Bradford Lad: Snowball Revenge
When Mike Coatesworth woke up early one winter's morn it was a case of snowballs before dawn.
One morning when I was a lad it was so cold that I wrapped blankets around myself before going to look out of the bedroom window. There was snow. Lots of it. Excited, I jumped on my brother's bed to wake him up and tell him the good news. He wasn't interested. He preferred to sleep.
It was 5,30 am and still dark. I opened the sash window very slowly, so that it wouldn't squeak as much as it usually did. There was a large amount of snow on the windowsill. I made a snowball, pulled the covers off my brother, then threw it at him. You couldn't have believed that a lad would scream so loudly. After all, it was only a bit of snow, even if it did wet the bed.
I jumped back into my own bed and pretended to be asleep. I was relieved when nobody came to our room. Our parents must have thought it was too cold to get out of bed to find out what all the racket was about. They knew that we were always up to some mischief.
Eventually I got dressed and sneaked downstairs, avoiding the creaky treads. I could hear my parents snoring in their bedroom. When I went outside into the avenue it was still snowing heavily. I began to build a snowman. When I'd finished it I threw nowballs at it. Soon I became bored with doing this and searched around for another target. It was then that I noticed I had left my bedroom window open. Chuckling to myself, I hid behind the snowman and started to throw snowballs at the open window, hoping one of them would get through the gap and hit my brother.
A couple of the snowballs got through the open window, but not a sound was heard from the bedroom. Further snowballs were on target, and eventually there was another loud scream from inside the house. I hid when a light went on. There were voices in the bedroom. Then the light went out and all was quiet again.
I was puzzled by this. I came out of my hiding place and was then hit by a barrage of snowballs thrown by my dad. He was standing just outside the house, wearing slippers, trousers, and nothing else. "Blimey!'' I thought, "he must be freezing.''
I returned fire though and hit him a couple of times on his bare chest.
We were both grinning when we went back into the house.
