Betty, Belle and other stories

leaves the city behind to go wild in Exmoor in a Land Rover Defender

- James Fisher

IT is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when he wakes up and quite reasonably says to himself: ‘I slept terribly last night.’ There might be myriad reasons for this. At my advancing age, too many drinks on a weeknight can spark a certain anxiety that leaves the mind racing too much for rest. Perhaps it is too hot. A shared bed can always be a risk when a partner is snoring too much. However, in this instance, it was none of these things. It was, in fact, sleeping in a tent, on top of a Land Rover Defender, in a field, in the middle of Storm Betty.

There’s a certain relief that comes with surviving a night in a storm protected by only two layers of canvas and a sleeping bag. In the morning, the grass is greener, the air is fresher, the sky a vivid shade of blue unseen at other times of year. As the clouds cleared and the landscape opened up, thoughts of terror that had spent the previous evening preventing sleep dissipated to ones of wonder: here is a landscape that only I could see, slowly revealing itself to me as it discarded the fearful ballgown that it had donned the night before.

Some 24 hours previously, and fully aware of the impending arrival of Betty, we arrived at Taunton train station to meet Dan Usher-Clark, who runs Defender Campers. We’d received our booking confirmation a few weeks earlier, so we knew that his radiant red Defender, Cherry Belle, would be our home for the next three nights. There’s an irony that the D5 engine and its semibaritone chugging is a sound that is slowly disappearing from our countryside; it, like the curlew, or the corncrake, is such an evocative sound of rural England. Cherry is a beauty and it’s obvious almost immediately how much Dan loves it and his two other Defender campers.