IT WAS the Sunday when strong winds and storms lashed the UK - October 27. At about lunchtime, nine-year-old Abigail Brayshaw and her sister Bethany, six, were playing upstairs in the bedroom of their home in Spalding Avenue, York.

They should have been safe. But suddenly, out of nowhere, a firework smashed through the window, shattering the glass and setting fire to bed and carpet.

The children's grandmother, Joan Brayshaw, still shudders when she thinks about it.

"How they were not hurt is a miracle," she said. "This rocket came straight through the window. It shattered the glass and ripped the curtain to shreds. One of the children was standing up in the bedroom near the door, the other was sitting on the bed.

"The rocket landed on the bed, burned the bedding and one of the children's comfort blankets, then whizzed around the room, burning the bedroom carpet, then whizzed into the landing and burned the landing carpet too."

The children's dad, Joan's son Steven, heard the children's screams and rushed upstairs in time to see the rocket flying around the bedroom and out into the landing.

"He looked out of the window and saw a lad at the back just throwing them around, willy nilly," Joan said.

Mercifully, neither Abigail nor Bethany were injured - at least not physically. Mentally, said Joan, they will take a long time to get over it.

"They are absolutely terrified now," she said. "They ring me up, crying on the phone, and say 'I don't want to go into that bedroom, nana, I'm so frightened'. And they don't want any fireworks any more. Normally we make a big thing of it, jacket potatoes, hot dogs, the lot, but they don't want to know now."

It's just the kind of incident which, every year, re-ignites the debate over whether fireworks are simply too dangerous. Joan believes there is no argument. They are - and should be banned, for everything except properly-organised public displays.

"It is too dangerous now," she said. "People just don't have respect for fireworks any more."

She is not the only one to think that. York's Liberal Democrat councillor Andrew Waller has put forward a motion, backed by other members of City of York Council's Liberal Democrat group, which if passed would see the council calling on the Government to tighten restrictions on sale and use of fireworks.

The motion, which will go before the council on November 12, calls on ministers to give local authorities the power to restrict the period

during which fireworks can be bought to the week before Bonfire Night, and the week before New Year's Eve. It also calls for regulations to make fireworks quieter, and for a licensing scheme to be established for shops selling fireworks.

The issue was first raised, Coun Waller said, at a ward committee he attended at Westfield School on October 24. The meeting kept being disrupted by fireworks. "People were saying there needed to be a tightening of restrictions, because we were being subjected to this noise and mayhem for weeks at a time," he said.

It is not only the noise and disruption, he points out - fireworks are explosives, and they are dangerous. He points to the recent case of fireworks being posted through a post box in York. "Anything could have resulted from that. Depending on how it blew up, it could have set off a gas main."

He would like to see firework sales restricted to just two days before November 5 and New Year's Eve, for fireworks to be sold only in large 'job lots' suitable only for organised displays - so discouraging individual buyers - and for bangers to be banned altogether.

"They are completely unacceptable," he said. "I don't think they add to the sum total of the joy of humanity."

Another who thinks fireworks should only be used at public displays is the Mayor of Selby, Coun Colin Trevor. He was injured when a firework he was lighting at a public display in Selby blew up in his face. But his injuries could have been far worse, he says, if he had not been wearing a protective mask and visor - as he might not have been if it had been a small family do.

The truth is that such accidents have become almost commonplace in recent years: 14 injuries in North Yorkshire last year alone, according to Andrew Waller. So when is enough enough?

The fire service today issued its usual warnings about taking care and treating fireworks with the respect they deserve.

But for Joan Brayshaw, that's not enough. "People will say I'm a killjoy," she said. "But I think we're encouraging people to play with fire. All their lives we're telling children not to play with fire, don't do this, don't do that - and then we go and do this."

Updated: 12:35 Tuesday, November 05, 2002