A short story -  in not more than 1,000 words

        PART I

       I grew up, naughty, on the south side of Glasgow. 'Did you take it, Jennifer?' I had a penchant for cooking chocolate, apparently. My mother held my 3 year old chocolated face up to the mirror and I replied, 'No.' More cunning was needed. Some other banned substance, like Golden Syrup, was stuck to my Mum's treasured bridge cards. I washed the cards at the kitchen sink and laid them out on the grill. The charred result was not what I'd hoped for.
      I rode down the red staircase in a big cardboard box. Loved my toy hoover. My beloved mother's mother moved in with her yellowing cancer and the nurse let me wear her hat. My trike had a huge boot with a label: Duckham's Oil. A girl in our street wrote her name on our car bonnet with a lump of coal. My father wrapped us in blankets in the middle of the night and drove us to Costa Bravan holidays.
     Then a big house and for a while, my great gran and great great aunt lived with us. When they died, there was a regime change. We lived under my older brother Dick's military dictatorship. Typewriter torture, dead legs. Some latin: 'Right in the solar plexus!'. Dick instituted a new language, loosely based on Cockney rhyming slang. My big sister Jill was in charge of sulking and is, to this day, unrivalled in the art. Some of the time, my sister lived in a lilac room with David Cassidy and was hard to reach. Once, I hit her with my Twinkle annual; a risky move but I had two of that year. 
      We had a great dog, a feral cat, guinea pigs (which we lost in a tall grassy field and my Mum found them), a tent, fruit trees, woods. My brother smacked the windows a lot with a football and I with a tennis ball. We played badminton late into summer evenings. Dick always had money and bought the ingredients for the ice cream soda. My sister and me made a 'raft' on the lawn and punted it down the Amazon with a clothes pole. I was awed when she said, 'I know this river like the back of my hand.' More flotsam rafts and razor cuts from jellyfish on Troon beach, beneath the deafening jet engines from Prestwick. The Brownie pack was distant with me because I went to a different school. My school was mostly terrifyingly dull. I didn't behave at all well.
     At home, people teemed. My brother's giant, homemade, sound to light boxes. 7" singles. Snooker. Reading the Herald crossword clues to my clever, clever Mum. Helpless with laughter at the golf tee and my father saying to us, 'Girls, do you want to learn?' Cremola foam. Sodastream. Sermons with the Reverend Ironside Simpson, oy veh. Patent shoes. Our poet Gramps on Sundays, with his tortoiseshell comb and oiled hair (with which I could do whatever I pleased). Masses of make believe. Impersonations for the sewing bee. Plays for my pals. Puzzling over bridge. Freezing bus stops. Chilblains. Jill's kidney battle in a freesia scented hospital room. My accident. Cleaning the silver for Christmas. Finishing off the grown-up drinks in the dining room. Nicking fags. Illicit kissings, etc.
     A family rupture. My sister stitched colours onto my blazer - right wing (not politically, but in hockey).
     I loathed my piano lessons and so did my teacher at the Geddes Academy of Music (a red standstone semi). Hey, I can't remember your name, but sorry.
     I liked it best when we were all laughing at the same thing. Like the time the dishwasher was roaring away at breakfast and my Dad said to my Mum, 'Oh Nan, can't we have it off.'
     Virginity was prised from me on a Greek island. Failed the panel interview for the degree in journalism. Began to study wine.

      PART II

     Moved to London. Worked. Studied oenology a bit more. Missed my dog.
     A quick succession of ill judgments led to a short stay in the Central Middlesex.
     And then, my goodness, I fell madly in love with a young English woman. But this love was unwanted outside of itself, so, no more silver Christmases.
     We lived in Brighton and then France where the days and nights were a bar chart of soaring highs or pummelling lows. The gendarmes visited regularly. A neighbour wielded his shotgun. After some years, the graph smoothed out. Rifle shots in the cemetery were often just hunters. We became seasoned. Aillettes grow in the spring. Money comes in the summer. Cepes appear in the autumn. The young hang themselves in the winter.
     We loved the work. Back-breaking, amazing, satisfying work. We made a living. We made a baby with my partner's brother. Our child had a profound language handicap and we had to bid au revoir to the French. Returned with our autism to lovely England, and can't imagine leaving again. A botched spine operation left me on my back for the best part of a year but then I began to seriously do what I'd always wanted to seriously do: write. And to bloody well split infinitives, if I choose.     

      PART III

       I asked my mother this year what happened to me after wrecking the bridge cards and she said, 'I leathered you. They were my best cards.' I am newly aggrieved. And perhaps it is this injustice which causes me now to spill lemon tea all over my lap.
     I learned to play bridge, though not well. I partner my mother who is very forgiving about my shortcomings, in this respect. Sometimes I partner my sister; less points with her but lashings of her Kevin Bridges impression. I'm pretty sure it's an impression. My Dad and I cry with laughter. My mother shakes her head.
     Dick names each of his sheep.
     Jet engines have become quiet.
     Still in love with that Englishwoman and we've been given the silver punchbowl.
     No longer admire hoovers.
     Want to learn piano.