Interview with the leader of the discovered boys
Following is a transcript of a interview of the commanding officer on the HMS Victory with Ralph M., the leader of the boys which have been discovered on a Caribbean Island two days ago.
Officer: How did you boys come to this lonely island in the middle of the Caribbean ocean?
Ralph: I don’t know, Sir. I fell asleep soon after the take-off. When I woke up, I found myself on the beach. Piggy (a deep-drawn sigh) told me that we were attacked.
Officer: How many boys survived the plane crash?
Ralph: I’m not sure, Sir. I think about 15 older boys but I don’t know the number of littleuns. We never counted them. But two of us got murdered and a littleun died in a forest fire.
Officer: You told me, that you were the boss. Why did they choose you of all boys?
Ralph: I found a shell on the beach. Piggy told me how to blew it. The other boys followed the signal and we had an assembly on the beach. I still held the conch and there was something magical about it, so they chose me to be their boss.
Officer: What was the first thing you did on the island?
Ralph: Jack, Simon and me went up the hill to find out where we had landed. But there was nothing, no houses, no smoke, no footprints, no boats, no people. We recognized that we were on a uninhabited island with no people on it.
Officer: Didn’t you have any rules to keep the community together?
Ralph: We only had only one rule, Sir. The boy who held the conch was allowed to talk and all the others had to listen. I never tried to decide on my own, Sir. Everybody could make propositions.
Officer: How did you survive two months on the island?
Ralph: At the beginning we just ate fruits and drank water from a river on the island. After a few days we found out that there were pigs on the island we could hunt. So we appointed some boys to be hunters.
Officer: Were there no other animals on the island?
Ralph: No, Sir. Only some birds, but that was all....