Eight Hundred Scouts Navigate Wendover Woods, Three Parents Still Missing

At the edge of a car park in Wendover Woods, a father in a quilted gilet stood holding his phone at arm's length above his head, turning slowly on the spot like a man tuning a radio in 1954, while two nine year old Cubs walked past him with a paper map, agreed on a direction without raising their voices, and went to find control point six. He was still turning when they came back.

More than eight hundred Beavers, Cubs, Scouts and Explorers took part in the county orienteering day, and the children, it should be said plainly, were magnificent. They found the posts. They folded the maps properly. They did the thing the whole exercise was designed to teach and they did it before lunch, which left the rest of the morning free for the adults, who had come along to supervise, to be gently and comprehensively humiliated by a sheet of paper and a compass the size of a biscuit.

Three parents have not yet come back.

This is not a matter for concern, and nobody at the finish line is treating it as one. A retired bus timetable compiler working the clipboard explained the position to anyone who asked, which was nobody, that the missing adults are in no danger whatsoever, being merely somewhere in a large wood with full signal, a flat battery, snacks, and a profound unwillingness to admit they went the wrong way at the big beech. One mother was observed completing the same loop three times and describing it each time as a shortcut. Another had taken a photograph of the map on his phone and then zoomed in so far he was navigating by one letter of the word Wendover.

The honest part, and the paper will take its share of this, is that we sent a reporter and he came back by following a Beaver. Haddenham's own contingent returned early, cheerful, and faintly embarrassed for the grown ups, which is the correct attitude and one the village might usefully carry into Halloween on Saturday, when several of those same children will navigate the unlit end of Churchway with no map at all and still get home before their fathers.