The middle of the square where the camp’s platoons fell in was reserved for patches of loosened ground, a patch per platoon. Each day children laid out the date in their platoon's patch with green cones, or fresh twigs, or chopped off flower heads competing for the Best Designed Platoon Calendar.
On Sundays, a big bus was bringing to the camp a pack of parents to treat their children with gingerbread, and sweets, and – lemonade!
Our Mom was taking us over into the greenish shade of trees and watched as we chewed and swallowed, and asked questions about the camp life, while Dad clicked his brand new FED-2 camera. Consuming the treats, we were sharing that the camp life was quite like a camp life. That not long before, all the platoons went out for a hike in the forest and on our return – surprise! There was a restaurant waiting for us on the floor-boarded platform of the pergola, outside the cinema room in the barrack.
As it turned out, the girls from the senior platoon did not participate in hiking and instead set up tables and chairs in the pergola, and cooked the dinner together with the canteen workers. Handwritten menu sheets were put on the tables, and everyone sitting around them summoned the girls with the adult word “Waitress!” And they approached to get the order for “May Salad” or “Onion Salad”, the only two items on the menu.
When the restaurant was over, I accidentally overheard two of the waitresses giggling between themselves that everyone asked for “May Salad” while “Onion Salad” was way more delicious and thus the waitresses’ share became bigger thanks to the fools easily hooked by mere look of words on a piece of paper.
(… and I promised myself: in future, never get fooled by tinsel wrappers. Yes, because by that time unrestrained reading had made a rather pathetic kid of me loaded with a big stock of weird vocabulary…)
Regrettably, the daily schedule in the camp retained an obnoxious vestige from the kindergarten past under the new name of “stiff hour”. After the midday meal, everyone should go to their wards and to their beds. Get asleep!
Sleeping in the middle of a day just did not work and the two-hour-long “stiff hour” progressed at a snail rate. All the spooky stories been told and listened to for the millionth time, both about the woman in white who drank her own blood, and about the flying black hand that had no body to it but kept regularly strangling anyone on its way, and all the other gory horrors, yet there still remained the same unchanging 38 minutes before the long-awaited-for shout “Get up!.”