The One About the Keys . . .

Back when I was in sixth form, oooh over ten years ago now, my Mum and Dad went on holiday with my brother and my sister and I stayed at home.  Well at 17 and 15, we felt we were too old to be going on holiday with our parents, so instead we had two weeks where we just chilled at home, oh and looked after our cat Poppy.  Oh and before you ask, no there weren't any mad parties.

Mum left us with a fully stocked cupboard and fridge of supplies, but we needed to go out one morning to get necessities like milk and bread.  So because it was a nice day we decided to walk into town to the supermarket to get them.  As we were getting ready to go, as the next day was bin day I emptied the kitchen bin and put the rubbish out.  My sister, being sensible put the alarm on the house and pulled the door shut behind her . . . big mistake!  She thought I had the house keys, and I presumed she had them!  Unfortunately we had one of those doors that once it's closed it's locked tight and you can't get back in.  So, we were locked out!

We did the only thing we could think of . . . we walked round the corner to my mum's friends house and explained our predicament.  They got out their yellow pages, and let me use their phone to ring a locksmith.  (This was well before I started carrying a mobile with me wherever I went - in fact that didn't happen until I went to university!)  So we went back to the house, sat on the doorstep and waited for the locksmith.  Did I mention that it was a nice sunny day?  It would have been a lot worse I think if it had been raining, but then if it was raining we probably wouldn't have been going out in the first place and none of this would have happened!  You could think about things forever going 'what if?' couldn't you?

When the locksmith arrived, his best suggestion was to take one of the window panes out of the dining room, the bay window at the front, for me to climb in to turn the alarm off and get the key out of the front door.  As it was the only option, we had to go with it, and because I was the eldest, naturally it fell to me to do the climbing, although my sister was smaller than me at the time (she's taller than me now!) and perhaps she should have gone in! Luckily my Mum had left us with emergency money so we were able to pay the locksmith.  And when our parents next rang to check in on us, they weren't too cross as all about what had happened.  Probably because with two teenage girls on their own for two weeks, we could have got up to a lot worse!

Thanks to my sister for reminding me about this story today, because I had been really struggling to think of anything to write!

This story is brought to you as part of Sian's Storytelling Sunday.  Why don't you hop on over to her blog to read lots of other stories today.