One night I woke up and listened to a scraping and scratching coming from outside. I looked out and saw a hill getting bigger. I ran to get dressed. When I came outside I saw ten ants climbing out that were about fifteen feet high and about twenty-five feet in length. After them came about fifty bees and wasps, so twenty-five of each. They were two foot high and six feet in length and they swarmed off to the school.
I ran to my friend’s house, Paul, and woke him up by shouting. He came down, fully dressed, and I told him what had happened. We ran to the school and saw the ants eating the school and spitting it out again and the wasps and bees were flying after the cars and crushing them when they landed on them. The bees soon went after more cars, but the ants went after the next big building which was the Country Club. They climbed up on the roof and started to demolish it like the school, and when they had finished that they went over to the Rudds Arms and finished it off like the rest. When that had been finished they went off towards The Grove and tore down the trees.
We were close behind when there was a blinding flash and the ants disappeared. Suddenly from behind us came a buzzing. We looked round and saw the wasps and bees coming towards us. There was another blinding flash and they disappeared and we thought that would be the last time we would see them, but it wasn’t.
About two weeks had passed and I was staying on a farm on the moors, and by coincidence, Paul was staying there as well, so we were having a good time together. One day as we were exploring the nearby woods, we came to a cave. We went in and to our surprise we heard a buzzing noise, so we walked towards the back of the cave, but the noise became quieter. Suddenly we heard footsteps, so we went for the shadows, and when we looked behind us we saw the funny little man that was also staying at the farm.
He walked in and stamped on the floor three times and said a well know phrase, the floor opened and he walked down. We made sure he was gone, then we came out. We went over to where the noise was loudest. I stamped on the floor three times and Paul said “Open sesame.” But nothing happened and Paul said “Maybe you’re stamping on the wrong side.”
“Maybe,” I said, so I stamped again three times and Paul said the same words again and this time it worked.
We got down on the stairs just as the door closed. The stairs were in a passage and they seemed yo go on for ever, but when we did come to an end we found that the staircase was an escalator. We looked about us and saw a lot of machines and in one corner there was a bee’s hive, a wasp’s hive and an ant’s nest.
Someone had come silently down the stairs and grabbed us both and pushed us off. As we fell we thought that it would be the end of us, but as we landed we bounced straight up again off the floor and we kept bouncing until we stopped.
The man had now reached us and had grabbed us again and put us in a cage. From there we watched all that happened. First the funny little man, Mr Sharkof, put his padded hand into the beehive and took out some bees and put them on a conveyor. The strange thing was that the bees did not try to fly away. The other man, Jacko, pulled down a lever and the machinery started up. When it was about halfway, there was another blinding flash and as the bees passed by a glass panel, we saw that they were giant size.
Suddenly there was a flash and the whole lot of machinery blew up and burst into flames. Some flying debris flew over us and hit the stairs which burst into flames as well. We thought that it would be the end for us, but there was a rock fall from the roof and through the hole in the roof came farmers and farm workers from the nearby farms where we were staying and behind them were five policemen. They grabbed the two men while a farmer got us out of the cage.
Back at the farm we fell asleep straight away because it was late at night. The next morning we were awakened by a shot from a field gun. We got dressed and ran to see what was happening. We saw that the army had been called in to fight off some giant ants. There were two lying smouldering on the ground and a lot more bits of ants all over the place. The army moved in with flame throwers and destroyed a few.
Suddenly there was a loud roar and from behind us came a lion about two hundred feet high. Then there was an explosion and all the ants were blown up. The air-force came in and blew a big hole in the lion’s side, then the flame throwers burnt the lion’s feet and it crumpled down onto a few trees and crushed them.
That was the last we would see of the giant creatures, because the men were safely put away in jail and all the equipment was smashed to bits. The next day we went home and told our families of the adventure.
(c) M. Robert Gibson
Written about 1974-03
This is probably my first attempt at an action adventure story, written at age 11.
Disclaimer
This is a school essay.
It was written well before the internet. It is full of inaccuracies and assumptions; bad punctuation; bad grammar and a woeful lack of research, but, it is also a first draft. It was also hand-written in an exercise book, none of your fancy electronic gizmos back then.
And don’t forget, it was written by a schoolboy in a time before political correctness.
It is published here for purely selfish vanity reasons, so read it at your own peril and do not expect any great revelations.
M. Robert Gibson 