“Do be, do be, do be, do do do, d… eh wha’, who are you?”
“I, my young fellow, am the greatest scientist ever to set foot on the earth. I am, er, wait a moment, ah yes, I am Charles Darwin.”
“Oh, didn’t you invent the monkey or something like that?”
“What, ho ho o no, dear boy. I found out about the monkeys being, ahem, sort of related to us in a way. Evolution, of course.”
“Oh yes, I remember. Well what are you doing here? Didn’t you live in the nineteenth century?”
“Yes, I do, not did.”
“Well what are you doing here? This is the twentieth century.”
“What! Aah, I’ve done it at last.”
“Done what?”
“Invented the time machine, of course. How else could I get from the nineteenth century to here?”
“What, but that would be impossible. None of this is in the history books.”
“Of course not. I have not written the, ahem, ingredients down, nor anything to do with this adventure. Oh it’s great to be great. Yes, I’ll be world famous, I’ll ev…”
“Just a minute, have you ever thought how you are going to get back?”
“Oh that does not matter now, first I must find out all about this place. For a start, what is this black stuff?”
“Oh that. That’s tar on the road.”
“Yes, and what are those white lines?”
“Those, oh they are to keep the cars on either side of the road.”
“Cars? What are cars?”
“They are, um, look there’s one!”
“Eeee, a coach without horses. How does it move?”
“With an engine.”
“An engine? What is an engine?”
“Well, it’s sort of got a lot of spark-plugs, and carburettors, and fans, and fan-belts, and big batteries, and oil tanks, and petrol tanks, and a few other things I don’t know about.”
“Oy, oy, oy. This is all too confusing for me. Tell me more about this place.”
“Well, in America, they have reached the moon.”
“Oo, the moon you say, tut, unbelievable. Those clothes you’re wearing, very strange, tell me about them.”
“Well, these leg coverers, these are trousers and this is a v-necked sweater and this is a casual jacket. These are socks and these are lace-up shoes, called training shoes.”
“H’m. Trouzers, v-necked sweater, cazual jackit, socks, lace up training shoes. It’s very different to what young boys wear in my time. What do women wear?”
“Skirts, trousers, platforms, dresses, tights, socks, jackets and loads of other crazy things.”
“They seem to wear most things that boys do.”
“Yes, they copy us a lot. How are you going to get back?”
“H’mm you’ve got a point there. I had set the dial for one hour.”
“Well I’ve been talking to you for… forty-five minutes. I found you at quarter past five, so you have go…”
“What’s that thing round your wrist?”
“What this? This is a watch. A sort of portable clock.”
“Oh. Anyway, I had been here for about ten minutes, so it won’t be long before I disa…”
“Hey Charles, you can’t go yet. Tch, too late. He’s gone and I wanted to hear what his way of life was like for my history exam!”
Teacher’s Comments
B
Don’t you think that he would want to know about science today?
(c) M. Robert Gibson
First written 1975-10-07
School exercise.
Don’t forget, it was written by a schoolboy.
It is published here for purely selfish vanity reasons.
M. Robert Gibson 