12 August 1603, London outskirts.

My name is Benjamin Buckman and today is my eight birthday. My parents, Rachel Locke and George Buckman, got me a hoop and I really like playing with it. I showed it off to my friends and they were really jealous.

When I was playing on the street about a week ago, I saw lots of rich people coming back from the town centre. When I asked someone why everyone was leaving London, they told me the Plague had struck again and for that reason the Oxford Theatre had been closed. It wasn’t until uncle Timothy visited our farm that I knew why everyone wanted to go to the theatre. A man called Shakespeare, which sounded quite familiar to me, wrote a new play called Hamlet. Not that it really matters to us since we don’t have the money to visit the theatre anyway, and even if we would, no one would be stupid enough to stay in the town centre in times like these. Except for Jacob and David, my older brothers. They decided to visit London a few days ago without asking mum and dad, and he asked me not to tell them, so I didn’t. Jacob never came back, and yesterday, we saw him on top of a pile of dead people on the side of the road along with a sign saying “Danger: Plague”.

Two of the four children of our family died so far. Grace, my younger baby sister, died about a year ago because of unknown reasons. David came back from London a few days ago in seemingly perfect health. He said he and Jacob got separated when they reached London and he was able to live with and work for a wealthy family while he had no idea where Jacob ended up, who died a bit later as I mentioned before. The money David makes allows us to fix up our house and replace the wood with stone since David is our only income ever since dad lost his hand after an accident during an amateur cock fighting match.

That’s all what happened so far. I hope David doesn’t get sick too because I wouldn’t like it if he died too because I wouldn’t have any brothers left. I hope I can work too soon so I can help mum and dad improving our farm so the rain doesn’t pour through the roof so they are sick less often. Can you come over soon again uncle Timothy so you can help me write down more things in my diary? Thank you.

Benjamin Buckman signing off.

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This text was written for an assignment for my English class where we had to write a "diary entry" for someone in the times of Shakespeare and each student was given a role, mine being a boy of an average-poor family. I decided to post this since this is pretty much the only instance I write a proper "story" in English so any constructive criticism is appreciated I guess.
This text is written in British English. Deal with it.