It was an exciting time for the Sensha-do team of Shamrock School for Girls. A visit from Éire Tanc, a European Tankery school, had afforded them the opportunity for some joint training sessions, and it was highly advantageous for the inexperienced girls of Shamrock to be able to see how a proper team did things.
The highlight was a two day exercise on the mainland. Rather than return to their school ships at the end of the first day it was planned that the tankers would camp out on the training field for a night. Since it was high summer this was not going to be any particular hardship and was something that many of the girls were eagerly looking forward to.
Shannon, although keen and always eager to please, was nonetheless completely out of her depth as per usual, having never organised anything like that before, so the majority of the planning and administration fell to Fianna, the busty, blonde commander of Éire Tanc. The need to create a 'B Echelon' supply train was solved by transferring one entire tank crew to cover these duties, and Fianna selected her team's Vickers Mk D, given that it was the weakest and slowest of the tanks they possessed.
Fianna probably would have been content to leave that tank out of practice all together, but Shannon, however, had other ideas. Horrified that the tank would be upset if it didn't take part (Shannon had some odd ideas about tanks) and more importantly being plagued with Shamrock's usual problem of too many team members / not enough tanks, Shannon had volunteered a crew of Shamrock girls for the Mk D. Fianna admitted this was probably sensible and besides, Shannon wouldn't shut up about it until she'd agreed.
At the end of the first day the Shamrock girls had been taxed hard but were still buoyed up and full of enthusiasm, although looking forward to being able to relax for the evening. Another boost for Shamrock was that Finn, the ruthless leader of the school's Dance Club and standby tank commander, had also been commanding one of Éire Tanc's L-60s, owing to the temporary absence of its usual commander.
There was an ablutions block on the training fields but for their actual overnight accommodation the girls were going to be under canvas. Tents, rations and other supplies had been brought up by Fianna's 'B Echelon' in a three-ton lorry and a dark green Rolls Royce armoured car, with large, white 'ÉIRE' lettering on its turret and towing, oddly, a civilian caravan, which was packed with supplies.
The girls, many of them now in their t-shirts due to the lingering heat of the late afternoon, were addressed by Shannon on the subject of the various duties they were to undertake.
"Putting up a tent may be complicated," she finished. "But it isn't dangerous."
"But to someone like Laune, that is dangerous!" whispered Clare, who was standing at Shannon's side.
Shannon turned a blind eye, or rather, a deaf ear to this, and then split the girls into groups to erect the various ex-army 160-pound tents that would be their homes for that evening.
One such group consisted of Annalee, Inny, Avoca, Dalua and Laune, with Erne and Finn both believing they were in charge. The silver-haired Tolka was also supposed to be part of this group but she had disappeared somewhere, presumably, avid birdwatcher as she was, to investigate what new and fascinating avian wildlife inhabited the training ground.
"Come on, chop chop!" Shannon hurried them up as she flitted about between whatever it was that she was engaged in. "The other groups have already got their tents and have started putting them up!"
"Yeah, yeah, it's not a bloody race!" Erne scowled and muttered after Shannon's departing figure. Nonetheless, she and the rest of the group trooped over to the three-tonner.
"So it came true!" said Laune; a girl known for her gullibility.
"What did?" Finn asked, knowing that she'd regret doing so but unable to resist.
"Shimna's prediction!" Laune said triumphantly, referring to comments made by her teammate who had a penchant for trying to predict the future. "She said she knew we'd be putting up tents today."
"Of course she did - she saw them getting loaded onto the trucks, you dummy!" Finn snapped, but Laune was unconvinced.
"She has a crystal ball! She can tell the future!" she protested.
"That fraud can't even tell the present, let alone the future!" Finn shot back, but further discussion of the subject was halted as they had reached the truck, where the final tent awaited them on the floorboards.
"Is this a tent!?" Erne asked, looking at the rope-bound parcel of dark green canvas.
"I guess so?" Finn shrugged. "Well, come on, get it out," she instructed anyone but herself.
Inny stepped forward and tugged at one corner of the heavy canvas package. It promptly unravelled as she pulled it. The unexpected lack of resistance caused her to fall back until she landed on her backside with her mountainous chest wobbling as if it was suffering the effects of an earthquake.
"Oh, well done, Teaboo!" Finn snapped. "Now look at what you've done to it!"
Exasperated, Finn took hold of another corner and pulled. Unfortunately, the same thing happened and more of the dull green canvas became free of its previously neat folds.
"Stupid thing!" Finn cursed it, dropping the canvas and folding her arms.
"Getting angry with it isn't going to help us set it up," Erne said, in a very out of character statement. She had a spectacular return to form, however, after clambouring into the lorry and attempting to push, heave and kick the protesting lump off the tailgate, where willing hands waited to receive it. By the time Erne had persuaded it, with much bad language, to depart from its place of repose it resembled a canvas sausage with various ropes hanging loose, rather than a neat parcel.
"We'll need someone to support the middle as we carry it along," Erne instructed from her loft position on the back of the lorry. "Avoca, Dalua, under you go."
"Why us?!" the two library girls protested in unison.
"Because you're the shortest," Erne answered curtly, climbing down from the tailboard. This wasn't strictly true, as Annalee was a fraction shorter than the duo, but Erne wasn't going to be ordering her sister under a pile of canvas when there were others who could do the job.
With mumbles and mutterings, mainly from Dalua, the pair of nerds positioned themselves under the sagging canvas monster, the front of which was held by some of the other girls and the rear still resting on the lorry.
"Okay - heave!" Erne called, standing in with Finn to take the back end of their creation. There were muffled protests and moans from the two hapless girls under it as the thing was tugged off the lorry and into the arms and onto the heads of those carrying it. It seemed to disintegrate a bit more too, shedding a few extra guy ropes.
Undaunted, the group of girls set off towards the site chosen for their pitch, all except Laune, who tried to head off in the opposite direction. She was soon corrected, however, and the procession marched off, resembling some kind of olive drab parody of a Chinese carnival dragon.
"Okay, here's the spot!" Finn announced, and the party dumped the canvas on the ground, where it wriggled and writhed as Avoca and Dalua, who had unfortunately still been under it, fought to extract themselves.
"So, how does it work?" Finn asked once the two library girls, now looking rather dishevelled, had made their escape.
"I dunno!" Erne said with a shrug, giving the thing a prod with her foot. "I've never had to sleep in a bloody bag before!"
"Does it have any instructions or something?" Avoca asked, trying to rummage through the canvas to see if there was any helpful paperwork provided. Her search proved fruitless, however.
"How can people do something like this without instructions?!" Dalua grumbled.
"Perhaps you can get a book about it from the library?" Finn snarked.
Fianna then arrived on the scene; her brown boots squeaking slightly and her voluptuous chest preceding her by a good five seconds.
"What are you doing?" she asked, somewhat needlessly.
"Putting up a tent," Finn scowled.
"Good," Fianna smiled, disarmingly. She surveyed the tableau in front of her with her hands resting on her hips.
"Good," she repeated. "Where are the poles?"
"Um… Bonple?" Annalee cheekily replied with a raised eyebrow.
Fianna didn't appreciate the joke.
"The tent poles?" she asked.
"Um…" said most of the girls.
"Back on the lorry?" Erne ventured, correctly as it happened
"Tsk," Fianna tutted. "Get the poles and get it sorted, otherwise we won't have enough space to sleep everyone," she said, before departing to supervise something that needed supervising somewhere else.
With sighs and moans, the posse of Shamrock girls trooped back to the lorry, where sure enough there were a series of wooden poles of various sizes which they had overlooked on their first trip.
"Here, take this one, will you?" Erne asked Annalee as she passed down one of the timbers.
"Oh, thank you Onee-chan; I'll call her Jajka," Annalee remarked, clearly in a mood for frivolity.
Once all the poles had been unloaded they returned to their pitch. Erne had even found a sack with a mix of wooden tent pegs and two mallets in it, which everyone agreed was probably going to be useful.
"Surely we can work it out now?!" Finn fumed.
The problem was that none of the poles seemed to be the same length. Some of them clearly were designed to slot together to make longer ones, but no combination appeared to yield the sizes they wanted. Eventually, some sort of compromise was reached.
"I guess if we… put the poles up… and then put the canvas over them?" Erne suggested.
This idea was adopted purely for the absence of anything better, so Annalee, Avoca and Dalua ended up each holding a pole while the taller girls attempted to pull the heavy canvas over the top. It was not a success, and when Annalee accidentally let go of 'Jajka' and it nearly fell on Dalua's head, the attempt had to be restarted.
Eventually, something that resembled a giant flattened bishop's hat was erected.
"How does it stay up?" Inny asked.
"With the ropes, of course!" Finn scolded her favourite target. "Take that mallet and hammer in some tent pegs so we can tie the ropes to them."
"Okay!" Inny said cheerfully, as usual rather oblivious to Finn's vehemence towards her.
Two of the boys from Éire Tanc appeared at that moment carrying armfuls of hinged metal contraptions and more furled canvas.
"We've brought your camp beds for you," the taller one said.
"Thanks, just put them down there," Erne instructed, waving vaguely with her hand to nowhere in particular. The first Éire Tanc student did as he was told, but his short companion seemed to be frozen to the spot. By following his gaze it became clear why. Inny, with just her thin summer t-shirt on, was animatedly hammering one of the wooden pegs into the ground. The rapid motion was ill suited to her top-heavy figure, causing a sea of ripples and wobbles all over her substantial chest, although she seemed to be completely unaware of the spectacle these were causing.
"Oi!" the first Éire Tanc student called, clicking his fingers to snap his colleague out of his reverie.
"How can she be in so many places at once without moving?!" the second of the pair muttered, wide-eyed, which earned him a clip round the ear from his friend.
Seeing what was happening, Finn tutted in annoyance. "Clear off you two, and stop gawping!" she told the two Éire Tanc boys. "And you! Teaboo! Stop that jiggling about; you're causing a scene!"
"What? I…?" Inny said, looking up from her task.
Finn looked as if she was about to start arguing with her, but Annalee's cry of "Can we let go now?" distracted her, with a not unjustified level of worry.
"Alright… but carefully!" she instructed.
"Yup… we wouldn't want to ruin a disaster, would we?" came Annalee's muffled cheeky comments from under the folds.
With a few scanty ropes holding the thing up, the pole bearers gingerly released their grip, and Annalee even dared to step away from her upright and out into the sunlight.
Much to Finn's surprise, something had gone right and the dubious creation was, remarkably, standing freely. She approached it with caution and cat-like tread until she was standing next to it. Then there was a creak, a shriek, and the whole front half tent, if such it could be called, sagged and collapsed, engulfing Finn in its canvassy folds.
Erne, Annalee and the two Éire Tanc boys roared with laughter as Finn battled to regain her freedom. As she struggled, her curses rang out loud and clear. Unlike those of Erne, whose outbursts were short, sharp, and liberally sprinkled with expletives. Finn's curses were long and deep, striking at the very soul of the tent that had wronged her. Her curses not only encompassed every part of the tent and what she felt about it, but extended further, to include the makers and the designers of the tent; their past and future lives, their families, their friends and their pets. By the time she had fought her way to liberty, every element of the tent and all those involved in its construction and history had been thrice damned to Hell and back.
This chaos was mercifully interrupted by the arrival of Éire Tanc's Talulla; a small girl with dyed purple hair and an explosive personality. The smart appearance of her crisp service dress uniform and single brown officer's boot was somewhat offset by the heavily signed and doodled-upon white plaster cast on her lower right leg. This medical necessity was as a result of a poorly thought out loss of temper with a Covenanter's roadwheel the previous week. Ever since that incident and the subsequent medical intervention, she had installed herself unofficially in the role of Fianna's adjutant, acting as the mouthpiece for Fianna's orders as well as possibly some of her own. She had not taken part in the training but had evidently arrived with the support vehicles.
"What the Hell is going on here?" she said in her loud and abrasive Cork voice as she awkwardly hobbled up, leaning on a single crutch to assist her.
"We've messed it up!" Laune explained, cheerfully and correctly, a pleasant smile beaming on her face as she gestured to the horror they had created.
Talulla surveyed the lumpen mess.
"You idiots!" she said. "You've got the canvas inside out!"
"Oh, does that mean we'll have to sleep on the outside?" Laune asked.
Talulla ignored the stream of gibberish coming from the girl with the apricot-coloured hair and directed her attention towards the others.
"Haven't you ever put a damn tent up before?" Talulla scolded.
"No!" said a lot of the girls in unison.
"We've never had to - we have houses where we live," Erne teased Talulla.
"Very funny," Talulla shot back, as she clearly wasn't in the mood for jokes. Sensing that guidance from someone who actually knew what they were doing was needed, Talulla began to give some much needed direction to the operation, getting the green-clad girls to take their ramshackle construction apart and start anew.
While it was being dismantled, Talulla turned to Laune.
"You can start assembling the camp beds," Talulla instructed, using the tip of the crutch she was holding to indicate the stack of folded frames.
"These are beds?" Laune asked, looking puzzled.
Talulla rolled her eyes and gritted her teeth slightly.
"Yes, they just need assembling. It's very straightforward," Talulla explained. "You space out the legs, then connect the side bars with the canvas, starting at the middle, then each end in turn."
"Alright!" Laune said happily.
Laune set about the task with gusto. She folded the legs first one way, then the other. She unrolled the canvas and attempted to attach it to her creation, but the canvas seemed to have other ideas and fought back determinedly. Finally, after some more repositioning of the legs, Laune got it attached, but it looked nothing like a bed. The overall shape was so weird; so strange in its unearthly hideousness, that she became terrified and hid under a blanket along with Avoca.
"Can't you do anything right!?" Talulla snapped, throwing her crutch to the floor and wrestling with the 'bed' until it was subjugated and returned to its constituent parts. "You two!" she called out to Avoca and Dalua, correctly assuming that they would be better at working out how the camp beds were constructed. "You deal with these."
She turned to point at Laune. "You - go and make yourself useful with the tent," she instructed.
Talulla turned her attention back to the tent, reorganising the poles, which was especially necessary as it turned out that Annalee's pole was part of something called a 'ridge pole' and not one of the uprights after all.
"Farewell Jajka; we shall never forget your gallant sacrifice," Annalee said with mock solemnity then started humming Chopin's Funeral March while saluting in the Polish style.
"Stop mucking about!" Talulla ordered, but was largely ignored until she redirected the quietly cheeky redhead back to pole duties.
"Right, you and you, take hold of those long ropes. Yes, one on each end, that's right. Then when I say lift, you three in the middle raise the upright, and you two on the ropes assist in pulling it up, got it? Okay… lift!" she said as she guided them through what needed to be done with the easy confidence of someone who wasn't doing it.
The obedient Shamrock girls did as they were bid, and the structure swayed up off the ground.
"See? That's how it's done," Talulla encouraged them. "Now secure those lines and it will stay up by itself. Not with that peg there! Who put that one in the ground?! Take it out and put pegs there and there…" she deftly directed with a stern pointing finger. "Then attach the guy ropes at the corners and edges to pegs, and you're done!"
With that, the remaining Shamrockers split into two teams and began enthusiastically banging the large wooden pegs into the earth and looping the various lines onto them.
Erne nodded her sage approval at Talulla's work. "I have to admit, it does look more like a tent than our first attempt," she said. "I'm still not sure it's one I'd want to sleep in though! It looks like it could crash down and suffocate me at any moment during the night!" she quietly confessed to Finn, who sniggered her agreement.
"Come on, you can help finish off the pegs as well," Talulla casually called across to Finn.
"Me?!" Finn asked, raising an eyebrow.
The short Irish girl stopped in the middle of a hobbling stride and shot a look back at Finn. "Yes. You. All you've done so far is stand there and look on! You can get involved too!" she said strongly.
"Who are you to order me around?" Finn said casually. Erne inwardly groaned, knowing where this was likely heading.
"A tank commander, that's who!" Talulla snapped back.
"Well, as it happens, so am I. A commander of an L-60," Finn drawled in reply. "Your L-60, in fact," she added, in a below-the-belt move.
"Why…" Taulla blustered, as the girl with the mop of red-streaked black hair had clearly touched a nerve. "You've been in command of that for less than twenty-four hours!" she shouted. "I've been commanding tanks for all of my third year!" she yelled, getting angrier.
"Well I've been the leader of the largest club in the school since my second year," was Finn's flat put down, as she folded her arms across her chest. "And at least I know enough about tanks not to try punting them like a football!" Finn said with a sneer.
"You…!" Talulla exploded, looking as if she was about to deal with Finn in the same way she had tried to deal with the Covenanter's roadwheel, but Erne was saved from having to play the uncharacteristic role of peacekeeper by a loud howl which interrupted the brewing argument.
The sound had come from the side of the tent and Erne and Finn were first on the scene, with the impeded Talulla bringing up the rear. They found a panicked Laune and a crying Inny, who was holding her thumb. It transpired that Inny had been holding a tent peg while Laune attempted to hammer it into the ground, but the clumsy plum had managed to hammer poor Inny's thumb instead.
Laune was, of course, full of apologies and remorse, but getting herself even more worked up as she tried to say sorry over and over again while Inny was sobbing. Finn's reaction was to immediately burst into laughter, which did nothing at all to help the situation.
Luckily, Inny's howls had also brought the other girls of the tent construction crew. Annalee, Avoca and Dalua, now redundant from pole-holding duties given that the end guy ropes had been anchored, came round to see what the fuss was. Talulla was quick to step up to the task, and equally quick to delegate the different aspects of it back down again. She swiftly summoned Dalua and ordered her to take Inny to the resident medic of the Shamrock team; a good-humoured blonde girl known as Callan.
"You take this one to her boyfriend and get him to calm her down," she told Avoca, recognising, although not phrasing it wonderfully well, that Laune needed a sympathetic shoulder too.
"Her… her boyfriend?" Avoca asked, as if the concept was an alien one to her (which it probably was).
"The driver of the Churchill," Talulla told her.
"The driver of the Churchill?" Avoca repeated.
Talulla rolled her eyes. "The big green heavy tank…"
"I know what a Churchill is!" Avoca protested.
"She doesn't know what a boy is!" Finn laughed, clutching her sides with mirth.
Talulla looked like she was about to round on Finn once again, but Annalee intervened and rescued the situation.
"I know who he is," she explained, taking the distraught Laune by the hand and leading her off towards the parked Éire Tanc tanks and other vehicles.
Talulla looked around, possibly seeking her new adversary, but the leggy leader of the Dance Club had disappeared and was nowhere to be seen.
What was to be seen, however, were three Éire Tanc boys walking nearby. It happened to be Sean, Seamus and Flanagan, or the 'three stooges' as they were sometimes known. The last of the trio seemed not to be in a relaxed mood.
"Seriously Sean, why are you taking us off for a walk?" he could be heard to complain.
"Well, it's getting us out of building the tents, it's relaxing, exercise and fresh air," Sean replied, listing his reasons, but Flanagan, the complainer, wasn't interested.
"What is so relaxing and interesting to see on a walk here then? I come from County Longford, which is all green; I've come to Japan, and it's all green," he continued to moan.
"It's a different sort of green though," Seamus countered.
"It isn't though!" Flanagan retorted.
"It is!" Seamus shot back.
"It just isn't!" Flanagan continued on.
Their bickering continued until the stooges were out of earshot, with some of the Shamrock girls finding their droll behaviour rather amusing. Talulla, however, who had to put up with the trio every day, was not so endeared, and chivvied up everyone who remained into completing their task.
As they were finishing off the last few guy ropes, the Éire Tanc commander, wearing her aptly-named tent hat, walked up at that moment with Shannon and a number of Shamrock and Éire Tanc students following her.
"Is that tent finally up?" she asked, rhetorically, since the answer was obvious. "Really, Talulla, I would have expected any team under your command to have been more efficient; not the last ones to complete their task."
"Wha…?!" Talulla spluttered. "I only came to help sort out their mess! It was me who…" She was silenced, however, by a wave of Fianna's hand. The giggles of Annalee, who just returned, however, could still be heard until they were curtailed by intervention from her sister.
Using Shannon's built in megaphone voice, the two teams were summoned from their duties and gathered round in an informal semicircle.
Fianna entered into a short speech of praise for the day's training, helped by interjections from Shannon at moments both appropriate and inappropriate, followed by a list of duties for preparing for the evening under canvas.
"So, tent allocation," Fianna moved on to. She began reeling off lists of names for each of the eight-person tents that had been set up, ensuring they were strictly either all male or all female. When it came to the dubious contraption erected by Erne & Co., Tent Constructors to the Needy, Fianna was either brave enough or stupid enough to assign herself to it.
"...and Shannon also," the voluptuous Éire Tanc commander announced, intending for the short but also well stacked Shamrock commander to share the 'command tent' with her (or at least be where Fianna could keep an eye on her).
"With Niamh," Fianna said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the buxom red-headed Irish tart as she continued to read from her list.
"...Siobhan and Roisin," she went on, citing the two shapely and rounded-chested sisters that had been Finn's crewmates in the L-60 that day.
"Along with…" Fianna's voice changed slightly here, as she still evidently found it odd to be calling people after the names of rivers in her native country. Nonetheless, she recovered and pressed on. "Laune and Inny," she finished. The busty amputee and the even bigger-breasted dancer, the latter now with a heavily bandaged thumb, nodded and began to move over to their allotted quarters.
"Hang on… that's only seven," Fianna muttered, rechecking over her list. "Oh, sorry! And Miss McNiven as well!" she concluded, smiling an apology for her omission to the flat-chested girl from Cork. With that, Fianna quickly dismissed the lads and lasses to the duties.
"Hey, hey!" Talulla called out in something of a loud whisper as she limped up to Fianna, trying to get her attention. "How come I'm in that tent?!"
"Well, you're my adjutant, or so you said," Fianna reminded her. "And you supervised putting it up - is there something you're not telling me about it?" Fianna joked, completely failing to grasp Talulla's obvious embarrassment.
"No, the tent is fine," Talulla assured her. "But..."
"But what? There's someone in there you don't like? We're all friends here, remember," Fianna said, sounding sterner.
"No, no, it's not that!" Talulla protested.
"What then?!" Fianna asked, sounding irked.
"Everyone else is… I mean, has… ah, forget it," Talulla said, with something of a resigned sulk.
"Anyway, you'll be back with your crew," Fianna pointed out, nodding towards two Éire Tanc girls who were struggling towards the tent with heavy bags on their shoulders and packed sleeping bags in their hands.
As soon as the approaching figures spotted Talulla however, they at once dropped their belongings and rushed to embrace their short, purple-haired former commander.
"Hey! What are you doing!? Get off!" Talulla chastised them.
"We're just so happy to see you, Miss McNiven," one of the girls said.
"Yeah… whatever, just mind my injured foot, alright?" Talulla scolded, noting the proximity of their heavy hobnailed boots to her own damaged limb.
"Oh, your poor foot, of course!" one of them squeaked. They both promptly ran off, only to reappear almost immediately, carrying two collapsible camping chairs. They almost pushed Talulla into one, before installing her plastered right foot into the other, lovingly supported by an inflatable travel pillow donated from Roisin's kitbag.
"Hey," Talulla feebly protested.
"We just want you to get better, Miss McNiven!" Siobhan said.
"Yes, as soon as possible, and come back to our tank," Roisin fawned.
"Wha…?" Talulla began.
"Oh, yes," Siobhan echoed. "Just don't leave us at the mercy of 'her' again."
"Now," Roisin interjected. "Is there anything we can get you; anything at all, mind?"
"Uh…" Talulla began, beginning to reflect on her new situation.
"What on Earth did you do to them!?" Erne asked Finn in a hushed voice. Finn just shrugged innocently, with an expression on her face that might have made an angel cry.
After a few hours had passed, involving everyone making themselves comfortable in their allocated tents, setting up some trestle tables and benches, and a hot meal of delicious stew from large dixies, the boys and girls were well fed, content and relaxed. Now with (strictly soft) drinks to hand, the majority of the teams had spread out into groups and clusters, where old friends were catching up and new friends were being made. A light-hearted hurling game had even started, with Shamrock's speedy driver, known as Keady, proving that small size was no barrier when it came to competing with the boys.
Talulla was still enthroned on her camp chair and waited on hand and foot by her devoted crew, while Finn had a crowd of followers and hangers-on surrounding her at the opposite end of the camp. Annalee had played some music, accompanied by one of the Éire Tanc boys on a flute, but the day's training had left her weary and she didn't go on too long. She was now sitting with Erne and Dee, a mischievous first year, sharing silly stories and jokes.
"Well, I guess we should turn in," Erne said, stretching her tired arms and yawning. "This day has been intense!"
"So, we're going to end it in the same way!" Annalee suddenly chirped, struggling to suppress giggles that seemed about to overwhelm her.
"What do you mean?" Erne asked, suspiciously.
Annalee spluttered, and then collapsed in convulsions of laughter, all the while watched by her older sister who had one eyebrow raised and a despairing but resigned look on her face. Annalee's mirth continued for at least a minute, before she finally managed to blurt out: "In tents!"