Dirty Bertie 15 – Snow!

Alan MacDonald's Dirty Bertie Snow is a trio of funny stories for 6 year olds, and the first has no school, a hill full of sledges and a race Bertie should never have agreed to.

What happens

Bertie has been praying for snow for weeks. When it finally comes he's out in the garden in his pyjamas before breakfast. Then the phone rings. School's closed!

Everyone's off to Pudsley Hill. The trouble is that Bertie's sledge got broken last year (four people on it at once will do that). So Gran digs out Dad's old one from her shed. It's made of heavy planks nailed together and it smells of mould.

Guess who turns up with a brand new Speedster 2000? Know-All Nick, of course. He laughs at Gran's sledge, Bertie says it's faster than it looks, and suddenly there's going to be a race. Bertie's wishing he'd kept his big mouth shut before he's even climbed back up the hill.

In the second story Dad joins a society that acts out the English Civil War. Bertie's first question is whether he can come as a pirate. (No.) He's only meant to watch, but he ends up as the King's drummer boy. And nobody can make him see why his side should lose just because that's how it went in history.

The third is a school one. Miss Boot wants a world record so the school gets its picture in the paper, and she settles on a pyramid made of pennies. Bertie thinks that's very dull. He'd rather go for the loudest burp. Then he reads about a record-breaking dog on a skateboard, and remembers he owns both a skateboard and a dog.

That's the fun of these. Bertie's ideas always make perfect sense to Bertie, and you can see the disaster coming a mile off. There's plenty of noise along the way (CRUMP! WHUMPF! KADOOF!) and each story is just four short chapters.

This is the fifteenth Bertie book, but you don't need the earlier ones first. And for a boy called Dirty Bertie, the mucky bit is pretty mild here. There's a lot of talk about burping, some baked bean sauce down a chin and that mouldy sledge.

What to read next

If the snow day goes down well, Bertie does Christmas too. In the Crackers stories he turns up to audition for the school nativity in a pirate hat (some things never change) and decides the shepherds could really do with a sheepdog.