The clearing with the flag mast was followed by a short tilt, down which there stood a long squat barrack of timber with two large bedroom-wards separated by the central blind partition and filled with rows of spring-mesh beds abutting the windowed sidewalls. Each of the wards ended with the door to the shared square room comprising the whole width of the barrack. There was a small stage with a screen for movie shows and rows of seats for the audience.

Entering the bedroom-wards on the day of arrival, the children were not in a hurry to go and get mattresses, sheets, and blankets from the canteen-etc. building, but instead, they dropped their bags and suitcases on the floor and went amok, leap-racing along the spring-mesh trail of the lined beds which tossed you up in long jumps thru the air. For that particular sports activity, it’s vitally important not to collide with a jumper rushing in the opposite direction…

Then everyone opened their suitcases and bags and started to enjoy the sweets, flashing them down with the gulps of treacly condensed milk from blue-and-white tin-cans. As it turned out, for condensed milk consuming, neither an opener nor a spoon was needed. Just find a nail sticking out on the wall and hit against it the upper-side round part of the can, to punch a hole. Make sure the hole’s location is near the top rim and not in its center. Produce another hole in the top opposite to the first one and—here you are!—now the condensed milk can easily be sucked out thru any of the holes without smearing your lips and cheeks, as when eating with a spoon from an open tin-can… And if you are not a well-trained puncher, or not tall enough to reach the nail up in the wall, then ask someone of the elder boys – they would punch it for you for just a couple of hearty sucks from your can…

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!.”

Once at the midday meal in the canteen, I got aware of obviously clandestine gestures of 3 boys at my table, their exchange of silent nods and winks was nothing but some double talk with secret code signs. Clear as daylight – there was some collusion. And me?

So I accosted one of them in earnest until he shared the secret scheme. They conspired to flee the “stiff hour” that day and go to the forest, where one of them knew a spot of such raspberries that had more berries than leaves in their bushes.

The midday meal over, the fugitive boys run stealthily in the direction opposite that to the barrack. I follow them, repulse the leader’s attempt at turning me back to the ward-bedroom, and crawl in the wake of the others under the barbed wire of the fence into the forest.

We arm ourselves with the rifles made of breakable tree branches and walk along a wide footpath among the Pines and shrubs. The leader steers into some glade after which we again enter the forest missing the footpath already. We wander for a long time without finding any raspberries but only the bushes of wolf-berries which you should skip eating because they’re poisonous.

Finally, we get fed up with the useless search, and our leader admits that he can’t not find the promised raspberries, for which news he gets the multi-voiced “eew! you!”, and our wandering thru the forest goes on until we come across 2 threads of barbed wire nailed to the trees, one above the other, to form a fence.

Following the prickly guidance of the camp fencing, we come up to the already familiar footpath and our perked-up leader commands to fall in. Looks like we’re going to play War-Mommy. The order is executed eagerly, we line up along the footpath, pressing the dried boughs of our assault rifles to our stomachs.

But suddenly, two grown-up women—the camp caretakers—jump out from behind a thick bush with a loud yell, “Drop weapons down!” We let our sticks fall and, in the already formed file, are convoyed to the camp gate. One of the captors walks ahead of us, the other closes the formation…

At the evening all-out line-up, Camp Director announced that there happened a disruptive incident at the camp, and the parents of those involved would be informed, besides, there would be raised the question of expelling the escapers from the camp.

After the line-up dispersed, my brother-’n’-sister came to me from their junior platoon, “Now, you’ll sure get hell!”

“Ah!” dismissively waved I, trying to conceal the fear caused by the uncertainty of the punishment for getting raised the question of expelling. That uncertainty nagged me till the end of the week with the Parents’ Day on Sunday…

Our parents came as usual, and Mom shared between us condensed milk and biscuits, but she never mentioned my involvement in the disruptive occurrence. A beam of hope flicked for me—perhaps, Camp Director forgot to inform my parents!

When they left, Natasha told me that Mom new about the incident all along and, in my absence, asked her who else was among the runaways.

On getting the exhaustive report, she turned to Dad and said, “Well, you bet, the kids of those aren’t going to be expelled.”

~ ~ ~

At the end of that same summer, there occurred a drastic change in our Block’s way of life. Now, every morning and evening, a slow-go garbage truck entered the Courtyard, honked loudly and waited for the tenants of the houses to bring their garbage buckets and empty them into its dump. Besides, they took away the rusty boxes from the garbage bins enclosure and nailed up its gate.