The Secret Series
Off for the Holidays
One morning, at the beginning of the summer holidays, four children sat in an express train, feeling tremendously excited.
“Now we’re really off!” said Mike. “My word - think of it - two months in a little house by the sea! Bathing, paddling, fishing, boating - what fun we shall have!”
“All the same, I wish Mummy and Daddy were coming with us,” said Nora, Mike’s twin sister. “I shall miss them - especially after being away at school all term, and only seeing them once.”
“Well, they couldn’t take the whole lot of us with them on their lecture tour!” said Peggy sensibly. “They will join us at Spiggy Holes as soon as they can.”
“Spiggy Holes! Doesn’t that sound an exciting name for a holiday place?” said Jack. “Spiggy Holes - I wonder why it’s called that. I suppose there are holes or caves or something.”
The four children had come home from school the day before. Nora and Peggy had arrived back from their girls’ school, and Mike and Jack from their boys’ school. They had spent the night at home with their father and mother, and now they were off, all alone, to Spiggy Holes.
Jack was the most excited of the four, for he had never been to the sea before! He was not really the brother of Mike, Nora, and Peggy, and had no father and mother of his own.
But the children’s parents had taken him for their own child, because he had helped Mike, Peggy, and Nora so much when they had run away from an unkind aunt and uncle. Captain Arnold, the children’s father, had left them at a farm with his sister, whilst he and his wife had tried to fly to Australia in an aeroplane.