luckier, there was a teacher-training day at school on Friday, so we could camp on Thursday night, catch the dragons and then have an extra-long weekend to play with them. You really do have to admire our optimism.

So with Kat and Kai as our team organisers, Operation Fruit Burst got into full swing.

Planning is what the twins do best, and by Wednesday morning we had provisions plans, equipment lists and an hour-by-hour timetable of the whole event.

In the afternoon, as Flicker settled down in the toy box, scratching my latest comic into comfortable-sized pieces for his bed, I looked at the list supplied by Captains Kat and Kai. I scanned to see what I was expected to bring. It seemed pretty thorough. You know, for just the one night.

PROVISION AND EQUIPMENT LIST
by Kat and Kai

SANDWICHES (Kat): Marmite & peanut butter/honey & chocolate spread/golden syrup with hundreds and thousands

CAKE (Ted’s basic collection): iced buns, currant buns, jam doughnuts, custard doughnuts, gingerbread, treacle tarts, lemon sprinkle fairy cakes, chocolate muffins, chocolate-chip cookies, chocolate cupcakes and chocolate brownies

Chocolate (Kat and Kai’s birthday left overs)

Emergency Chocolate (for hypothermia)

Extra Emergency Chocolate (for when Ted eats Emergency Chocolate)

Tent

Sleeping bags

Sleeping mats

Torches

Night-vision goggles

Walkie-talkies

Compass

Water bottles (filled)

Mallet

Bandages

Smelly stuff for repelling bugs

String

Woolly hats

Nets

Face paint

USEFUL BOOKS:

Camping in the Wild Outdoors

The Ultimate Survival Handbook

How to Survive a Bear Attack

A Hundred and One Deadly Plants

I wasn’t sure where I was going to get half this stuff. The only walkie-talkies I could find were Lolli’s Dora the Explorer ones and I wasn’t going to be taking those. As it turned out, the main thing we needed was the tent. And I bet you can guess what we forgot.

So there we were on Thursday, finally ready to put the plan into action. And yup – no tent. Luckily Grandad had one kicking about in the garage, along with various bits of dodgy camping kit, including some rusty saucepans which none of us fancied touching, let alone eating from, and an old lantern.

‘We’ve had a fair few adventures with this lot, me and your nan.’ Grandad chuckled.

‘Stick it in the front garden,’ Nana said. And then added, ‘That way you’re nice and close for anyone needing to pop in to use “The Facilities”.’

Which is her polite way of saying the downstairs loo, which is just inside the front door.

So under Grandad’s instruction, and in between his stories of camping in the wilderness, we put it up.

‘Good sturdy tent that,’ said Grandad, resting his hand on one of the tent poles, and then quickly taking it away again as the whole thing sagged precariously.

By the time Grandad left us to go inside, we had got pretty well organised. There wasn’t much room, but we figured being that close together would probably help prevent the whole hypothermia thing, which Kai insisted on reading to us about from Horrendous Hazards and How to Avoid Them – A Guide to Camping Safely. I’m not sure we needed to hear in such detail about the stages of frostbite, or to see all those pictures of fingerless hands. But as Camp Doctor, he was taking no chances.

‘Right,’ said Kat, as we huddled round the flickering lantern, ‘time to get camouflaged. Operation Fruit Burst is GO.’