We persuaded Lucy to accompany us to the farm.
Lucy does not fit entirely comfortably into the semi-outdoor habitat of Mark’s workshop.
Actually she fits in like a bored puppy at a G7 summit meeting.
Her attendance was not entirely voluntary. She is hoping to go to Blackpool and do some ice skating this summer, and a stark choice was put before her by heartless parents. We explained that we cannot go on any holidays again ever until the camper van is going.
Not Blackpool, not visiting Number One Daughter, not exotic foreign jaunts to Paris, not even an overnight in Windermere car park. No more adventures until we have got a camper van in which we can have them, because we are flat broke and will probably not be staying in hotels again ever.
Apart from Christmas, when we go to the pantomime, obviously. I don’t mean that sort of holiday, which doesn’t count.
Lucy wants to go ice skating quite badly. She considered her options very carefully.
In the end she reluctantly agreed that three people working on the camper van instead of just two would hasten its progress considerably, although observed that manual labour was not exactly her strong point.
We said that this was probably because she had never actually done any, and assured her that there was plenty that she could do. We also explained the benefits, such as fresh air and exercise, of mending a large white elephant instead of spending her holidays sitting in her bedroom watching cartoon Japanese people having relationships with one another.
When we got up this morning we bellowed up the stairs to wake her up.
Some time later we bellowed again.
Eventually she emerged, blinking and sleepy, and wondering if perhaps it would be a better idea to stay in bed after all.
We promised her untruthfully that she would have a lovely time, and dispatched her back upstairs to find some clothes.
We made flasks of coffee and tea and packed biscuits and left over birthday cake into boxes, and by the time she could be considered to be actually conscious we were ready to set off.
She borrowed a pair of my trainers as suitable footwear for getting filthy, and we piled into the car with the dogs and the picnic, and thick slabs of wholemeal almond bread, hot and smothered in butter, to eat straight away.
Lucy had not actually seen the newly-illustrated camper van, and it was a surprise. She stood and stared at it for quite some time.
When she recovered her breath she couldn’t think of a thing to say. She laughed a bit, but mostly she was stunned into silence, probably with the loveliness of it. We sounded the new horn for her, and she gasped, and we explained that our aim was to have it ready in time for her school’s Speech Day in a couple of weeks.
She didn’t seem as thrilled about that as I might have expected, probably it was just excitement.
We had a cup of coffee and got on with the day’s jobs.
Lucy’s job was to coat the floor of the cab with a thick bitumen coating. This involved a heat gun and was very sticky.
I got on with my painting, and Mark started fixing the brakes, only one misfortune led to another and very shortly he came to the dreadful realisation that he had got to take the gear box out.
There was a reason for this, which he explained several times, with much accompanying bad language. It was a tragedy and a disaster, and at first he thought that to access the gearbox he would have to take the whole engine out again.
I do not like it when Mark gets cross. He is not a getting cross sort of person, that is my part of the marital division of labour. I was quite worried, and made lots of reassuring sympathetic noises.
These did not help much. I didn’t expect that they would, because if you have got to take an engine out you need more than somebody anxiously saying: ‘poor Markie’. Cognac might work better.
In the end he lay underneath the van and banged about and swore all day, but did not, after all, need to take the whole engine out, and by evening he had restored his tranquillity as well as the gear box, so all was well.
Lucy spent the day getting hot and sticky.
She got her hands dirty.
She was quite shocked about this. It turned out that she had never in her life had dirty hands, and now there was black stuff down her fingernails and everything.
The bitumen made her hands sticky, and touching the dogs only compounded the problem.
She sat down cautiously in the driver’s seat which we had dumped temporarily in a corner of the workshop, and surveyed her black furry hands with horror.
When Mark had recovered from his gear box he helped her to clean her hands with a can of thinners and told her that she had done very well.
She explained haughtily that she was perfectly well aware of this but felt that her vocation was unlikely to be in camper van restoration, and wondered if perhaps she might be allowed to go home.
We went home and ate leftover Chinese, which was magnificent.
I hope we can persuade her to come with us again tomorrow.
