T hief at S ea!
For the real Tommy and Sylvia - Momma and Grandad. Miss you every day.
First published in the UK in 2025 by Usborne Publishing Limited, Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England, usborne.com
Usborne Verlag, Usborne Publishing Limited, Prüfeninger Str. 20, 93049 Regensburg, Deutschland VK Nr. 17560
Text copyright © Emma Swan, 2025
The right of Emma Swan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover and inside illustrations by Katie Saunders © Usborne Publishing Limited, 2025
Photo of Emma Swan © Matt Nalton
The name Usborne and the Balloon logo are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Limited.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems (including for text or data mining), stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781835409954 9965/1 JFMA JJASOND/25
Printed and bound using 100% renewable energy at CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY.
CAKE
Living on a cruise ship is like living inside a cake. A cake that floats on the sea. Everything is piled on top of the other but lucky for us the ship is built from stronger stuff than cake mixture, otherwise we’d sink. Try it next time you get a cake – drop it in the bath and see what happens.
JOKES. Do not do that, or at least don’t say I told you to…
CANDLE: The funnel of the ship is the chimney and it makes me think of a giant candle that I would 10/10 NOT recommend you try to blow out!
ICING: The top of the ship is flat and smooth, like icing. It is also decorated a lot with little flags because “Top Deck ” is where the parties happen.
SPONGE: The passenger cabins are the plain layers. I’m giving the passengers the boring bit because they like to
complain A LOT (often to my mum when she is working), even though they are on holiday. My mum smiles and smiles as Grumpy Gwendolen tells her that her “holiday was better 50 years ago” or that she “could make a better 6-course meal at home”. I think, Why are you complaining – you’re supposed to be having fun? So yeah, the passengers in their cabins are definitely the sponge.
JAM
AND
CREAM: In between the sponge layers, the delicious sticky filling is all the fun things to do. Onboard our ship we have 9 shops, a theatre, stairs for sick-bag Olympics (I’ll tell you about this later!), a cinema, an indoor waterfall to drop things down, 5 cafes, 12 chandeliers, 4 restaurants and a buffet where you can eat as much as you like. Sometimes, on special occasions (when Mum isn’t working), I go to the cinema when the passengers are on a trip ashore and Mum and I have the whole place to ourselves. I move seats throughout the film to find the best view, which I think annoys Mum a bit, but as long as I don’t run she says she doesn’t mind.
THE PLATE: The crew area, where I live, is the shiny plate that the cake sits on. That’s because most of the crew live at the bottom of the ship in their cabins. Some passengers treat us like we are lower down than them and they are my least favourite kinds of people.
Our ship has 14 decks (so it’s 14 floors high!). There are 6 hot tubs and 3 swimming pools onboard, but I don’t go anywhere near pools, especially if other kids are in them… Anyway, my name is Silver, I’m 10 and a ¼, and I live in a floating cake, also known as a big cruise ship called Potentia. I nearly forgot to tell you my name because I have to introduce myself to the frowning passengers
ALL OF THE TIME. “Hello, lovely to meet you. I’m Silver, Deputy Cruise Director Jane’s daughter. I’m nearly 11… Silver…SILVER!!” (Most of them can’t hear very well.)
“Yes, the colour… Yes, it is a real name.” So let’s skip that and play a game instead.
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
(Mum says I should say fib rather than “lie” but I don’t think two truths and a fib is very catchy.)
I’ll say three “facts” about myself – two are true and one is A LIE!!!! (Sorry, Mum!)
1. I have been around the world (the whole way around) 8 times.
2. I have been stung by a jellyfish.
3. After silver, my favourite colour is pink.
Which do you think is the lie?
1, 2 or 3…?
Don’t look… until… you’ve… GUESSED!
The LIE is that after silver (obviously the best colour), my favourite colour is pink. It isn’t pink, it’s green, like grass. Definitely not blue, there’s too much of that around me. Imagine waking up and looking outside of your porthole and you just see blue. So yes, I’ve been around the world 8 times and been stung by a jellyfish (and if you have heard about jellyfish, NO, NOBODY
WEED ON ME TO MAKE IT BETTER
, but it did hurt
A LOT
.)
Please write in this and tell me about yourself too. Yeeesss, you can write in this book! (Or if you’re borrowing this from a friend (JEALOUS) or a library, write your answers on a bit of paper.)
Go on, write two truths and one lie about YOU on the next page. Then I’ll try and guess.
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE
1. ............................................................................................................
2. ...........................................................................................................
3. ...........................................................................................................
We need to get to know each other, you see, because, well, I hope you don’t mind but I’m sort of using you as a practice.
I’ve never had a best friend for longer than two weeks and two days and I really want one.
A full-time one.
THE GANG
Old people love cruises. Seriously. There is a group of old people that seem to always be on the ship, and they call themselves “The Gang”. I find this HILARIOUS because they are the least scary Gang ever.
You see, I do have some friends. The trouble is they are all over 80. I know I said that the passengers are grumpy –and it’s true, loads of them are – but some of the very old ones are actually alright.
MEET THE GANG
Gwendolen, 85 - the grump. EXCEPT when she is watching football and then she jumps around cheering at the TV like the players can hear her.
Abdul, 84 – if old people could be cool, I suppose Abdul would be. He used to be an actor when he was young and people sometimes recognize him. He can also do a trick with his hands and pull half of his thumb off – like this.
Elvira, 81 – calls herself my “Glamma” (Glamorous Grandma). She wears leopard print or sequins everywhere, including to the pool.
Tommy, 82, and Sylvia, 80 – they have been married for 60 years and still like each other (WOAH). Sometimes they even wear matching outfits.
Sylvia loves them and Tommy says he does too (whenever he knows Sylvia is listening...).
Betty, 99 – can knit with her eyes closed AND SHE
TURNS
100 NEXT CRUISE!!! I’ve checked and her birthday is Day 9 out of 13. I’ve been planning what we should do to celebrate for ages. My first ideas were:
1. Jet-skiing around the ship, OR
2. Throwing 100 birthday water balloons off Top Deck.
But Betty said this all sounds too “active” and she’s happy sitting down with tea and a slice of cake. Zzzzzzz.
BACK-TO-BACK
Most passengers come onboard for one cruise. That might be 10 days sailing around the Mediterranean, 16 days in
the Caribbean or 110 days cruising across the world, but they come onboard for ONE holiday…
The Gang aren’t like most passengers. They pretty much live full-time onboard and book back-to-back cruises.
Sometimes they will leave the ship for a bit, to stay with their families, but The Gang all decided to sell their “on-land homes” to live at sea! I think this decision is 100% because they can’t bear to leave me (and not at all to do with the back-to-back cruise discount Tommy likes to brag about!).
HOW I GOT OLD PEOPLE FRIENDS
Abdul, Elvira, Betty and Gwendolen all met onboard over 20 years ago. At the beginning of every cruise there is a meeting for passengers who are travelling alone. It’s called the SOLO GET-TOGETHER. Abdul had lost his wife, Betty had lost her husband, Gwendolen had lost her girlfriend and Elvira had lost many, many husbands. So they all went to this meeting. (When they first told me how many people they’d lost, I thought they must be
SO forgetful, until I realized this is the old-person way of saying died.)
They became friends at the Solo Get-Together so they called themselves The Solo Gang. But then, a few months later, Sylvia and Tommy tagged along (they don’t like it when I say that) and so they changed their name to The Solo Gang. The Gang have been sailing together as one group ever since!
Okay, so now the most important bit…
I met The Gang when I was 3. I don’t know if I can remember this or if I’ve just heard them tell me the story a lot. You know when that happens?
Anyway, The Gang were playing Giant Chess on the aft end of Top Deck. Tommy was just about to make his winning move and suddenly I toddled right into the middle of their game, knocking over their giant pieces and said, “Can I play?”
Follow the arrow to find out what “aft” means
And I became The Gang’s final member.
US NOW!
7 and a ¼ years later and we still go to the aft end of Top Deck every Thursday but to play deck quoits instead. (They don’t trust me near the chess!) Deck quoits is a sport where you throw rope rings and try to get them into white circles on the deck. It sounds boring but it’s actually quite fun and I am really good at it when nobody is watching.
This is a deck QUOIT – sounds like KITE if you had a strong Irish accent.
If you don’t, sorry, that’s not helpful.
Mum says playing deck quoits counts towards my PE, which is great because it gets me out of schoolwork and it means I don’t have to go on a deck run that day. Running round and round the deck makes me dizzy because you go in a big loop, breathing in the salty smell. This is only cool if you see dolphins, which does happen, but not often. When it does, I don’t make a fuss about it. If somebody shouts, “Dolphins!” all the passengers spill over to that side of the ship and I get crushed. So, when I see them on my run, I feel like they’ve just come to say hello to me. Their fins pop up out of the waves as if to shout…
Of course, I would never ever jump in the sea to join them. I do NOT swim and jumping into the ocean from a ship is literally the most
Why are you running? That looks hard, dive in and join us.
dangerous thing you can do. Someone pushing me overboard (or into any water) is my biggest fear, but I don’t think crimes like that would ever happen on the ship.
Mum says if grown-ups are really badly behaved onboard they are locked in The Security Room until the police come to get them when we get back to Southampton. I’ve never seen that happen, though, and I have never been in the Security Room but it’s on deck 2 and it sounds scary.
I’ve been pretty much everywhere else onboard though.
The good thing about living on a ship is FREEDOM. My mum is the kind of mum who, when we go ashore, would like to tie me to her like a puppy on a lead.
Don’t walk too far. I’ll take you.
Will there be an adult to supervise?
Yet on the ship, I’m allowed to go anywhere (before 7 p.m., 8 on weekends). So it’s like I have my own mini, floating town to explore all by myself!
It hasn’t always been this way. Before I turned 10, when Mum was working, she would drop me off with different members of my ship family to look after me. Thankfully, now I’m in double figures I can go around on my own. She probably thinks if someone steals me they can’t take me very far – unless they hired a rowing boat, buuuuut we won’t mention that to Mum.
Anyway, this afternoon with The Gang was seeeeeriously windy and when Gwendolen threw a deck quoit, her cap blew off. I sprinted after it and caught its red brim before it went into the sea. WINNER. A big hazard to living onboard is that when the weather is bad lots can blow into the water. I’ve lost pages and pages of homework…
If you’re thinking, Why does Silver have homework when she doesn’t go to school? I’m thinking exactly the same thing. I ask my mum all the time why I can’t just chill and have screen time all day, but apparently being homeschooled or, as I call it, “ship-schooled” is important.
It’s not too bad. Amandeep, the ship’s librarian and my
teacher, lets me use a laptop in the library for a lot of the day and sometimes I can sneak onto a game of “Zap the Lizard” when she thinks I’m revising my “qu” words. I can always get away with quite a lot when the library is quiet and a passenger is enquiring about a book…
Zap zap zap :)
I do learn things too. Last week we were doing similes. I used it on you, did you notice? At the very start I said living on a cruise ship is like living inside a cake. BOOM! SMASHED IT. I was trying to show off to make you want to be my friend. Did it work? Anyway, trust me, smiles similes took me ages to understand until Amandeep said I could use food to compare things to, and now I like them.
Staying up late is like going to the chocolate buffet.
Going to Kids Club is like eating sprouts dipped in sick with a crispy bogey coating. (Amandeep wasn’t a fan of this one but I think it’s my best work!)
Tomorrow it is TURN AROUND DAY. This has nothing to
do with people spinning and is actually the day where one cruise ends and another begins. Passengers who have finished their holiday get off in the morning and the new passengers, who are starting theirs, get on in the afternoon. The Gang, me, Mum and all the rest of the staff just stay where we are and watch sad faces leaving the ship and excited ones getting onboard.
Tomorrow is also the start of the first summer holiday cruise and that is the worst time of my life. In the summer I don’t have to do schoolwork any more, but I still have to do extra music and PE. (I seriously get away with nothing onboard.)
For PE I have “Kind Pete”. He is a big man, both ways, but he is SO speedy. He does deck runs with me and shouts, “Hurry up, Silver star, I’m racing you to our next port.”
I like Pete and so do the passengers. He often joins us for deck quoits on a Thursday and makes The Gang laugh with his bad jokes.
“Why do seagulls fly over the ocean?”
Keep going!
“Because if they flew over the bay, we’d call them bagels.”
Gwendolen always laughs at Pete’s jokes and this afternoon she did a big snort at this one. This made me giggle (not the joke – sorry, Pete) and she glared at me.
seagull bagel
“We’ll be missing you tomorrow, Silver, won’t we? You won’t be hanging around with our Gang when all the kiddies your own age get onboard.”
I let go of her cap, that I had SO kindly saved, and it blew off the aft end and into the sea. Whoops.
WAIT WAIT WAIT. Sometimes I use words that land people miiiiight not use (that’s you by the way – people who live on land). Just in case, I’ll put them here.
Hang on though, can we do a swap? When I give you any sea-people words, will you answer a land-person question so I can learn about you?
SEA-PEOPLE WORDS
Onboard we don’t call the sides of the ship right and left. We say:
Hmmmmm, how can you remember that?
Well, Amandeep gives me a STAR when I get things right so STARboard is the right side and so PORT must be the left. F for front, so FORWARD, that’s easy.
Ooh, and there is often a drAFT from the back of Tommy
after he’s eaten too many beans at the breakfast buffet. So drafty AFT is the back!
LAND-PERSON QUESTIONS
Where do you live and what’s your favourite thing about it? …………………........................................................
When our ship is full, it fits 1,925 passengers and 802 members of staff onboard. (Including me and Mum.) How many people live with you? .................
Is your home drAFTy? He he he. YES NO
