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
