HAL: Stories

The four: Abigail, Mary, Amelie and Rupert all offer to help on a Guide outward bound trip. Fifteen eleven to fourteen year olds learning to sail, rock climb and walk in the rugged hills. Rupert only came in at the last minute, he'd have to share. But who with?

The two schools had always had a friendly rivalry, as time went on the 'friendly' reduced and the 'rivalry' increased. The plan by three boys would take it to a whole new level. Even the head of St Benedicts plausible deniability would not protect him or his school if it all went wrong. Luckily Duncan, the head boy of St. Bs, was already showing his skills in careful and failsafe planning.

A ghost walk with a difference. I would have submitted this to the competition, but unfortunately not everybody is over eighteen.

The idea for this came to me when we really did pull into a very odd border station between Germany and France. My family are nothing like this, I just thought 'what if' and the started constructing it in my head.

The Green Guard are the elite of soldiers of the kingdom. They have a fierce code of honour that none may undermine, even accidentally. Societies have to change in upheavals like war, and even disgraced Green Guards may get a second chance.

The Duke's second daughter is proud, wilful and difficult - not unlike the Duke. So rescuing her from the invading army was always going to be trouble, but then he could hardly leave her; the Earl's army would happily have added her to all the other women that they would misuse abominably.

The early days of computing were like the wild west. It was an exciting time and the practitioners were regarded as special, geniuses at this new art. This is a true(?) story from that time.

An attempt at presenting Joseph's story. Joseph was a working man, a carpenter. An attempt to bring the story into more realistic tones than the myth-making carols we have.

The Admirable Crichton is a play by the same man who wrote Peter Pan. It concerns a butler who is admirable in every respect, including survival when the family he works for are shipwrecked. He does take one of the daughters as a mate (at least in the film – 1957, Kenneth More), but that is all skated over. This is a slightly different version.

He stopped to help a girl who had slid off the road, and found himself drawn into a party that was a hang over from the hedonist days of the 1920s.