Andrew Livingstone
We had been looking forward to this day all school year. The day that my grandparents took me and my four year old sister Kirsty to New Brighton. We had never been there before, it was a beautiful beach I thought when we arrived, but now that thought had been turned on its head. Suddenly my grandparents seemed to disappear, they were there as we were happily playing a minute ago, but then I turned back to look at them and they had both disappeared. This was quite a lot of anxiety and stress for six year old me and Kirsty, apart from each other we were completely alone in this unknown place apart from a lot of strangers which, to us, looked like big scary giants but it was up to us, we had to find and rescue our grandparents. The time had come for us to be real life superheroes!
Kirsty was very upset, I looked at her and could tell she was about to cry. I thought I should try to distract her as we didn’t want to draw attention from any of the big scary giants, I sang her favourite song, Old McDonald Had A Farm, and that seemed to do the trick and she calmed down and the scary giants didn’t seem to notice us.
I took her hand and we started to make our way through as much of the crowd as we could. All we could seem to see was sand and feet and legs which to us may as well have been trees, they seemed that tall. I was pushing through the crowd with one hand while still making sure that I had hold of Kirsty’s with the other, the day looked like it was going to be biggest adventure of our young lives. I just kept thinking of all of my favourite superheroes and was telling myself now was my time to join their ranks as I’d seen them rescue people lots of times.
We finally got through the crowd, the first thing we noticed was a big ship like thing and right next to it is what looked like bunch of pirates – we were too far away to tell for sure – but it all started to make sense to me; the pirates must have taken our grandparents.
They were right on the other side of the beach, so we needed to find a way to get a better look at them. Luckily we came across a blue telescope that was on a platform, there was a few on these dotted around New Brighton beach, and we decided to use it.
We had never seen any pirates in person before, only on TV. They looked so much more frightening in person, they were all really tall, wearing hats, all with beards and wearing black pants and red tops and big black boots, and some of them had eye patches they looked like they were all singing and dancing together and waving pieces of paper around. I thought to myself, pirates love maps, I’ve never seen a pirate on TV that doesn’t love them, so that paper that they are waving around while singing and dancing so happily will probably show us where they have put the people they have kidnapped including our grandparents.
Kirsty and I agreed that had to be what was on the paper. We were both nervous and excited to find a way to get hold of that paper, the pirates were so far away from us. We climbed down from the small platform and started to run as fast and far as our little legs would take us.
We bumped into another couple of kids who were running the opposite direction to us, I said, “hey, watch where you are going kid,” to the boy.
He replied, “I’m sorry but me and my sister have lost our grandparents we think something has happened to them.”
I told him we were doing the same thing and that we were heading towards the pirates. I explained about the maps that would hopefully lead to our grandparents. I asked him if they wanted to team up with us, he said that would be a good idea and, “we can find all of our grandparents and all be superheroes together.”
He said his name was Adam and that was his younger sister was called Sharon, it turned out that he was the same age as me and Sharon was the same age as Kirsty so we all matched up really well.
I was telling Adam about how Kirsty and I were not from the area so we had been struggling to find our way around the beach to find our grandparents, but he didn’t think that would be an issue for us anymore as he and Sharon had been to New Brighton beach a few times.
As the pirates were still far away from us Adam suggested that instead of going all the way through the crowds on the prom we could go through the park as we were near it and could use it as a good shortcut to get much closer to the pirates.
We walked through the park gates, I looked around and it looked like the biggest park I had ever seen, there was trees as far as my eyes could see and right in front of us was some climbing frames. I asked him whether he was sure this was a shortcut and he said he had been through this park many times and that I should just follow his lead and we would be okay.
We followed Adam, zigzagging our way through the park. Through our journey we went past ice cream vans, people walking their dogs, a big group of people exercising, and a busy playground and a massive cafe, I was amazed about how big this park was.
Even though Adam told us he knew the way we ended up getting lost for a bit. We must have passed that cafe three or four times and we started to panic.
I shouted at Adam, “you shouldn’t have told us you knew the way and it was a shortcut. If we had gone along the prom we would have reached the pirates by now!”
He apologised saying he was sure the park was different to how he remembered it and that they had put some new things in but, as he was just about to finish his sentence, Kirsty interrupted and pointed. We couldn’t believe it, we were near the exit gates!
Adam and I apologised to each other and we all ran as fast as we could out of the gate, we knew we didn’t have long left to reach the pirates and rescue our grandparents.
As we got out of the park there was a big crowd of people between us and the pirates, we thought that was typical of our luck so far.
I took hold of Kirsty’s hand and Adam took hold of Sharon’s and we started to make our way through the crowd, pushing and ducking and diving until we saw a gap of light.
We ran towards it only to find that we had accidentally come out the same way we went in, we were frustrated at the thought of this setback until we saw there was a space on the side that we hadn’t noticed before so we followed it round, and, as we turned the corner, we could see the pirate ship.
We thought, ‘finally it was the moment we had been working towards all day, we were hopefully going to find our grandparents here.’
As we got closer we could see the pirates were standing in front of the ship and still holding the paper which we were sure was the map that would lead us to where they had put our grandparents.
We noticed they were holding a big pile of papers now whereas before we were sure that they only had one. Some of the papers had blown away from them and where all over the floor so we picked some up. There were pictures on them we had not seen before and we were trying to figure out what it meant when all of sudden we heard voices call out our names and we turned around and all of our grandparents were standing there with tears in their eyes. They ran over and hugged us all and said they had been looking for us which we were really surprised about as we had been doing the same for them.
We wondered what had happened to them if they hadn’t been kidnapped, we didn’t have to wonder for long as they said they just went to get us some ice cream when we were on the beach earlier and when they came back we were gone.
I thought well if that was true the only thing left unanswered was what was the paper that we thought was a map. I showed my grandparents the paper and they said, “oh we didn’t know you wanted to go this new pirate themed restaurant that has not long opened.” They checked the time and decided that as we had all had a big adventure and used a lot of energy that day we should all go for tea in this new restaurant as a treat.