A Child's Christmas in Wales Read Online Free PDF

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the
sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I
sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed
for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days
and twelve nights when I was six.
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    All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold
and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the
rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and
bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued
ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs.
Prothero and the firemen.
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    It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs.
Prothero’s garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always
snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were
no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in
socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and
horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white
back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined
trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the
green of their eyes.

    The wise cats never appeared. We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic
marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows—eternal, ever since
Wednesday—that we never heard Mrs. Prothero’s first cry from her igloo at the bottom
of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge
of our enemy and prey, the neighbor’s polar cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
“Fire!” cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
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    And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the
house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was
bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii.
This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded
into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the
smoke-filled room.
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    Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always
slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing
in the middle of the room, saying, “A fine Christmas!” and smacking at the smoke
with a slipper.
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    â€œCall the fire brigade,” cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong.
    â€œThey won’t be there,” said Mr. Prothero, “it’s Christmas.”
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    There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero
standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
    â€œDo something,” he said.
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    And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke—I think we missed Mr.
Prothero—and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
    â€œLet’s call the police as well,” Jim said.
    â€œAnd the ambulance.”
    â€œAnd Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.”

    But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the
fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr.
Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a
noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in
the wet, smoky room, Jim’s aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at
them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said
the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining
helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she
said: “Would you like anything to read?”
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    Years and years and years ago, when I was