'That campsite unearthed every primal fear of darkness'

HOLIDAY DISASTERS: ANNA CAREYwas let down by the weather, in a restored vintage vehicle by the sea that became more rain-soaked hideout than rural idyll

IT WAS THE shepherd’s hut that did it. A small, brightly painted wooden structure on wheels, designed for shepherds in days of yore who needed to spend a night close to their flocks, I knew I wanted to stay in it as soon as I saw its photo on the caravan park’s website. And that’s how my husband and I, along with our Cornish friend Caroline and her small daughter, came to spend a week in the depths of Cornwall, where we would stay in beautifully restored vintage vehicles without electricity or gas lighting but with enchanting furnishings and accessories.

I’ve always had a great fondness for quaint caravans, tree houses and miniature dwellings of all kinds (I still remember the burning jealousy I felt as a child when I met a girl whose grandfather had built her a two-storey wooden Wendy house). Add to this a love of what I like to think of as “vintage kitsch”, but which an unkind person would call “old tat”, and a real desire to experience the realities of living in the past, and there was no way I was going to miss out on a few days of living by candlelight in a tiny little wooden house on wheels, surrounded by Edwardian china cups.

Despite my romantic imagination, however, I am all too aware that for most people, living “in the past” meant overcrowding, damp, lack of light, and a very limited diet. But I managed to ignore all this, until we arrived at the (beautiful) camp. As my husband and I settled into our hut and Caroline and her daughter settled into their tiny, pink 1950s caravan, it promptly started raining. Heavily.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that quaint retro caravans are not at their best in bad weather. Cooking for four in a very confined space on a single gas ring with no surfaces for food preparation was not fun (we ended up eating a lot of bacon sandwiches). When we left the hut, the heavy rain soaked through our supposedly water-proof shoes and, despite our best in-hut shoe-removing efforts, it was impossible to keep the hut’s floor clean and dry.

And, of course, because of the rain, all our planned rustic activities were suddenly impossible. We had intended to spend our evenings relaxing outside Caroline’s caravan, chatting over a glass of wine as the field’s campfire flickered away. But those plans were entirely scuppered by the weather. Caroline couldn’t go over to our hut, in case her daughter woke up and found herself alone in an electricity-free caravan on the other side of a field, but we couldn’t go inside her caravan and keep a small child awake.

So Caroline ended up having to go to bed at the same time as a five year old, and my husband and I ended up squashed into the cramped hut, sitting on the bed (there were no chairs) reading by candlelight and, in my case, afraid to even have a cup of tea in case I needed to go to the loo in the night. Which I always did anyway.

The toilet facilities of the campsite still haunt me. Not because there was anything wrong with them, apart from their lack of electric light – they were very pretty, based in a brightly painted little wooden structure on the other side of the field to our hut. It was the other-side-of-the-field part that bothered me. What would have been a mild inconvenience in balmy, cloudless weather became nightmarish in near total darkness and a howling gale.

I had never been particularly scared of the dark, but somehow that campsite unearthed every primal fear of darkness from my subconscious.

Our two feeble LED torches were almost useless. I even found myself feeling freaked out when I awoke in the middle of the night. It turns out that waking up when you know you can can reach out and fill a room with light at the flick of a switch is a very different thing to waking up knowing that, in order to get light, you have to fumble around in the pitch black looking for a box of matches.

And yet, despite the unwillingly early nights, the wet feet and the dreadful loo runs, we did have fun that week. We drove to a small fishing village that was spectacularly beautiful, even in the rain. On one of the few not-wet days we visited a beautiful theatre, carved into the side of a cliff. The four of us managed to get on very well, despite being squashed in a tiny space with constantly damp feet. And, best of all, at the end of the week, we packed our bags and drove 20 miles to Caroline’s lovely, bright, dry house for a few nights, where we happily lolled on her couch and watched trashy 1960s films. The thought that we might have had even more fun if we’d just stayed there all week remained unspoken.