The Lost Continent (an extract)

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 755.

Unit 2. Travelling

B. Underline sentences where the Past Tenses are used. Explain their function.

My father was born in Iowa[1], and lived there all his life, but every year he used to get a mad uncontrollable desire to go out of the state and go on vacation. Every summer, he used to pack everything into the car, including my mother, my sister and I, and drive for miles and miles through the states of America to some distant point. Every year it was the same. Every year it was awful.

The worst thing for us children was the boredom. Iowa is 1,000 miles from the sea, 400 miles from the nearest mountain, and 300 miles from skyscrapers or anything of interest. We used to drive for miles with nothing to see out of the window except fields. The only exciting thing we ever saw were billboards.

American highways used to be full of them, advertising anything from milk to a bowling alley and often some coming attraction, like the magic words VISIT SPOOK CAVERNS! OKLAHOMA'S GREAT FAMILY ATTRACTION! JUST 69 MILES! As soon as we saw one like this, we children would begin suggesting that we stop and have a look, taking it in turns to say, in a sincere and moving way, 'Oh please Dad, oh pleeeease.'

My father's reaction was always perfectly predictable, and was always the same. First he said, 'No, because it's too expensive, and anyway your behaviour since breakfast has been disgraceful.' A few miles later he changed, and asked my mother in a quiet voice what she thought of the idea (she never gave her opinion). Then he ignored us for a few miles, hoping that we would forget about it. Then he changed again and said that perhaps we could go. Then he changed back to 'Definitely no!' (because we had started fighting), until he finally said, 'All right. We'll go.' It was always the same. He always said 'yes' in the end. I never understood why he didn't just say 'yes' in the first place and save himself thirty minutes of arguing. But he always had the last word. 'We're only going to stay for half an hour. And you're not going to buy anything. Is that clear?' This seemed to make him feel that he was in control.

When we found them at last, Spook Caverns turned out to be an enormous disappointment. The only possible compensation was to buy a plastic knife and a bag of plastic dinosaurs in the gift shop. So, as the sun went down and my father realized that it was now late, and going to be difficult to find a room for the night, we children spent the time in the back of the car having noisy and aggressive fights, only stopping at intervals to cry, accuse each other of injuries, and complain of hunger, boredom and the need for the toilet. It was a kind of living hell. There aren't any billboards along the highways any more. What a sad loss!