Today is the 29th March 2074 and I am on a cruise round the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and they are all very nice.
30th March 2074:
31st March 2074: Yesterday I could not write in my diary because our ship was smashed to bits. I managed to get some essential supplies before the boat sank. Today I surveyed the land for life and shelter and I found a cave.
1st April 2074: Today is April Fool’s Day but I can’t fool myself. My cave is on top of a hill so it is hard work bringing up the heavy objects like the ship’s wireless. It does have one advantage, it is a good look-out point.
2nd April 2074: I made a simple axe and cut down some logs and made a stockade round the cave like in a film I once saw called Robinson Crusoe.
3rd April 2074: With the logs I had left over I made a den near the beach to hide in, in case of an attack by cannibals, and in it I put some guns to fight with.
4th April 2074: Had another look at the island and for food and I found a swamp, the hard way because I fell in and was nearly under if it wasn’t for a young sapling and worst of all it’s two hundred yards to the right of the cave.
5th April 2074: First sign of life, man or animal I could not tell as it was in the bushes moving fast. I’ll have to be prepared.
6th April 2074: Found out what the life was, my friend Paul! Paul showed me where he had made his home and he was just as well off as me, but we decided to stay on in mine because it was higher up and had better defences.
7th April 2074: Today as I was loading the guns in the den I saw some boats coming to the island. I watched them and saw that they were cannibals and they had brought some prisoners over to eat.
8th April 2074: Today I had an accident. I lost my diary so I shall continue our adventures as a story.
The next day I told Paul what I had seen and he said “I think we had better make a different den round the other side, just in case they see us.” I agreed and we set to work. We both had in mind a tree house like the one Tarzan has and we thought it would not take long, but it took a week to build the first part, then another week to build the second part and yet another week to build the rope bridge between the two.
(c) M. Robert Gibson
Written 1974-03-29
Another early attempt at action adventure, written at age 11.
The continuity leaves a bit to be desired – if the diary was lost on the 8th, how come all the earlier entries exist?
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 