{"id":5496,"date":"2013-12-23T21:31:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-23T21:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/soundslikewish.wordpress.com\/?p=5496"},"modified":"2013-12-23T21:31:20","modified_gmt":"2013-12-23T21:31:20","slug":"journey-to-the-centre-great-middle-lines-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=5496","title":{"rendered":"Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 20"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Christmas, a time of year when half the world is not covered in snow.\u00a0 Half the world is not even chilly.\u00a0 Many of us are melting in mid-summer heat.\u00a0 I had to find a Christmas story that Australians would ‘get’, where the characters were not wearing long sleeves!<\/p>\n

Christmas in the Floods<\/em> by Olaf Ruhen sounds like a true story, if only because it tells of a disaster that could typically happen here at Christmas.\u00a0 It’s written from the point of view of a fourteen-year-old boy who has been watching the river rise.\u00a0 It’s not long before dawn and the flood has chased him and his family into the attic.\u00a0 So at the turning point of the story they are on the roof, the characters not being able to go any higher.\u00a0 It’s a great movement from ground level upwards.<\/p>\n

I went to sleep, but Ralph wakened me.\u00a0 It was still dark, but there was a little light coming, and I knew there was only one more day to Christmas Eve.
\nThere was water on the attic floor now, and Dad and Ralph wanted us to shift on to the roof.\u00a0 It didn’t seem as if the flood could come any higher but if it did, they said we mustn’t be trapped inside the attic.\u00a0 They had rigged up the trestle-table so it was half out of the attic window, and you could climb on it and step back on the roof at the gully between the two gables.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Illustration<\/a>
Illustration for “Christmas in the Floods” in The Oxford Book of Christmas Stories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

*****<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s Christmas, a time of year when half the world is not covered in snow.\u00a0 Half the world is not even chilly.\u00a0 Many of us are melting in mid-summer heat.\u00a0 I had to find a Christmas story that Australians would ‘get’, where the characters were not wearing long sleeves! Christmas in the Floods by Olaf … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 20”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[460,550,2,462,551,21,226,270],"class_list":["post-5496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-great-middle-lines","tag-20th-century-literature","tag-christmas-in-the-floods","tag-literature","tag-middle-lines","tag-olaf-ruhen","tag-postaday","tag-postaday2013","tag-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t