The Boy in the Tower 1

The Boy in the Tower 1

Some text here about the topic of discussion

Open Ended

Who is the boy in the tower?

The boy in the tower is...

The Boy in the Tower

​

I've already told you about the TV crews that arrived, haven't I? Well, lots more came after they closed my school.

 

It was funny seeing streets that I know on the television. They didn't look right. They looked greyer and darker and smaller somehow.

 

Sometimes they interviewed people who lived nearby and they talked about how scared they were and they often said that they were packing up and leaving their homes.

Open Ended

Why did they close the school?

Open Ended

Why are people leaving their homes?

“You aren't safe inside your home and you aren't safe on the streets any more. There's nowhere left to go,” I remember one woman saying. She had a baby sitting on her hip the whole time she was talking, playing with her hair.

 

I always wondered if Gaia or her mum might suddenly appear on the television. Maybe they would tell me that they were leaving, so I would know for sure that they had gone and that Gaia would be safe.

 

I would always run back to the television if I could hear different voices other than the serious tones of the newsreaders to see if it was them. But they never turned up.

​

​I spent a lot of time watching television because there wasn't much else to do. Sometimes I dreamed I could hear Michael's mum calling for me to walk to school and I would wake up with a start and think I needed to rush out, before I remembered that Michael's mum had gone now and that school didn't exist any more.

 

​

Subject | Subject

Some text here about the topic of discussion

It's funny because sometimes when I was at school, especially if we had tests or long pieces of writing to do, I used to wish I was back at home, watching television and not doing anything much at all. Now that I was at home watching television all day, I wished I was back at school. I missed Miss Faraway and how our classroom

was always warm and colourful. I missed listening to stories read aloud to us. I missed seeing Gaia every day.

 

My head sometimes hurt for no reason and I wished I could run outside and feel the air rushing by my cheeks as I ran but I didn't dare leave the tower unless I really needed to. I felt foggy some days and nothing seemed to make me feel

much better. I just carried on watching television, even if I had a headache, because at least that way I could hear people speaking.

 

One day I was watching television and they started talking about 'the Blucher Disaster'. Blucher is the name of the road which Gaia and I walked down, the one where the first two men and the policemen who had been found unconscious.

Subject | Subject

Some text here about the topic of discussion

Open Ended

What do you think the disaster is?

​They were talking about everything that had been happening and whether or not the army should be sent in. The problem was that they didn't know what they were fighting, so it was all well and good to send the army in but they didn't know who or what the enemy was.

 

The people talking on the programme were getting very red-faced and blustery when not everyone agreed with what they were saying. Then they started talking to another man through a video link. He had large pink cheeks that wobbled

when he spoke.

 

“Prime Minister, what is being done to help the people affected by the Blucher Disaster?” they asked him. “It seems like not a lot from where we are sitting.”

“No, that's not true,” he started, and then he was speaking a lot of words but they weren't making any sense at all. I don't know how else to explain it. He was talking a lot but it was like it didn't really mean anything.

I knew a little bit about the Prime Minister but I couldn't really believe that it was this man, with his pink, jowly cheeks and nervous, dashing eyes, who was in charge of our country. I couldn't stop thinking that he didn't have any idea what to say, that he didn't know what to do, and if the Prime Minister didn't know what to do then what hope was there?

 

I didn't watch it for long and I changed the channel to someone talking about the number of people who had been hurt so far, and there were people who knew them, their families, crying and talking about how much they were worrying about them. I turned the television off for a while after that.

Open Ended

Where do you think the main character lives?