How I Spent My Summer Holiday

It is with a sense of despair that I faced the prospect of keeping a weekly journal throughout my summer holidays. I really don’t think it is fair for the teachers to assign homework over the summer. But my parents say it’s good for me, and they are going to want to read it when we go home. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read something so boring. What happened today changed everything.

We found a skeleton! My sister and I. We found a real, live skeleton! Well not exactly live, because all that is left Is bones and a few tattered remnants of clothing, but it is a human skeleton. The police are out there. They won’t let us watch. They say we have to stay in the house so as to not the compromise the evidence, whatever that means. Grandma suggested I may as well start on this while I have the chance. I’ll bet no one else in the class will have a real skeleton mentioned in their diary!

Grandma just read this over and suggested I should start at the beginning. I suppose she’s right. Kind of like lying down a scene in a movie so you know where you are. So here goes.

We are spending the summer with my grandparents in Fernwood Manor. The “we” is just my sister and I, not my parents. Both Mom and Dad are working from home now, because of Covid-19. They both have major projects to complete for their companies this summer so they won’t have the time to pay attention to us kids. Now, I don’t think that matters much. I mean, we are old enough to look after ourselves. I certainly can keep myself entertained with my X-box. But that wasn’t good enough for them. Nope. They had to drop us here, way out in the country, as far away from our friends and real civilization as possible.

My grandparents own Fernwood Manor. They are my dad’s parents. The house has been in our family forever, I guess. No one likes to talk much about it, but Grandpa says it was built by my great great great great grandfather after he made a lot of money selling ammunition during the first world war. Not something to be proud of, I guess. They say he was the one of the lucky ones who survived the flu of 1918, which I guess was much like covid-19. After he got over it, he decided to buy land out in the country and build this house to protect himself and his family.

Fernwood Manor is not huge, like a mansion or a castle, or anything like it. It is bigger than most houses and it does have lots of land around it. Grandpa and Grandma are retired and spend most of their time working in the gardens. They are huge! They grow all their own vegetables and fruits. There are also lots of different flower beds and grass and trees. They wanted us to help in the gardens, but when Isabelle pulled up almost a whole row of carrots instead of weeds, they decided it wasn’t a great decision. I’m glad.

The house comes down through my grandmother’s family. She was the only child in her family that survived the polio epidemic in the fifties. It wasn’t a big epidemic like covid-19 is, but lots of people died then too. Most of them were children. Grandma had a sister and a brother, who both died before they even got to go to school. There is a huge portrait of them with my grandmother in Grandpa’s study. It hangs over the fireplace. They look happy in the picture. I guess it was taken before they got polio.

Grandma laughs and says Grandpa only married her to get the house and the land. He looks very sad when she says that. It’s almost like he’s not good enough for her. At least his family didn’t make their money selling bullets.

Life has been pretty boring this week. In the beginning we spent our time exploring the house, listening to Grandma and Grandpa tell stories and playing Chinese Checkers on a big, round, metal board that is probably as old as this house. I must admit, I was getting pretty good at playing that game. You have to plan your moves, right from the beginning. They soon got tired of entertaining us and headed back to their gardens. We were finally free to do what we want on our own This kept us busy for a couple of days, but even that was getting boring.

There is a huge wall of trees on the north side of the house. Grandpa told me they are Lombardy poplars that he planted because they grow so tall and so straight. They have been growing for so many years that you cannot even see through them now, much let get between them. I have never seen anything like them before. Anyway, we were amusing ourselves by playing tag and Isabelle was trying to get away from me when she saw a small break in this wall and crawled through it.

“Simon” she yelled from the other side. “Simon, can you get through too? There is something I want you to see.”

I scrunched myself together and managed to wiggle through the hole. And there, on the other side of the trees, was a barn. It was old. It was run down. It looked like no one had had anything to do with it for years.

Isabelle turned and looked at me, her eyes shining with excitement. “We can use it for a playhouse!”

“It’s pretty big for a playhouse, but let’s check it out.”

And so we did. Now I don’t know a lot about barns, but it looked pretty regular to me. There were stalls with mangers to put the hay in. Not the kind of mangers you see at Christmas, but ones that ran the whole length of the stall. There were posts sticking out from the beams with things hanging on them. Halters, I think, and ropes and an old rusty pail. A door opened into a room on one side of the barn. It was a real mess. Piles of boards were lying on the floor and leaning up against the walls. A three-legged stool was lying near the door, upside down, with its legs sticking up in the air. We didn’t know what it was until we flipped it over. Isabelle decided it would be her first piece of furniture for her playhouse. She hoped grandma would let her bring more furniture down from the attic in the house. I didn’t say anything, but I wondered how she thought she could bring anything through that small hole we had crawled through.

A ladder was nailed to the wall at the back of the barn with a hole above to the hayloft. I climbed up. When I got to the top, I found I was standing beside a huge open space in the wall. Wooden doors stood ajar. I pushed them open. I could see far across the countryside. These were likely all the fields my dad had told us about.

I turned away from the door and looked at the loft. It was empty. You could see the sky through the roof in lots of places and it looked like a lot of the floorboards had holes in them. I didn’t go far. I didn’t want to fall through.

As I turned to climb down the ladder, I saw a rope and pully hooked up to the wall beside me it. It kind of looked like a swing so I thought I would try it out. I grabbed it and swung down through the hole. It was a mistake. The rope was old and broke as soon as I put my weight on it. I went flying through the air and crashed into a pile of boards leaning against the corner of a stall.

I didn’t hurt myself. I’m much too tough for that, but Isabelle came running over to see if I was okay. That’s when she saw it. The skeleton, I mean. It had been hidden behind the boards and now it was lying in pieces before us. We stared at it in horror for a few seconds. Then I grabbed her hand and we ran as fast as we could back to the hole in the wall of trees.

Grandma said we were both screaming. I don’t believe her. I am far too mature to do something like that. But I do know that Isabelle was. And so, when we got through the hole, my grandparents were there, waiting for to us to tell then what happened.

To be continued….