Jake's Magical Easter Adventure: Jake's Big Adventures, #1

By J. William Turner

Australian boy Jake is nine years-old and lives in a seaside town called Coconut.

 

Jake spends his Easter holiday with a backpack exploring his home-town and the world beyond, where he meets very strange people, before joining up with two aboriginal friends, Ben and Ken. They hike into mystical coastal mountains to discover a fantasy world with amazing wildlife.

While sleeping in a beach hut, an angry giant mud crab with huge claws walks out of the sea looking for tasty morsels to eat.

Jake suddenly wakes up in bed at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. William Turner
• Release date: Aug 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781466047105

J. William Turner

J. William Turner (aka James Turner) was born in Reading, England, forty miles west of London, in the late 1950's, and migrated with his family to south-eastern Australia in the mid 1960's. The youngest of three children James spent the last seven years of his education at a boys' private school in the coastal city of Geelong. During his time here, he became a senior N.C.O. in the school's army cadet unit, having undergone basic, practical military training for promotion, on a regular army base for two weeks in 1971, as a fourteen-year-old, at the end of the nineth grade. After finishing the twelfth grade, he attended university to study science, but discontinued his course after two years. In the early 1980's James gained his private pilot licence, was a volunteer operational member of St John Ambulance for ten years, and travelled to many parts of inland Australia and overseas, including two visits to the U.S.A.. He also penned the initial draft of Storm Ridge, the first of the four installments of Dangerous Days, in 1979, loosely based on a similar school hike he did in 1970 as an eighth-grader. Later, in 1989, Paddle Hard was drafted, based on an actual murder in Geelong in the mid 1970's, and his own experience at canoeing. Another ten years later, he drafted Outback Heroes after several visits to several parts of the vast Australian outback. Enemies Within was written just four years afterwards to give closure to the unanswered questions in Outback Heroes, and is set back in London, near to his ancestral roots. James has always liked putting pen to paper, and has had two articles published in Australian aviation magazines (1996 and 2008). Over a six-month period from January to June, 2004, James wrote the first three stories of another, four-part, fictional autobiography, yet to be published, entitled Blades, about the traumatic and difficult teenage years of a 'top-gun' helicopter pilot named Julian. Set in the late 1990's, in Darwin, Melbourne, the central Australian outback, and southern California, Blades also reinroduces the three main child characters from Dangerous Days, now adults aged in their late-twenties, and their relationship with Julian. These three stories are entitled Street Kid, High Country, and California Dreaming. The final story, Aftermath, was completed in two-and-a-half months just midway through 2008, to bring Julian's life story almost to the present day.

Book preview

GOOD FRIDAY (Morning)

The sun was already high in the sky when Jake found himself suddenly awake.

No school for two weeks, he said happily. This is going to be so cool! But what should I do?

After thinking quietly for a few seconds, Jake had a really good idea.

I know, I’ll go on a long walk, an Easter adventure, to see the world and all its silly people, he thought.

So he found his hiking rucksack in the bottom of the bedroom wardrobe. Into the rucksack he put a tent, sleeping bag, box of matches, a water bottle, fishing line plus hooks and sinkers, and extra clothes. But he did not pack any food. He wanted to try living off the land, but eat ‘take-away’ if he couldn’t find any food in the forest. In his pants pocket, he had all of the money he had saved in six months from his weekly allowance.

Before leaving home, Jake made himself breakfast. He ate an emu egg on toast, four large wattle-seed biscuits covered with sweet sherbet powder and milk from a water buffalo. With his meal, he drank a glass of wild blackberry juice.

When his tummy was full, he stepped out through the front door, and set off on his long walk.

Away in the distance, he saw a huge black cloud. A big tropical rainstorm was coming, and the church bells rang to tell everyone. But Jake did not worry. The rain would give his mango and paw-paw trees a good watering.

A minute later, he saw a man, wearing a big hat, hitting the trunk of a palm tree with a plastic toy baseball bat. The palm tree was full of sleeping fruit bats.