1Anyone for Camping?

      “Okay, you chaps, I’ve got an announcement to make.”

      The three boys stopped eating and looked up. Adiel and Gillon exchanged puzzled glances. It was the “you chaps” that did it, together with their father’s hail-fellow-well-met manner. He simply was not the “you-chaps” type. But stranger was to come.

      “What would you say to our all going camping?”

      Adiel dropped his jaw. Gillon dropped something noisier, his knife and fork onto his plate. A piece of toad-in-the-hole was dislodged and fell to the floor in a small shower of rich brown gravy.

      “Oh, Gillon, don’t show off! What a mess!” said their mother, irritated. “Kitsa! Leave it!” – as the cat, lurking hopefully under the table, pounced. Gillon wrested it from her and plonked it triumphantly back on his plate.

      “You’re not planning to EAT it now?” His mother snatched it up and left the room with it, returning at once with a wet cloth. “What are you talking about, Lionel, camping?”

      “Camping is what I’m talking about. What do you say, boys?”

      Adiel said, quite gently, “Are you feeling all right, Dad?”

      “Never better.”

      “Camping? I mean, are you kidding? Camping? You mean, on our own, without you.”

      “No, no, of course not. With me.”

      There was a silence. Omri glanced at his mother. She had mopped up the splashes of gravy and was crouching by the table beside Gillon, staring glassily at her husband. The two older boys were staring, too.

      Only Omri was not reacting with astonishment. He sat with narrowed eyes, only pausing for a moment before hacking into another batter-encrusted sausage. Camping indeed! That’d be the day when his dad even dreamt of such a hearty outdoor pursuit, especially after the one and only time they’d ever tried it, which had ended in total disaster on the same day it began.

      Omri grinned secretly at the memory of the four of them trailing home, not from some wild moorland or forest but from the local common, after they had failed to put up the tent and the skies had opened, drenching everything including the food; this had been left exposed after Gillon nicked a premature sandwich out of the cool-chest and left the lid off. The sunroof on the car had also been left open. Their dad, humiliated by his defeat-by-tent, couldn’t say much except, “That’s it, boys. Home.” Their mother had been very nice, she hadn’t even laughed, at least not much. It was only later Omri had stopped to wonder why there had been a casserole and five baked potatoes in the oven when she had been told they wouldn’t be back for two days.

      Now there his dad was, at the head of the table, beaming at them, the very picture of a hearty, extrovert father. He was even tilting his chair back and rubbing his hands. Gillon snorted.

      The front legs of their dad’s chair hit the floor. “What, may I ask, is so funny?”

      “You, Dad. Camping. You’re not serious, you can’t be.”

      “Don’t you want to go, then?”

      Gillon considered it. Then he said, “Would it be like last time?”

      “Of course not,” said their