Just at the moment almost everyone I know seems to have snow. Not us, though. The Manchester local climate is famously mild, so we just have hours of depressing rain. Instead, here is a little extract from the second Saltbury book, ‘Annie’ and a double Games lesson in the snow with usually tyrannical Games teacher Miss Baxter.

“It had snowed again after our sunny Sunday sledging. Monday and Tuesday had seen further heavy falls,so by the time we had our Games lesson on Wednesday afternoon, hockey was going to be a problem. There was almost a foot of snow on the ground and more was still falling, so we could only find the pitch at all because the goal posts poked through and if we’d put a hockey ball down, that would be the last we’d see of it until the thaw. We’d received a message the previous afternoon that gloves and tracksuits might be a good idea for today’s session and we assembled on the pitch, or at least where we believed the pitch to be, like a troop of off-white polar bears with hockey sticks. Miss Baxter blew her whistle, demanded that we “Gather round ladies” and generally looked as keen and serious as always, although she was carrying a shoe box, which was a little non standard. We looked at her astounded, with Gillian Rogers voicing the thoughts of many when she muttered:

“Surely she can’t expect us to play in this?”

“Play!” snapped Miss Baxter, whose hearing as ever was inconveniently sharp, “is exactly what I expect you to do.”

She divided us into four teams, instead of the usual two, and then opened the box. Yes, the woman was totally barking, because there inside were four carrots and an assortment of small black discs. She blew her whistle and barked:

“First period, snowman contest! Let’s have the biggest you can do, and the best please, ladies.”

The whistle blew again. Tina and I stared at each other trying not to laugh and then pounced. The two of us, plus Marlene Graham and Tamsin Phipps turned out to be quite a good team thanks to the fact that Marlene and I were quite strong, Teen was tall and Tamsin didn’t quite eat all of what turned out to be liquorice Pontefract cakes, so we could still do the eyes, mouth and buttons. That was rather fun. I’d never had fun in a Queen Bitch class before.

The second period was my first ever official snowball fight. Miss Baxter was referee and so a designated non-target, but I always was a lousy shot. Sometimes you could almost like Miss Baxter. She really was a very strange one indeed.”