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Leroy and Dover - It’s No Choke

“It’s snowing!” Leroy the Frog yelled as he looked out of his bedroom window. “Cool!”

“Yes, it usually is,” said his friend, Dover the Mouse.

It was the day after Boxing Day and Leroy and his friends had been trying out the new Playstation 2 he had got for Christmas.

“It’s sticking!” Leroy said excitedly as he watched the large snowflakes fall in a hush to the ground. They stood watching it for a few minutes while the snow gently covered everything they could see.

“Come on, let’s go out in the snow!” Leroy said, happily abandoning the computer game they were playing, as he was losing anyway. “We could build a snowman,” Dover said.
“Or have a snowball fight,” their friend Musty the Mole added.
Leroy started to jump around the room in his excitement, which he often did. “Let’s have a snowball fight first,” he said, “then we’ll build a snowman.”

Twenty minutes later they were running and leaping in the snow, which was now several centimetres deep. It would have been sooner but Leroy could not find his gloves and his Mum told him he could not play out without them.

They quickly found hiding places behind walls, trees, bushes or cars and made a row of snowballs each. Then with a great deal of shouting, leaping and laughing they threw them at each other. Although they often missed, some throws were direct hits, which usually meant they laughed and shouted even louder.

Each one of them had to stop every few minutes to make more snowballs. This was a good time for them to sneak up on each other and throw snowballs at close range. Dover was very good at it, being a white mouse, as the others could not see him until he was on top of them. Leroy, of course, was not happy about this.

“That’s cheating,” he complained after being hit by three snowballs at once, although only two were from Dover. “All you have to do is close your eyes and we can’t tell where you are.”

“It’s not my fault I’m the same colour as the snow,” Dover said, laughing, “but if it will make you any happier, I won’t move from this spot from now on.”
In the next five minutes Dover was hit seven times, Musty was hit only twice and Leroy was hit twenty-three times. “Let’s build a snowman now!” Leroy said.

They started to build the snowman together, helping each other roll the snow, and somehow, without knowing how it happened, ended up building a snowman each. They tried to outdo each other by building the biggest and best snowman. It was some time later when Leroy, who clearly had the smallest snowman, said he had had enough.

“We ought to go back in,” he said. “I can’t feel my fingers.”
“I think my tail has dropped off!” Dover said, looking over his shoulder to check it was still there.
“I win,” Musty said, leading the way back into the house.

Leroy’s Mum made them hot chocolate and worm roly-poly. They sat in front of the fire, warming their feet and sipping their drinks, happily ignoring Leroy’s attempts to play I spy (with my little eye).

Leroy could only take so much sitting around and he soon got restless and jumped to his feet, demanding to know what they were going to do next.
“How about going to sleep,” Musty replied, yawning.
“How about watching the sun set,” Dover said, as the sun began to sink below the trees.

“How about playing with some of my new toys and games,” Leroy said, eager to play with the Christmas presents that hadn’t even been taken out of their packaging yet.

Dover and Musty, both still feeling a little tired, said “After tea.”
Leroy grinned. “O.K.”

After tea Dover and Musty were much too full and much too sleepy to want to do anything other than lie down and watch television. As he was feeling full himself, Leroy was happy enough watching television himself, but only for a little while.
“Time to play some games!” he announced, just as Musty drifted off to sleep.
“I was wondering when you were going to say something like that,” Dover said with a little sigh that Leroy didn’t hear.
Leroy began to tear off the plastic and cardboard packaging of the toys he hadn’t played with yet. In his usual excitement he threw them aside to get to the toys and games underneath.

Leroy stopped when he heard a strange sucking and choking noise. The noise was coming from Musty who was lying on the settee. Leroy looked at him in annoyance and was about to tell him to stop messing about when he noticed there was a plastic bag over Musty’s face.

It was one of the bags Leroy had thrown and it was now tight over Musty’s face, sucked into his nose and mouth as he tried to breathe. Leroy froze in horror as Musty, now fully awake, began to suffocate. Dover dives across the room and pulled the plastic bag off his face. Musty took in great gulps of air until he could breathe normally again.

“I’m really sorry, Musty,” Leroy said dejectedly, not able to look at his friend.
Musty smiled weakly. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You didn’t mean to.”

Leroy went quiet and still and his Mum looked at him suspiciously when she came in to light some Christmas candles. Nobody said anything to her.

It didn’t take long for Musty to feel a lot better and it didn’t take much longer for Leroy to return to normal. To cheer him up properly, Dover and Musty agreed to play one of his new board games. Leroy moved the candles off the side table so that they could use it to play their game.

Ten minutes later Leroy was reading the rules for the third time because he didn’t understand them.
“Let’s just play it,” Dover said, “and you’ll soon pick it up.”
“I think it’s a silly game!” Leroy said in a huff. “I don’t think I want to play it anymore.”
Musty sniffed loudly.
“Can you smell something burning?” he asked.
Dover looked over to where Leroy had put the candles and saw one of the curtains was on fire.
“Fire! Fire!” Leroy shouted in a panic.

Dover dashed into the kitchen where he knew they kept a fire extinguisher. He rushed back with Leroy’s Mum behind him and sprayed the curtain until the fire was out. The room was filled with smoke and Leroy’s Mum opened the window to let the smoke out.

She looked at the damage to her curtain and was glad it wasn’t worse. Then she looked at what had started the fire.
“Who put the candles next to the curtain?” she demanded.
For the second time that evening Leroy felt like a tadpole again.
“Leroy!” his Mum said sternly. “Never put candles near curtains or anything that can catch fire. You could burn the house down, and you with it!”
“Sorry, Mum.”
“And if I find you’ve taken the battery out of the smoke alarm, which I notice didn’t go off, I’ll give your new Playstation 2 to Dover!”

“Don’t worry,” Dover said to Leroy as he and Musty left to trudge home through the snow a little later. “You can play on it whenever you like when you come to my house!”