County Clare 2020:
A Day in My Life
Creative Writing Competition for children and teenagers
Highly Commended 10 to 12 category
Clare 2020, A Day in My Life - The
Treasure Hunt
by Eva Kidney
Life is different at the moment as we must all stay at home. School and training and music is done online and mum and dad are downloading and uploading lots of work to keep us busy. I miss my friends and facetime is good but not the same as when we meet at school.
Mum has made a list of all the jobs to keep Dad and us busy and the list seems to be getting longer not shorter. Last Saturday dad was out in the shed as he decided that it was time to tidy it out. I was keen to help him so he could finish early and play a game of my favourite game, UNO.
Dad had already cleared the front of the shed and me being a mini detective decided to head down the back to see if I could spot anything useful. As I was searching, I found a few things left by the old owners of our house like an old teapot, a shovel and even an old clown outfit … scary. None of those items took my fancy so I kept searching. I kept rummaging through old boxes but I couldn’t find anything I liked. I was just about to give up when I spotted an unusual box sitting in the corner.
I opened the lid carefully, unsure what could be inside. ‘Could it
be an old diary’ I thought to myself
‘maybe even the Queen’s jewels (like I read in Gangsta Granny)’.
Inside this box was an old map and a letter. I opened the map and tried to
read the letter but the writing was faded it said ‘I have looked here
and I have looked there and I know that the treasure is somewhere. If you
are smart and solve the clue you could find some too.’
I showed the map to my dad but he was too busy surrounded by lots of junk and trying to put what was useful away. My sisters were more interested and when they read about the treasure we decided that we had to hunt it down.
We turned the map this way and that way and eventually it looked right and familiar as I recognised the old oak tree in the middle. It was our garden and the fields around us which made us more excited - could there be treasure on our doorstep.
What would we do … Disneyland Orlando, a trip to New York, tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Our list of how to spend the treasure was getting longer and longer.
The first x on the map was a ruin in the field behind us and a clue – pull a brick that has the date find the clue behind the plate. We searched around the ruin and tried different bricks but nothing moved. Then my sister spotted a brick with 1848 written on it, the year the building was built. We pulled and pushed so excited and then found another note ‘I am big and red and not quite dead but smaller now as the wind broke my head. In the middle on the ground the treasure could be found’.
That was easy. It was the redwood tree in the next field that had partly blown over many years ago and we ran over to it. The bottom had two trunks with a gap in the middle and we decided that this must be where the treasure was.
We ran home for a shovel and wondered would we need help to carry all the treasure home. We dug and found a small metal box … that really did not look very old and inside was €5 and a note. It was written by a girl called Mary who used to live in our house and she had found the map but could not find any treasure but decided to leave €5 for the next treasure hunter.
Running home we finished the note – Mary wrote hope you had fun and buy some ice-cream. It was a great afternoon and we would wait till after lockdown to spend our treasure.
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