Elizabeth Judge attends the Girl Guides' World Camp,
and finds things have loosened up since the days of knee-high socks
Brightly coloured tents cover the forest floor like a blanket. Long-legged girls in trainers and trendy tops stroll around looking nonchalant. Huge sponsorship signs loom in the sky. The talk is of last night's disco and how much beer the girls got through.
This is a little unnerving. For the scene in the depths of Hampshire's New Forest is not a Glastonbury spin-off but a gathering of new-look Girl Guides from around the world. Dug in for a week-long camp are 3,200 girls from 55 countries, none of whom looks anything like the goodie-two-shoes I hung out with as a ten-year-old.
This is only the third world camp since the organisation was founded by Lord Baden-Powell and his sister Agnes in 1910 to try to bring Guides from all over the world together. More than 50 per cent of women born in the UK have belonged to the Guiding Movement at some period during their lives.
The girls, who have paid £110 for the adventure, still join in hearty activities such as canoeing, sailing and cooking round the campfire. Every afternoon the guide packs put on displays and presentations representing their country. And the original camp motto, Peace, Vision, Power", has been retained.
But the traditional image of the organisation has moved with the times. These Girl Guides are more Spice girl than head girl - and have attitudes to match. "Boys? No way, we wouldn't want them here. They would spoil it," says one ice-cool blonde.
"We can look scruffy and be as silly as we like on camp and it doesn't matter," says her friend, who does look scruffy but in a cultivated, hippy kind of way.
Like most of the girls she has turned her neckerchief into a bandanna which she ties around her head to keep the sun off. The black patent lace-ups which were staple in my day are replaced by Nike trainers. And not a knee-high sock in sight.
"We had a disco last night, so no one is feeling their best today," says a reassuringly plump woman, a "guide guider" with glasses propped on the end of her nose. "We have drunk more beer in the past week than the average rugby team gets through in that time," she laughs. "The brewery are quite amazed. We have drunk twice as much as they estimated."
Drinking? Discos? Surely Guides are practical, sensible types? They sew, cook and rank knot-tying as an enjoyable activity.
Things clearly have changed: today's Guides are into organic food and balanced diets and are more likely to be prepared for safe sex than for whipping out a compass to find the way back to camp.
In the beauty tent, a group of girls etch henna tattoos on to their ankles and experiment with aromatherapy oils. Outside the health tent, where the girls are educated about drugs, the queue is longer than a West End nightclub on a Saturday night. As guider Ira Luxton said, as she took me on a tour of the 65-acre site: "It's not all cake-making and knot-tying now, you know."
When the camp was first held in 1924, one Guide wrote in her diary: "As we sat around the campfire I thought how wonderful it was that although we spoke different languages and belonged to different social classes, we were all sisters in the great movement of Guiding."
Today's "sisters" are not so easily moved. Blue passes or dog tags are worn by the girls who are old enough to drink at the bar (and, from what I saw, most would instantly be awarded proficiency badges on their performance). Later this month there is a Guides-only pop concert at the Manchester Apollo when 2,000 of them will bop the night away to a host of boy bands including Ultimate Chaos and Next of Kin.
And the badges are changing, too. The latest edition of The Guide Badge Book now includes computing and skiing.
Soon a film-lover's badge will be introduced which encourages girls to watch and review a film, and the old Hostess badge, awarded for creating just the right mix to make that perfect sponge cake, is to be replaced by a party planner's badge - presumably so every Guide can put together that essential canapé to go with a cocktail. Perhaps because of the revitalisation of the movement, the girls look much more trendy than the blue-skirted girls I hung out with.
When I asked a group if they were teased by their school friends, 14-year-old Holly Newman cooked up scornfully. "We don't care what other people think. It's great fun and we get a chance to do loads of things and make lots of friends," she said.
The Guide Association is the largest voluntary organisation for girls and young women in the UK with more than 700,000 members.
For information contact:
The Guide Association,
17-19 Buckingham Palace Road,
London SW1W OPT
{sent in by Lucy Bishop}