HURRICANE

Hurricane
“It’s blowing a gale out there!” Mum exclaimed as she burst through the front door laden with shopping bags. She smoothed out her ruffled hair as she deposited the bags on the table. I ran and shut the door.
“Is it a tornado?” my 10-year-old brother Chris asked.
“God forbid,” my granny said, “I remember in 1964…”
Me, mum and even Chris groaned under our breath. Now we were in for an hour of talk about the 1964 tornado, if there even was one. But Mum distracted Granny before she could really get going.
“Here, Mum, help me with these bags, eh?” Mum said.
“Oh, righto, dear,” Granny replied, and they started piling the shopping bags onto the kitchen worktops. Chris and I overheard their conversation
“If there’s one thing I don’t like about living out here in the Bahamas, dear,” we heard Granny’s voice say, “it’s the constant threat of hurricanes.”
“Hurricanes?” Mums voice answered, “don’t be silly, Mum, they haven’t had a serious hurricane here for 40 years, or so the weather man says.”
“But you said yourself, Jenny,” (that’s mum’s name), “it’s blowing a gale! How often does it do that out here, eh?”
“Oh, mum! It doesn’t mean there’s a hurricane on its way! It’s just gusty, that’s all,” Mum ended the conversation firmly.
THUD!
Chris and I whirled around, and Mum and Granny came out the kitchen.
“What was that?” Mum asked.
“I dunno, but it came from outside,” I said. We all peered out the window.
“It’s a brick!” Chris exclaimed.
“No it’s not…” Mum began, but Granny finished her sentence for her:
“It’s a roof tile.”
“Not just any roof tile…” Mum began again.
“Our roof tile.” I finished. This was beginning to sound like some kind of bizarre pantomime act.
“I told you, dear,” said Granny, quite calmly, going to sit down on the sofa, “it’s not just gusty. It’s a gale.”
“Alright, Mum,” my Mum said, “best switch on the TV, see how strong it is.” 
“Right you are,” said Granny, reaching for the remote, “now…ah, yes, the weather channel.”
The voice of the TV weatherman rang out across the room, reaching Mum, Chris and I still standing by the window.
“… severe weather warnings issued across the Bahamas. People will be warned of the imminent hurricane, which is so sudden that it has not yet been named.”
“A hurricane!” Granny said, sounding panicky, her voice rising, “didn’t I tell you?”
Mum just stared at the TV blankly.
“Mum?” I said quietly.
“Sssh, listen,” she said, “we need to know how strong it is!”
“…hurricane, which has been named a category 3.” Announced the weatherman.
“Oh God,” said Mum, “right, we need to board up the windows and doors…” she began, and carried on spouting safety measurements that we needed to take, while we rushed around carrying them out as best we could. By the end of it, all we did was just sit around the table in the living room and wait for the storm to come.
We listened to the wind whistling in and out of the cracks in the things we’d used to block up the windows. Every so often there was a thud as one of the roof tiles fell off our house or one of our neighbours houses. The TV had lost all signal ages ago, and so had the radio. But Mum had just laughed (somewhat hysterically) and said:
“Now we’re just waiting for the electricity to go.”
Shortly afterwards, the electricity went.
So we sat there in the dark, shaking as the wind got up and the hurricane moved nearer to us.
RRRRRRRRIP!
We all whirled round (again) to see that the ‘protective’ layer we’d managed to put on the outside of the window came away, and the inside one fell to the floor. We all gaped as we saw the ‘protective layer’ and our wooden shutters blow down the beach. Chris laughed and said:
“This is fun!”
“Shut up, Chris,” I hissed, “it won’t be fun when the house blows away!”
That shut him up.
But I was beginning to get very worried myself. What if the house really did blow away! Was category 3 strong enough to blow away houses? I hoped not.
We all continued just staring out the window for a minute, before I suddenly cried out:
“Look! Look at the boats! And the palm trees!”
Because the boats that had been resting on the shore were blowing along the beach! Yet again, all we could do was watch in amazement as these heavy boats simply blew away, whilst the palm trees were leaning right down so that the tops touched the ground. I was just waiting for these to be uprooted and blown away too, when:
“AH!” Chris yelled, jumping behind the sofa, “don’t let the house get blown away! HELP!”
OK, maybe I’d gone a bit too far, telling him we were going to blow away. I’d consulted Mum and she’d said that a category 3 wasn’t strong enough to blow us away. But she hadn’t sounded too sure.
After a while, the wind started to die down to just a gale. We waited until it was only gusty, and then went outside to assess the damage.
A scene of devastation met our eyes. Our house and the houses all around, as far as we could see, had practically no roof tiles left, and the rain was simply leaking into the houses through the gaps. The boats that had been blown along lay shattered at the end of the beach, and the palm trees were either left bent over or completely uprooted, lying on the sand. The windows had mostly been smashed by flying pebbles from the beach, and the wicker roof of ‘Larry’s Bar’ had been blown off, as had most of the walls.
“Well,” said Chris, “at least our house didn’t get blown away.”
That says it all, really.