Bonfire Night Waen’s first time at the annual village fireworks display

< Apeth (from Ota Sbees)

Captain Carnivore Gary Shepherd is hunted down by a deadly flying meteor

Super Jesus A special pin-up of your favourite Nazarene webslinger

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the Underworld

Tuesday April 15th, 1980

Now this is getting ambitious. Only my second day back after the Easter break and already I’m writing stories with eight protagonists. Most of them are dead by the end of the first page - in fact, they’re all dead by halfway down the second - but that’s a Waen Shepherd adventure story for you. Bloodthirsty, stupid and totally pointless. The first thing to understand is that the heroes are all classmates of mine. We’ve already met Andrew Wall and Aaron Ross before, but this one introduces quite a number of others, some of whom would become very good friends of mine over the next couple of years. There are pictures of most of them here from when we all got dressed up to go to Clarke Hall. The only one missing is Carl Clayton, but I did draw a portrait of him in my Science book a couple of weeks later, so maybe have a look at that too. I don’t remember for certain but I’m going to stick my neck out here and say this was probably another instance (like British Skiing Events and, to a certain extent, Fury Falls) of me writing up what a bunch of us role-played outisde one lunchtime. It has all the hallmarks of the sort of thing a bunch of boys would make up in the playground one day when they weren’t allowed to play football for some reason. Each time one of us dies, that’s one of us dropping out to go do something else. In that context, I can virtually guarantee therefore that the idea about the nest of giant ants is absolutely totally me. I had a bad habit of ruining perfectly reasonable games about down to earth things like potholing by introducing ridiculous fantasy elements no one else would think of, so it’s likely me anyway, but the giveaway is the line “They ate the others.” That’s the sound of three boys (Carl, Jason and Wayne, who were as thick as thieves) deciding they don’t want to play a game about giant ants and buggering off somewhere else. Kudos to Gareth and Andrew then for sticking with me. I don’t remember Gareth too well - he was a couple of years above me as I recall - but I remember him being quite a solid, dependable sort of boy, a scout leader type - the kind of kid you’d actually give responsibilities to. So naturally he survives till very near the end. Andrew at this time was rapidly becoming my best friend and definitely wasn’t averse to a bit of role play, so I’m surprised he didn’t last longer, but it might just be that he really fancied screaming his head off while being eaten by a giant ant. I can believe that. This story also has the distinction of being the first (I think) of many I wrote in which the narrator dies before telling the story. In the context of being a playground game, that totally makes sense - I die because the bell goes. But there is, of course, the slim chance I might be making all that up. For all I know, this really did spring solely from the mind of an eight year old boy who wanted all his classmates to die horrifically violent deaths. I just doubt it very much. Favourite line: “The Father Ant got away” - so random! Was I already planning a sequel?

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