FULL MARKS FOR TRYING by BRIGID KEENAN

suddenly came alive and played itself – all Sparky had to do was run his fingers over the keys and the piano would produce a perfect performance of whatever he had announced he would play. Only Sparky knew this secret, everyone else believed he was a child prodigy, and he became famous for his playing, but he also became spoiled and rude and unpleasant, until one terrible day – at Carnegie Hall, in the middle of a concert – the piano tells Sparky that it will no longer play for him and the frantic boy bashes the keys crying, ‘Play, piano, play’ . . . and it all turns out to have been a dream. I mention this because all through my career I have often thought of Sparky – whenever I have managed to write something that I am particularly pleased with, I wonder, secretly, if my typewriter/computer did it for me.
    Our new-found seventeen-year-old brother David was dazzling: handsome and funny and sweet to us; we hero-worshipped him when he came home on holiday from boarding school. He’d built a wooden shack, Ivy Cottage it was called, by the stream at the bottom of my grandparents’ garden and we spent most of the time there, or in our rather taciturn grandfather’s tool shed where he let us ‘help’ make jigsaws with his fretsaw. (Later, after we returned to India, Grandpa, most unexpectedly, sent us a series of thrilling stories he’d written about the adventures of a girl called Briditia – a combination of Brigid and Patricia, my sister Tessa’s real name. They were illustrated by my cousins Jinny and Prue. I am always meaning to try and get them printed for my grandchildren.)
    In the end we became fond of our aunt and our grandmother, who was a bit scatty – she once saw a group of her friends chatting away in the high street in Fleet. As she passed them, she smacked one of them on the bum, saying: ‘Gossip! Gossip! Gossip!’  The women turned round in surprise, and to her horror Granny saw they were total strangers.
    Not long ago, Fleet was nominated as
a
) one of the best places to live in Britain and
b
) the town where more sex toys are sold than anywhere else – are
a
) and
b
) related? one wonders. In our day, presumably because of its nearness to Aldershot – which used to be known as ‘Home of the British Army’ – Fleet was stuffed with retired Indian Army families like ours who, thankfully, wouldn’t have known a sex toy from a plate of kedgeree – though, to be fair, I don’t think the toys had yet been invented in the 1940s.
    The only notable thing about Fleet then was that there was a genuine
patisserie
shop, run by a real Frenchwoman called Madame Max (how/why/when did she come to dreary old Fleet? I wish I knew her story). Bread rationing in England was introduced while we were there, in 1946, and you could only buy the meagre amounts of bread (or cakes, I suppose) that you had coupons for in your ration book; when he was at home Granny used to send David up to Madame Max pretending he’d lost the coupons to try and wheedle some extra treats – he was always sent back empty-handed.
    The awesome thing – the
only
thing, really – we knew about Grandpa’s long life in India as a railway engineer, before he came ‘home’ to Fleet, was that one day at work out in the countryside he was attacked by a leopard: it leapt on him as he walked through some long grass, sank its claws into his shoulders and used him as a springboard to launch itself on to the man behind him. Grandpa could never lift his arms up very high as a result of his injuries, but, so the story went, the other man died of his.
    All I ever knew about Granny’s life in India was that she taught her cook how to make a delicious dish of fish with finely sliced vegetables wrapped in parcels of greaseproof paper and baked in the oven. The cook seemed to grasp the idea and