Q 1. You have studied ‘nostalgia’ in Language and ‘Treasure Island’ in Literature. Read the following excerpt about a grown up sharing his/her childhood memories about watching Treasure Island on TV. Imagine that you are grown up and complete it. What do you remember about it? Try to maintain a tone that is nostalgic. Quote the fondest memories from the serial (you will use your reading but portray it as the serial) and relate it to some effect it had on your personality back then. For e.g, you tried to copy a character or did something that suggested that you were inspired by the T.V serial at that age. “Treasure Island and childhood memories” It was 1988. I was then eight years old, and, at that time, we did not have a television set. The BBC was serialising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island on Sunday afternoons, and I used to go to my friend, Kevin’s house to watch it. And afterwards, we used to play at being pirates. And I remember taking out the book from the children’s section of the library in Kirkcaldy (where we were living at the time), and thrilling both to the story, and also to the vivid illustrations that brought to life an imaginative world that has stayed with me since. My apologies for boring you all with a bit of autobiography, since one’s nostalgia is generally of no interest but to anyone but one’s self. But if it is true that experiences of one’s childhood shape what one becomes as an adult, then I have no doubt that my childhood immersion in the imaginative world of Treasure Island has shaped me. Not that I’ve become a pirate, of course, nor yet that I have led an adventurous life: I have always been physically timid, and turn away in trepidation even from some of the more adventurous rides in Thorpe Park. But the imagination does, after all, exist to fill the gaps in one’s personal experience, and no story looms larger in my imagination, even now, than does Treasure Island. There is many a book I enjoyed as a child, but which are impossible to enjoy as an adult, not even with all the mitigating factors afforded by nostalgia. Treasure Island, however, needs no mitigating factor at all: quite simply, there has not been a better adventure story written. From the very opening paragraph, where Captain Billy Bones knocks on the door of the inn run by Jim’s father, I am hooked. And after that, it is one adventure after another. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________________
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QUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards: