Text 1: Our first (and last?) night in a campervan, by Sam Parry

An original contemporary blog.

The campervan, when we collected it from a farm near Hexham, looked perfect: cream and orange, with checked curtains, a sink the size of a mixing bowl and a roof that pops up to make a second bedroom. The owner showed me how everything worked in about four minutes. I remembered roughly a quarter of it.

The first thing to go was the fridge. It ran off something called the leisure battery, which I had not known existed, and by teatime the milk was warm, the butter had become a sauce and the children’s yoghurts went in the bin.

The pop-up roof was next. Halfway up, one of the struts jammed, so the canvas sagged at an angle and our son had to sleep with his feet higher than his head. Then, at about eleven, the heater gave a small click and stopped. The temperature in the valley that night fell to three degrees. We slept in our coats, and our daughter wore my woolly hat over her own.

In the morning the water pump made a noise like a dentist’s drill and produced nothing at all, so there was not even a cup of tea to cheer us up.

We drove to a lay-by café on the main road, where a woman called Sheena served us four bacon rolls and two hot chocolates and mentioned that the heater has a reset switch under the passenger seat. It does. We found it on the way home.

Text 2: Under canvas on the Downs, by Edwin Marlowe

An original magazine essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this essay, published in a magazine in 1884, the writer describes a week’s camping holiday on the chalk hills of southern England with two friends from the office where he worked.

We had read a great deal about the healthful pleasures of camping out, and very little about its practice, which may account for what followed. Our tent, hired from a shop in the Strand, came down by train and was carried up the hill from the station in a carrier’s cart, together with a kettle, a frying pan, three blankets apiece and a ham.

We pitched it on the first evening in a pasture at the foot of the Down, close under a hedge, for the sake of shelter. The shelter was excellent. The pasture, however, belonged to a herd of young bullocks, who came at midnight to examine us, breathing heavily through the canvas and stumbling over the ropes until one corner of the tent sagged down upon our faces. In the morning the ham, which we had hung from the ridge-pole, was found trampled into the grass, and the loaf had vanished altogether.

Water was another difficulty, for the stream marked upon our map had dried up in the summer, and every drop had to be carried in a bucket from a farm three quarters of a mile away. Our fire of furze blazed up beautifully and was gone in a minute, so that the kettle, after half an hour of feeding, was barely warm enough to wet the tea. The farmer, an old man in a smock, came up to count his bullocks and plainly believed us to be escaped lunatics.

Yet we came home after a week brown, hungry and in perfect health, and we are going again next summer.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what problems the campers faced.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.