Survive!

Neville’s Island by Tim Firth

Chester Gateway Theatre, 1996

Here are ten things that every boy scout knows but which unfortunately Neville, Gordon, Roy and Angus didn’t. A cut-out-and-keep guide for every traveller who may one day find himself up the same shoddy creek without a certain implement.

Orientating yourself

The trouble with islands is that they tend to be surrounded by water. This can have a disorientating effect and could induce feelings of loneliness and despair. In these circumstances, the cheerful fellowship of your comrades will be vital for helping you all get through your shared ordeal in good spirits. Take along a supply of jokes and a sense of humour. Better yet, take along a bottle of good spirits.

Appoint a leader who will be responsible for making all the wrong decisions. This gives the rest of you someone to blame. If they also happen to be your senior in civvy life, so much the better – you have the perfect excuse to take revenge for all the grief they’ve been handing down to you all these years.

Shelter

Find shelter as soon as you can in order to be comfortably settled before nightfall. If you decide on a cave, make sure it isn’t going to get flooded at high tide, or that it’s not the abode of some wild animal. Have the group leader investigate first – that’s why he earns the big bucks after all.

If no natural shelter is available, you will need to construct your own. This is best done with several stout branches interlocked to form a framework like a wigwam, then covered with leaves and grasses. Everyone should join in to develop a feeling of camaraderie and teamwork. When the first petty argument breaks out it will be the group leader’s job to see fair play, get everyone’s back up, then rule in favour of the most aggressive contender. He’s going to need all the allies he can get, and the stronger the better.

Once the shelter is finished (it will be shelter number three, the first two having fallen down the moment you all tried to squash into them), the group leader should assign sleeping positions. Smokers, snorers and farters should be placed nearest the entrance.

Water

If there is no natural water supply on the island it will be necessary to build a cistern for rainwater. This can be done by stretching a sheet of canvas (say, a tent) across a wide hole, placing a cup in the hole beneath it and a stone in the bottom of the canvas. At this point it will be the group whiner’s job to ask why you couldn’t all have used the tent to sleep in in the first place. The other members of the group should then gaze thoughtfully at the miserable little hovel they’ve just spent the best part of the afternoon constructing, and take it out on the group leader.

Food

There is unlikely to be any edible wildlife on the island. Anything small enough to catch will probably be so repulsive you wouldn’t want to eat it anyway, and anything larger is likely to be so fierce that you couldn’t catch it if you tried.

Fungi like mushrooms are nourishing and tasty, but toadstools which are virtually identical can be nauseating and potentially lethal. The same goes for fruit and berries. Brambles and wild raspberries are safe, but the duchesnea indica, which looks like a wild strawberry, is extremely poisonous. One of the golden rules of survival is: “Don’t put it in your mouth unless you know how to spell it.”

You could always try angling, but don’t expect to have any more success than you would on an average fishing trip back home. If you can’t land so much as a tiddler when you’re armed with a £270 rod and a couple of six packs of Foster’s, why should you have any more luck when you’re starving, cold, and dangling a bent pin on the end of a piece of string into a muddy lake?

Fire

The secret of a good fire is plenty of dry kindling. If all you can find is the stuff that has been gently soaking in the rain for the last four weeks, you will need to sacrifice some clothing. Try those garish boxer shorts your wife has been trying to get you to chuck out.

A spark can be made by striking a piece of flint with the blade of a knife. Or not. When the knife breaks, try bashing two pebbles together. Or you could try spinning a rod of hardwood in a notch gouged into a plank. While the person assigned to do this gets on with it, sweating like a bison, the other members of the group should all sit around like bollards offering helpful advice like “You’re just not fit enough, my son.” At the first wisp of smoke, everybody has to rush forward and start blowing on it until it goes out again.

If all else fails, use a cigarette lighter.

Cooking

Steaks can be fried on a grill mesh made from very green sticks. Or you can wrap your food in a ball of clay and cook it in the embers of the fire. (The advantage of this latter method is that you get a side dish of burnt earth thrown in for nothing.) You could also try constructing a Maori hangi, which consists of a pit with heated stones placed in the bottom warming up the food which is spread out barbecue-style on a lattice platform laid across the pit’s mouth. It won’t work and will take forever to make, but think what an appetite you’ll build up in the process!

Hygiene

Just remember that a little dirt never hurt anyone and some people actually eat earth as a regular part of their diet. Utensils like cups, saucers and cutlery can all be improvised from bits of wood, twigs and bark, and it’s not going to kill you to ingest a little raw nature for a day or two. If it was good enough for our ancestors, it should be good enough for you. Of course, they never grew above five feet and had the life expectancy of a gnat, but they still managed to build Stonehenge didn’t they? Also, moss makes excellent bathroom stationery and you can clean your teeth with a finger – though not necessarily in that order.

Clothing

All wet clothing should be removed immediately and thoroughly dried ready for the ensuing bout of pneumonia that will inevitably follow your standing around with nothing on waiting for your wet clothes to dry. Make sure to keep a clean pair of underpants handy in case the rescue party needs to rush you to hospital. Holes in your socks can be darned using a long thorn and thin strips of dried grass. Holes in your fingers caused by darning the holes in your socks should be treated with dock leaves. You won’t need to wash your clothing in the wild – your own flop sweat will do this for you from the inside out. Besides, remember you can get at least four days’ wear out of any garment – right way round, back to front, inside out, then back to front again.

Equipment

A good stout knife will be invaluable as it can be used for so many vital things – cutting up food, telling people to back off, etc. Forks for toasting marshmallows, if any, can be improvised from twigs propped over the fire, if any. Advanced survivalists could even try knocking up a shoe rack from notched sticks. But if you’re going that far, hey, why not a jacuzzi in the lake and a CD player knocked together out of old bits of string and a chewing gum wrapper? Get real.

Rescue

When you can no longer stand the constant diet of nuts and poisonous berries, the wet clothes, the collapsing shelters, the filth, the squalor, the depression and your companions’ smelly feet, build a raft and sail back to civilisation. It’s the only sensible thing to do.

Tim Firth (1964-)

PS

This was an opportunity to do the kind of comedy number I have always enjoyed, and it made sense to cast it in the form of a devil’s guide. I had already written a whole book in this style about how to fail successfully at university, so the mechanics of litotes, reversal, and sour negativity were well ingrained. I can’t remember now whether I even bothered consulting the most rudimentary of serious guides to give me a kick start, or whether I simply made it all up. Probably the latter. The trick about being able to wear any item of clothing four different ways, by the way, is perfectly accurate, and the regimen can be carried out just as easily at home as in the back of beyond.