Sibling imaginative fun and rivalry-continued

My brother was also a bit of a trickster and I was often on the receiving end of his pranks. Some of these were like filling my room with spiders (it took my dad a long time to collect them all). However the one I remember the most was a time when we had to share a room. He put red coloured paper behind the eyes of his African mask. then rigged up a bulb. wire and battery that he could reach from his bed. I opened my eyes in the dark to see the devil glaring at me from the bedroom wall!! This led to more and more imaginative ways of getting back at each other. 

•Me – a ghost on a pully that went along the curtain rail

•Him – a rubber spider that descended above my face when in bed.

•Me – something that fell out of the cupboard when the door was opened and so it went on until my sisters left home and we got our own rooms. Being creative I was also interested to know how things worked, I was good at taking them apart, but not so good at putting them back together again. I once took apart my Austrian weather clock to see why the little people didn’t swap over when the weather changed. I discovered that you had to manually twist the chimney – sadly the clock never worked again, but at least I could make the people swap over when the weather was either sunny or rainy.

During this time as a family we went on great holidays every year. At Easter we went snow skiing, my dad's choice, and summer we went on hot beach holidays, my mother's choice. I remember a particular skiing holiday where my brother led me through some woods and neglected to tell me about the jump at the end! I never fully appreciated until I was much older just how very lucky we all were.