A Christmas was so much like each other, around the sea in those years away from the city corner now and the distant point of voices I ever hear a moment before bedtime, that I can never remember that it's six days and six nights to Ice when I was TWE lve or did it snow for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
All Christmases two tongues roll down towards the sea, bundling down a cold and head the moon-like sky that was our road; And they stop at the rim of ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I can find whatever I get in the snow to dip my hand and bring out. In that wool turns my hand into the white bell-tongued ball of Carol vacations resting on the rim-singing ocean, and come out Mrs truly and firemen....
It was on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs Truly's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing on Christmas. The December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeer. But there were cats. Patient, cold and collar, wrapped in our hand socks, we waited for the cats to snowball. Sleek and long as the jaguar and the terrifying-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they happen on the walls of Slink and Sidle white back garden, and lynx-eyed hunters, gyms and I, fur capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson's Bay, from Whispers Road, will give our lethal hurling the green of their eyes snowballed on. Intelligent Cats never appeared.
We were still so, Eskimo-footed Arctic shooters in the muffling Silence of Eternal ice – eternal, sometimes since Wednesday – that we didn't hear Mrs Truly's first cry at the bottom of the garden from her igloo. Or, if we heard it at all, it was for us, like the distant challenge of our enemies and prey, neighboring polar felines. But soon the gunshots grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs Truly, and she beat the dinner-hour.
And we ran down the garden, with ice shells in our arms, on the home side; And Dhunrapan, in fact, had food pouring out of the room, and Gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Truly was declared doomed like a town crier in Pompeii. It was better than all the Cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We tied in the house, laden with snowball, and closed on the open door of the room full of dhunrapan.
Something was burning all right; Perhaps it was Mr Truly, who always slept there after lunch with a newspaper on his face. But he stood in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and hitting on the Dhunrapan with a slipper.
"Call the fire brigade," Mrs Truly cried as she defeated Gong.
"There won't be," Mr. Truly said, "It's Christmas."
There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr truly standing in the middle of them, waving his slippers as if he were held up.
He said, ' do something. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke – I think we missed Mr. Truly – and ran out of the house into the telephone box.
"Let's say to the police as well," said Jim. "and the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes to fire."
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. Truly got out just in time before they turned it on. No one could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when firemen turned off the hose and stood in the wet, suspicious room, Jim's aunt, Miss. Truly, came down and peered in on them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what he would say to Unhen. He said the right thing, always. He saw three tall firemen in his glitter helmet, standing between the smoke and cinders and the fractured snowball, and he said, "Would you prefer to read anything?"
Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were Wolves in Wales, and the red-colored birds of flannel petticoats shaped the harps past, when we sang and planted all night and days in the caves that moist front , and when we followed, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and bear, before the motor car, before the wheel, the Queen faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy Hills bareback, it happened to snowfall and it happened. But here a little boy says: "It happened last year, Snowflake." I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea. "
"But he didn't have the same ice," I say. ' ' Our snow was not only shaken by a bucket of white washing under the sky, it came out of the ground and the swams brought out the shawls and drifted out of arms and hands and the bodies of trees went away; Snow grew overnight on the rooftops of houses like a net and grandfathered Moss, the minute-ivied settled on the walls and the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, Sunn Thunder storm of White, torn Christmas cards. "
"Were there postmen then, too?"
"Blindfolded and windy-cherried the nose, on the spread, with frozen legs they sprayed crisply for the doors and on the mittened