At 10.30 every morning, after the second lesson of the day, the bell high on the roof of Half Hitch School would chime three times and every class would run outside into the playground that formed a square in the centre of the school buildings and - through a bright tunnel that went under the Academy - a grassy field of hills and slides down one side of the school, too.
Margo and Mohammed were in Mr Bloom’s class and would often play with others from Mr Bloom’s class too, but today they were playing with Abby and Sam from Mrs Kipper’s class. The game they’d invented was putting a hoop on the ground and then throwing or kicking a ball as high as you could and trying to make it land in the - wait… What was that?
The noise of strange sounding plane caused them to look up into the sky. It didn’t sound like most of the jet planes that normally land at Horsmarlonerpool Airport. And it didn’t sound like a helicopter, either. But rather like a lawnmower running at full blast but very far away - as if the plane was just held together with old nails and screws and the little engine was doing everything it could to keep it up in the sky.
But as they watched the plane high up by the clouds, those with very good eyesight could just about see a big door open on one side and then - five skydivers jump out!
The four friends put their hands above their eyes to shield the sunlight and then watched as the divers all fell to earth, floating towards each other, holding hands, and then doing somersaults in mid-air.
After a few seconds, five big orange parachutes danced on a string above the divers, and then opened out into huge canopies. The skydivers now glided around in huge circles, making their way very lightly and very safely towards the ground. But it must have been very windy right up there in the sky because all of a sudden - DISASTER! Two of the divers got too close together and their parachutes got tangled up! Well when parachutes get all twisted and can’t billow in the wind properly they lose all their lift and so the two skydivers quickly tumbled towards the ground in a tangle of straps and orange material and then disappeared out of sight beyond the school buildings.
Margo, Mohammed, Abby and Sam looked at each other in horror. “We’ve got to help!” said Abby.
“We’ve got to check they’re okay!” said Mohammed.
“But where would they have landed?” said Margo.
“It was over that way,” said Sam. “About half a mile or so.”
Then, they heard a dog bark and turned around to see Harriet the school Labrador standing with her front paws on a map.
Mohammed picked it up and unfolded it. He put his finger where Half Hitch School was, and then turned the map in that direction and drew a line with his other finger about half a scale mile which led him to: “Sprivers Wood!” he shouted. “I think they’ve landed in Sprivers Wood!”
Harriet the Labrador barked and then ran towards the school gates. Abby, Mohammed, Sam and Margo followed. Harriet was sort of like a member of staff at Half Hitch now, so if she said it was alright to leave during the middle of the day it was almost like a teacher saying it. And anyway, surely it was important that they went to see if they could find the skydivers and help in any way they could? Surely Mrs Perrinpeas and Mr Bloom and Mrs Kipper would understand that? This was a proper emergency.
Having run as hard and fast as they could, in just under nine minutes they were standing at one of the entrances to Sprivers Wood.
“Should we split up and search?” asked Abby.
“No,” said Margo “Because we’ll never be sure who has looked where. What about we stay in a group, but because there’s four of us; one should look to the north all the time, and one to the east all the time, one to the south all the time and one to the west all the time.”
Harriet the Labrador barked and wagged her tail - it was clear that she thought this was an excellent plan.
They walked into the wood, following one of the many paths that they’d used so many times before, but this time all four had eyes set firmly up in the trees. If the skydivers had crashed here, they would have hit the tops of the trees first, and maybe just stayed there. There was no way that two parachutes - even parachutes that weren’t working properly - could make it through such a thick canopy of branches and leafs.
After walking for over twenty minutes, with Harriet sniffing the ground ahead of them, Margo stopped quickly. “There,” she pointed. Quite a way into the wood from the track, and high in the trees, were the torn remains of two orange parachutes.
The four friends, with Harriet ahead of them, ran into the undergrowth until they were stood at the base of the tree where the parachutes were caught. There was no doubt about it - those were the ones they were looking for because they could see the high branches freshly broken where the impact had taken place. But the skydivers were nowhere to be seen. How could they not be attached to their parachutes, and not be here on the ground either?
Within an hour, everyone from the town had come to Sprivers to help with the search. Sergeant Handle was in charge of operations, and organising different groups to search in different directions. Laura Bora, who runs the airport, was flying her helicopter over the wood to see if she could see the skydivers from there. And Mrs Perrinpeas, the headmistress of Half Hitch, was soon on the scene to see if her four pupils wanted to return to the school.
“If it’s alright, Mrs Perrinpeas,” said Mohammed. “I think we’d like to stay and help. We found the parachutes ourselves, so who knows what else we’ll find.”
Mrs Perrinpeas liked pupils who made a good argument, and so said they could stay. “And you might need these,” she said, and handed them four torches and four warm flasks of tomato soup.
After searching for the pilots all afternoon, it soon began to get dark. And so Margo, Mohammed, Sam and Abby decided to make a camp underneath the tree where the parachutes had crashed and drink their warm tomato soup.
But where could the skydivers be? It didn’t make sense.
Mohammed was staring up into the tree when all of a sudden he stood up and exclaimed: “The branches are broken!”
Margo sighed. “We know the branches are broken, Mohammed. We saw that when we found this spot hours ago.”
“No!” Said Mohammed to the others. “THINK. The branches are broken!”
Suddenly, Abby stood up too. “The branches of a tree in Sprivers Wood got broken! What would happen if we broke a branch in Sprivers Wood? Who would we have to explain that to?”
Now Margo and Sam got to their feet too. “The Bewls!” they said together. “The skydivers will have been taken by the Bewls!”
The Bewls are the tiny creatures that guard Sprivers Wood and make sure that nothing bad ever happens to it. And they wouldn’t know what a parachute was, or how the skydivers didn’t crash on purpose. They would have thought the skydivers were attacking the wood, not falling into it. And you didn’t want to mess around with the Bewls.
“We’ve got to find their camp,” said Margo. But that was not an easy thing to do. The Bewls would move their camp all the time, and the rumor was that the only way to find it was to look up into the trees and follow the direction the branches were swaying.
The four friends walked slowly, their heads held back looking up into the trees to judge which way the topper most branches were swaying towards.
It led them deep, deep into the trees - far from the path - but eventually they found a clearing. And there, sat laughing with thousands of little Bewls around them - were the two Skydivers.
“We’ve been looking for you! ” said Abby. “The whole town’s been looking for you! Are you okay?”
“Oh, yes!” said the first skydiver, whose name was Chia. Then, the second skydiver, whose name was Michael spoke too. “We’ve just been telling our new friends here about the time we skydived from a plane onto a ship.”
The Bewls all clapped excitedly. Then Chia said “But I suppose, if people are really worried, we really should be getting home. If,” and she looked at all the thousands of Bewls. “If that’s okay with all of you? And, sorry again about the tree.”
All the Bewls waved happily. They’d enjoyed the stories very much indeed, and there’s really nothing that Bewls like more than a story.
After the skydivers had been reunited with their team and Sergeant Handle had called off the search, she turned to Margo, Mohammed, Sam and Abby. “You four did very good police work today,” she said. “What would you like as your reward?”
The four of them thought.
“There is one thing we’d like,” said Sam.
The next morning as everyone arrived at Half Hitch school they were told to head to the Main Hall for a special assembly. And there, instead of morning lessons, all the pupils and teachers sat and listened as the team of five skydivers told them stories about skydiving all over the world.
And at half past ten, the bell high on the roof of the school chimed three times - which meant that it was time for break again.
