Stories from the Island...

When the normal school day was over, the year 9 Orchard pupils went down to the boat house with their belongings to stay the night on the island, based about 150 feet down the river. When we had all been ferried across the river, we started to unpack the boat and set up camp in our strategically located camp spot. We were each given 2 tarpaulin sheets to improvise as a tent, as many pegs and string as we needed. After we had set up our rather hopeless attempts at ‘tents’, we returned to the storage tent to wash our hands in the river – and then with hand wipes – and set up portable barbecues. After all the fire from the barbecues had gone we all got one piece of chicken, a sausage, plus, a burger. After the food had all been cooked and eaten, we put the barbecues away and started a fire. When we had the fire going, we roasted marshmallows - burned marshmallows more like – and sat around for a while relaxing and laughing at silly jokes that really weren’t that funny, before stumbling blindly through the dark to our camp sites. It took us all a while to settle down and even longer to get any sleep. Although if we remember correctly, there was a particularly loud and obnoxious swan during the night, so not all of us got our beauty sleep. After a night of restless sleeping – of which a handful of pupils slept perfectly, to the annoyance of the other students – we got up and packed away our tents, pegs and knot-ridden string. We then greeted the other students and shared stories of what happened in the night. We then packed our belongings away and put them on the boat, to which, ferried us back across the river to begin another day at school.

Paragraph by Brett Fullard and Andy Hildred